PLUTOCRACY. — According to its etymological sense, p. (from πλοῦτος = “wealth” and κράτος = “power”) signifies the rule of wealth or of those who possess it—industrialists, bankers, and large landowners. The term, however, is not usually employed to denote a particular political regime distinguished by its own characteristics from other forms, but rather serves to indicate, in a rather vague manner, a social condition in which the greatest possessors of wealth wield a predominant, often indirect, influence over the administration of public affairs. Plutocracy can therefore be associated with any form of regime, whether monarchy or republic, aristocracy or democracy. Only a conception based on the theory of the exploitation of the proletariat by bourgeois regimes led Karl Marx to define as plutocratic all forms of social organization in which private property is preserved.
Aristotle designated the rule of wealth as the distinguishing feature of oligarchy, in contrast to aristocracy, which is founded on virtue. Although this distinction is grounded in the political experience of his time and thus does not possess universal value as a principle of classification, it may nonetheless be said that plutocracy easily leads to oligarchy. It has nevertheless been observed that it is precisely democracy that has favored its emergence in modern times, inasmuch as the democratic regime, structured around large mass parties that require enormous capital for their organization and propaganda, becomes the instrument of those who finance such parties, to whose ends they are then compelled to serve.