PLUTOCRACY. — According to the etymological meaning, p. (from πλοῦτος = “wealth” and κράτος = “power”) signifies the dominion of wealth or of the men who possess it—industrialists, bankers, and large landowners. The term, however, is not usually employed to indicate a particular political regime distinguished from other forms by its own characteristics; rather, it serves to denote, in a somewhat vague manner, a social condition in which the major possessors of wealth exercise a preponderant, often indirect, influence over the administration of public affairs. P. can therefore be associated with any form of government, with monarchy as with republic, with aristocracy as with democracy. Only a conception based on the theory of the exploitation of the proletariat by bourgeois regimes led Carlo Marx to define as plutocratic all forms of social organization in which private property is preserved.
Aristotle designated the dominion of wealth as the distinguishing mark of oligarchy, in opposition to aristocracy founded on virtue. Although this distinction is supported by the political experience of his time and therefore does not possess universal value as a principle of classification, it may nevertheless be said that p. readily leads to oligarchy. It has nonetheless been observed that, in more recent times, democracy itself has favored its rise, inasmuch as the democratic regime, structured around large mass parties in need of immense capital for their organization and propaganda, becomes the instrument by which those who finance such parties maneuver them, and to whose purposes they are consequently compelled to serve.
Few examples of p. are found in antiquity, where the preponderant influence of the wealthy classes certainly cannot have been absent. Carthage is cited, and, in more recent times, Venice, though neither corresponds closely to the modern meaning of the term. True p. is a phenomenon connected with the modern capitalist regime, which, having permitted the concentration of wealth in a few hands through the creation of large and powerful industrial organizations, could not then prevent the owners of capital from invading the most sensitive nerve centers of social life, establishing a pervasive and suffocating dominion over governments and their policies, dictated by manipulating the hidden levers at their disposal. Capitalism and p. are twin offspring of the introduction of the machine and the progress of industrialism. To combat them, every social movement inspired by Marxist ideas proves inadequate, because it rests on the same error of overvaluing material and earthly goods, opposing the egoism of capital with the egoism of the class, and private p. with the p. of the State. Only a spiritualistic conception, which re-
establishes the hierarchy of values, can be an antidote to the dominion of wealth through its more equitable distribution among the social classes.