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Oligarchy (from Ancient Greek ὀλιγαρχία (oligarkhía) 'rule by few'; from ὀλίγος (olígos) 'few' and ἄρχω (árkhō) 'to rule, command') [1] [2] [3] is a form of government in which power rests with a small number of people.
More generally, an oligarch (from Ancient Greek ὀλίγος (oligos) 'few' and ἄρχειν (archein) 'rule') is a "member of an oligarchy; a person who is part of a small group holding power in a state". [3]
Rule by an autocracy or oligarchy with a power source predicated on a political party or stratocracy; characterized by the rejection of political plurality. Band society Rule by a government based on small (usually family) unit with a semi-informal hierarchy, with strongest (either physical strength or strength of character) as leader.
Solon introduced the ideas of timokratia as a graded oligarchy in his Solonian Constitution for Athens in the early 6th century BC. His was the first known deliberately implemented form of timocracy, allocating political rights and economic responsibility depending on membership of one of four tiers of the population.
The iron law of oligarchy is a political theory first developed by the German-born Italian sociologist Robert Michels in his 1911 book Political Parties. [1] It asserts that rule by an elite, or oligarchy , is inevitable as an "iron law" within any democratic organization as part of the "tactical and technical necessities" of the organization.
Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Xenophon, and the Spartans considered aristocracy (the ideal form of rule by the few) to be inherently better than the ideal form of rule by the many , but they also considered the corrupted form of aristocracy (oligarchy) to be worse than the corrupted form of democracy .
Union democracy refers to the governance of trade unions, as well as the protection of the rights and interests of individual members. [1] Modern usage of the term has focused on the extent to which election procedures ensure that the executives of a union most accurately represent the interests of the members.
Oligarch, a member of an oligarchy, a power structure where control resides in a small number of people; Oligarch (Kingdom of Hungary), late 13th–14th centuries; Business oligarch, wealthy and influential magnate Russian oligarch, business oligarchs in the era of Russian privatization in the 1990s