The other day, a couple of politically conservative billionaire activists drew fire from a Daily Beast commentator as “angry plutocrats”. (He meant some other demented plutocrat, evidently.)īack in 1917, Theodore Roosevelt said that anything that tends to government by a plutocracy is “un-American”. Malcolm Turnbull, Australian communications minister, has had to explain that Rupert Murdoch was not the person he had in mind with his recent unscripted public remark about a ‘demented plutocrat’ who was in the news business. It’s a term that’s used pejoratively, about others. ‘Pluto’ comes from a Greek word for ‘wealth’, rooted in the idea of an overflowing abundance.Ĭhildren are never taught in school that plutocracy is the system they’re growing up in. ‘Plutocrat’ is a back-formation to refer to the individual rich people exercising power. ‘Plutocracy’ has been used in English since the middle of the 17th century to refer to the rule or power of the wealthy.
It ought to be a useful synonym for ‘oligarch’, as the disheartening coverage from Crimea continues, but the two terms seem to show up in very different political contexts. ‘Plutocrat’ is another Greek-derived term suggesting a combination of wealth and power. While we’re visiting ‘oligarch’, we might want to drop in on a related term that lives nearby. Though widely described as a “billionaire,” Firtash, detained in Vienna last month at the request of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, turns out to be, according to Forbes, more like a mere half-billionaire. Indeed, Forbes, a publication that knows about such things, reported recently with some apparent astonishment on Dmitry Firtash, a Ukrainian businessman associated with Ukrainian former president Viktor Yushchenko.
#Oligarchy vs plutocracy how to#
There’s an implication of wealth, and in a system where great public wealth was suddenly ‘available’ for privatisation (e.g., the Soviet Union as it was dissolving), oligarchs could be counted on to figure out how to enrich themselves, and many certainly did.īut the essence of oligarchy is the fewness of those at the top, not their wealth. That arch element, meaning ‘rule’, is familiar from other words in English such as ‘monarch’ or ‘hierarchy’. The front end of the word is from ‘oligos’, meaning ‘few’. This term came into English around 1570, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary, from French, but it’s rooted in Greek. The “businessmen” in the inner circles of Russian President Vladimir Putin and the ousted Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovych, are referred to as “oligarchs”.Īn oligarch is part of an oligarchy, a system of ‘government by the few’. “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me,” we children used to sing-song on the playground.īut that hasn’t stopped the news media from fixing on some set terms to describe key actors in the unfolding crisis in Ukraine and Crimea.