Oligarchy

• 1. Introduction

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  Oligarchy is a form of government in which power rests with a small number of people. That definition sounds simple. But across thousands of years of history, from the aristocratic councils of ancient Athens to the billionaire donors of modern American politics, the question of who really holds power has rarely had a simple answer.

  The word itself comes from ancient Greek. Aristotle was the first to use it systematically, defining oligarchy as rule by the rich and treating it as a corruption of aristocracy. He drew a distinction between rule by the best and rule by those who simply had the most. That distinction would echo through centuries of political thought.

  Robert Michels, writing in the early 20th century, pushed the idea further with what he called the iron law of oligarchy, arguing that even democracies tend to drift toward oligarchic control. His argument was not about the character of rulers but about the structure of organizations: divide labor, and a ruling class emerges almost automatically.

  The questions this documentary will explore are both old and urgent. How does a small group maintain power over a large population? What tools do oligarchs actually use? And in places like Russia, the Philippines, and the United States, how does oligarchy take shape within systems that call themselves democracies?

• 2. The Iron Law

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  In their 2009 paper titled "Oligarchy in the United States?", political scientists Benjamin Page and Jeffrey Winters offered a precise definition. An oligarchy, in their framing, is a political system in which the wealthiest citizens deploy unique and concentrated power resources to defend their unique minority interests. The key word is "unique": oligarchs are not just rich, they have resources that ordinary citizens cannot match.

  Winters and Page identified four primary mechanisms through which oligarchic influence operates. Lobbying allows concentrated wealth to shape tax policy and other decisions without holding any formal government position. The field has grown increasingly professionalized and resource-intensive over time. Campaign contributions shape which candidates actually win elections. Opinion shaping controls who gets heard by formal decision-makers, crowding out ordinary citizens. And manipulation of constitutional rules, including the appointment of judges with sympathetic legal interpretations, gives oligarchs influence over the framework of governance itself.

  Winters also noted something that might seem paradoxical: oligarchy and democracy can coexist. The tension sharpens only when a majority of voters actively opposes unequal wealth distribution and pushes for a more equitable system. A democracy where most voters are passive or divided may leave an oligarchy's position largely undisturbed.

  Scholars have also identified a category called business oligarchies, defined by three criteria: the group must be among the largest private owners in a country, must have enough political power to protect its own interests, and must coordinate activities across multiple sectors rather than operating in a single industry.

• 3. Athens and Its Oligarchs

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  In 510 BC, an exiled Athenian aristocrat named Cleisthenes, a member of the powerful Alcmaeonid clan, convinced the Spartan king Cleomenes I to invade Athens and overthrow the tyrant Hippias. The plan succeeded. But Cleomenes then installed Cleisthenes's rival, Isagoras, as an oligarch in Hippias's place. Power had changed hands, but not structure.

  Cleisthenes responded by doing something unexpected: he mobilized the Athenian middle class. In the 508-507 BC Athenian Revolution, Cleisthenes overthrew Isagoras and laid the foundation for the democracy that would define Athens for generations.

  The back-and-forth did not stop there. In 493 BC, a middle-class member named Themistocles became archon. His lasting contribution was expanding the Athenian navy, a move that gave the lower classes, through military service, a new source of political leverage. Themistocles ruled Athens for over twenty years and is remembered as the victor of the Greco-Persian Wars.

  When Themistocles fell from power around 471 BC, the conservative politician Cimon, a strategos, led a resurgence of the aristocratic Areopagus council. Cimon's alignment with Sparta ultimately cost him his support base. In 461 BC, a politician named Ephialtes proposed stripping the Areopagus of its powers; the Assembly passed the measure unanimously. Cimon was ostracized for ten years.

  Ephialtes was assassinated in 461 BC, possibly by aristocratic opponents. His protege Pericles, also of the Alcmaeonid clan, then consolidated power and led Athens for over thirty years, presiding over the Delian League during the First Peloponnesian War. The period became known simply as the Age of Pericles. After the Thirty Years' Peace with Sparta in 445 BC, a new conservative challenger named Thucydides, son of Melesias and a relative of Cimon, attempted to use the Assembly against Pericles. Pericles' oratory led instead to Thucydides' ostracism.

  The most concentrated episode of oligarchic violence in Athenian history came between 404 BC and 403 BC, when the Spartans installed the Thirty Tyrants after Athens surrendered in the Peloponnesian War. The Thirty held power for only eight months, but in that time killed five percent of the Athenian population, confiscated citizens' property, and drove democratic supporters into exile.

• 4. Russia After the Soviet Union

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  After the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, Russia's state-owned assets were privatized at speed, and a new class of oligarchs emerged to claim much of what had been public property. Their reach extended into energy, metals, and natural resources, and many maintained direct relationships with senior government officials.

  In 1996, a group known as the Seven Bankers played a decisive role in Boris Yeltsin's re-election campaign, funding and organizing support in fear that the Communist Party might otherwise win. Over the following years, they continued to exert influence over Yeltsin's government.

  When Vladimir Putin came to power in 1999, he moved against many of these figures, arresting some for tax evasion and pushing others into exile. By the end of the 2000s, however, Putin had not dismantled oligarchic structures so much as rebuilt them around his own circle of personal friends and colleagues. NPR described the change by saying Putin "changed the guy sitting in the chairs, but he didn't change the chairs".

  Jeffrey Winters and Benjamin Page placed Russia on their list of countries that exhibit oligarchic characteristics, alongside Colombia, Indonesia, Singapore, and the United States.

• 5. The Philippines and India

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  Ferdinand Marcos's presidency in the Philippines, which ran from 1965 to 1986, gave rise to a network of monopolies linked to the Marcos family and their associates. Analysts described not only that period but also the decades that followed as an era of oligarchy.

  Rodrigo Duterte, elected president in 2016, campaigned on a promise to dismantle that oligarchic structure. But corporate oligarchy persisted throughout his tenure. Duterte publicly criticized prominent figures such as the Ayala family and Manny Pangilinan, while corporate figures aligned with him, including Dennis Uy of Udenna Corporation, gained advantages during his administration.

  In India, the picture is more recent. After Narendra Modi became prime minister in 2014, Gautam Adani, owner of the Adani Group and India's richest man, won bids to operate six Indian airports despite having no prior experience in the sector. His wealth increased by roughly $100 billion between 2020 and 2023. In 2024, Hindenburg Research accused Adani of fraud and stock manipulation, and the Adani Group lost $110 billion in market value within days. The episode came to be seen as a cautionary tale about cronyism under the Modi government.

  In 2023, Robert Lighthizer, the architect of American trade policy during Donald Trump's first presidency, described India as controlled by roughly fifteen or so billionaires who shaped its trading policy. He labeled India "the most protectionist country in the world" in his book No Trade is Free.

• 6. America and Oligarchic Influence

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  In 2014, Martin Gilens of Princeton University and Benjamin Page of Northwestern University published a study examining American policy outcomes between 1981 and 2002. Their conclusion was that wealthy individuals and business groups held substantial influence over political decisions, often sidelining ordinary Americans. The study sparked debate, with some scholars arguing that Gilens and Page overstated their conclusions. Gilens and Page stood by their findings, clarifying that they did not call the United States an outright oligarchy but had found strong evidence of economic elites dominating certain areas of policymaking.

  Former president Jimmy Carter offered a blunter assessment in 2015. In the wake of the 2010 Citizens United v. FEC Supreme Court decision, which removed limits on political campaign donations, Carter described the United States as an "oligarchy with unlimited political bribery".

  Economist Simon Johnson located a specific turning point: the 2008 financial crisis, after which the influence of an American financial oligarchy became particularly visible.

  In his farewell address on the 15th of January 2025, outgoing President Joe Biden warned that an oligarchy was taking shape in America, aided by what he called a tech-industrial complex. Politico noted that his language echoed Theodore Roosevelt's attacks on the robber barons of the Gilded Age. Biden's departure from office coincided with the rise of Elon Musk, head of the Department of Government Efficiency and a close collaborator of Donald Trump during the 2024 campaign. Musk contributed over $200 million to the 2024 election through a political action committee he created to support Trump. Senator Bernie Sanders launched a Fighting Oligarchy tour across the country in response to Trump's election victory, signaling that the debate over American oligarchy had moved from academic journals into campaign rallies and farewell speeches.

• 7. Power Without a Title

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  George Bernard Shaw put the critique of intellectual oligarchy on stage in 1907, in his play Major Barbara. Shaw's target was not the wealthy as such but the class of professional elites: lawyers, doctors, priests, literary figures, professors, artists, and politicians. In the play, he called for a democratic power strong enough to force the intellectual oligarchy to use its genius for the general good or else perish.

  Shaw's argument added a dimension that purely economic definitions of oligarchy tend to miss: power does not require formal office, wealth in the conventional sense, or even organizational backing. Knowledge, credentials, and cultural authority can function as power resources too.

  Page and Winters made a similar observation in the economic domain: oligarchs do not need to hold formal government positions. Indirect influence through lobbying, campaign finance, and opinion shaping is sufficient. The result is a class of people who shape decisions without being accountable to the electorate.

  Iran illustrates a distinct variant. The Islamic Republic, established after the 1979 Iranian Revolution, operates under a system called Velayat-e-Faqih, or Governance of the Jurists, which places power in the hands of a small group of senior Shia clerics led by the Supreme Leader. Critics describe this as a clerical oligarchy. The Iranian government has also pursued surveillance to suppress dissent, particularly targeting women and human rights activists. A program called the Noor plan, implemented in April 2024, intensified policing and criminal prosecution against women who defied mandatory hijab laws, showing how oligarchic power can press into the most personal spaces of daily life.