Plato's Five Regimes - Oligarchy

Oligarchy

Plato defines oligarchy as a system of government which distinguishes between the rich and the poor, making of the former its administrators.

An oligarchy is originated by extending tendencies already evident in a timocracy. In contrast to platonic aristocrats, timocrats are allowed by their constitution to own property and thus to both accumulate and waste money. Because of the pleasures derived from it, money is valued over virtue, and the leaders of the state seek to alter the law to give way and accommodate to the materialistic lust of its citizens. As a result of this new found appreciation for money, the governors work the constitution to restrict political power to the rich only. That is how a timocracy becomes an oligarchy.

Plato gives a detailed account of the problems usually faced by the oligarchies of his days, which he considered as significantly more troubled than the former system, that of timocracy. The following are examples of such problems:

• the very distribution of political power in an oligarchy, which prevents wise and virtuous, but poor, men from influencing public life, whilst opening such possibility to the rich but incompetent ones;
• an oligarchy is invariably divided, in the one hand, between very rich men, its governors; and, on the other hand, very poor men. The income disparities emerge mostly because of bad policy on the part of the state, which doesn't prevent citizens from enriching through exploitive contracts, or from becoming poor by wasting around their money and goods. The poor ones become either beggars or thugs imbued with anger at their condition and a revolutionary spirit which threatens the internal stability of the state;
• an oligarchy will usually perform poorly in military campaigns because the rich men, who are few, will make a small army, and they are afraid to give weapons to the majority (the poor) due to fears of a revolution. If a revolution does ensue, and the poor ones become victorious over the rich, the former expel the latter from the city, or kill them, and then they divide their properties and political power between one another. That is how a democracy is established.

As to the man whose character reflects that of an oligarchy, Plato says that he might have been the child of a timocratic man: The son initially emulates the father, and is ambitious and craves for fame and honor. When, however, he witnesses the problems his father faces due to those timocratic tendencies - say, he wastes public goods in a military campaign, and then is brought before the court, losing his properties after trial -, the future oligarch becomes poor. He then rejects the ambitions he had in his soul, which he now sees as harmful, and puts in their place craving for money, instead of honor, and a parsimonious cautiousness. Such men, the oligarchs, live only to enrich themselves, and through their private means they seek to fulfill only their most urgent needs. However when in charge of public goods they become quite 'generous'.

Oligarchs do, however, value at least one virtue, that of temperance and moderation - not out of an ethical principle or spiritual concern, but because by dominating wasteful tendencies they succeed in accumulating money. Thus even though he has bad desires - which Plato compares to the anarchic tendencies of the poor people in oligarchies -, by virtue of temperance the oligarch managed to establish a fragile order in his soul. Thus the oligarch may seem, at least in appearance, superior to the majority.