Taiwan Journal of Democracy, Volume 8, No. 1: 169-173
Book Review: Jeffrey A. Winters, Oligarchy (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2011), 323 pages.
The Power of Property
Oligarchy and Democracy in World History
Edward Aspinall
In this wide-ranging and important work, Jeffrey Winters offers nothing less
than a new interpretation of “the bulk of human history” (p. 273). He succeeds
in achieving this ambitious goal. Oligarchy is lucid in its argument, compelling
in its evidence, and at times startling in its claims and conclusions. It deserves
serious consideration by political scientists, sociologists, and political
economists, as well as by a much broader readership of students, political
activists, and concerned citizens.
The book provides a survey of human history that begins in earliest times
and carries through to the present, but which is based around a deceptively
simple thesis and an equally deceptively simple proposition. The thesis is that,
throughout history, most societies have been marked by extreme inequalities
of wealth in which tiny groups of people-oligarchs-enjoy riches far beyond
the reach of most members of those societies. The proposition is that by
understanding the variations in the patterns of this inequality and, especially, in
the means by which it is defended, we will unlock a key to understanding many
of the great conflicts of human history, and the changing nature of political
institutions down the centuries.
To make his case, Winters draws on examples as diverse as the cronyism
of Suharto’s Indonesia, the feuds of Appalachian clans in the nineteenth
century, the warring baronies and statelets of medieval Europe, the oligarchs
of the ancient Greco-Roman world, and the industry devoted to minimizing the
tax burden of the super-rich in the contemporary United States. Throughout
this account, which often combines startling juxtapositions (modern mafia
commissions and ancient Athenian oligarchies in one chapter, for instance),
he presents engaging narrative alongside careful analysis of the forms, modes,
and implications of wealth concentration in these otherwise very different
societies.
Edward Aspinall is a Professor in the Department of Political and Social Change, School of
International, Political and Strategic Studies, College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National
University. <[email protected]>
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To start with, he finds stark concentration of wealth across time and place.
Using a novel “Material Power Index” to illustrate how the wealth of top
oligarchs can be compared with those of lower strata, he suggests, for example,
that the wealth of an average Roman senator was “10,000 times that of a
common slave” (p. 95). In the United States today, the wealth of the top four
hundred taxpayers is “nearly identical to the concentrated wealth of Roman
senators” (p. 216), with an eye-popping average wealth equivalent to 10,327
times the average income of the bottom 90 percent of taxpayers (p. 214). He
provides similar figures for other societies.
But what does he do with such numbers? What is the basic framework
and argument of Oligarchy? The outline is provided in a first chapter that is
an exemplar of lucid social science prose writing. Advancing an avowedly
materialist perspective, Winters defines oligarchs as “actors who command
and control massive concentrations of material resources that can be employed
to defend or enhance their personal wealth and exclusive social position”
(p. 6). Oligarchy as a system refers to “the politics of wealth defense by
materially endowed actors” (p. 7). Wealth defense, in turn, comprises two parts:
property defense (the safeguarding of claims and rights to wealth and property,
in general) and income defense (“keeping as much of the flow of income and
profits from one’s wealth as possible under conditions of secure property
rights” [p. 7]). The first goal is general and assists all oligarchs; achieving it
requires systemic effort. The second goal is narrower and more individual.
It is thus not only the desire for accumulation of property that motivates
oligarchs, in Winters’ analysis, but even more so their fears that they will lose
that property. As he shows in sometimes gruesome detail, throughout much
of history, oligarchs had a lot to fear. At rare moments, oligarchs have been
expropriated by revolutionary movements from below (though this is not his
focus). More often, the cogent source of danger for oligarchs has been “lateral
threats” from rival oligarchs. The book contains many accounts of fierce
and sometimes bloody internecine battles among oligarchs. In more ordered
societies such as the contemporary United States, in contrast, where general
property rights are secured by the legal and political system, oligarchs are
more concerned about safeguarding their individual income, especially from
the danger of taxation imposed by the very state that provides the conditions
for their greater security.
Building on these observations, Winters develops a neat typology of
oligarchies. On one axis he considers “the degree of direct involvement by
oligarchs in providing the coercion needed to claim property” (p. 7). In some
societies, oligarchs defend their wealth by staffing their own private armies
and militias; in others, they are individually disarmed but look to the coercive
power of the state and its legal system to protect them. The second axis concerns
“whether that rule is individualistic and fragmented or collective and more
institutionalized” (p. 7). Some oligarchies involve multiple players, working
more or less in harmony; others are dominated by a single individual. The
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most important historical shift, however, has been on the first axis: “the change
in the locus of coercive power, from individual to state, is the single greatest
source of transformation in the character of oligarchy in history” (p. 15). When
oligarchs give up a direct role in ruling and in defending their riches through
violence, conditions can emerge for the rise of a “tamed oligarchy” that can
coexist with democracy.
This framework, in turn, leads Winters to a fourfold typology which
structures much of the book. Warring oligarchies arise when oligarchs are
armed (they command private armies) and are “personally engaged in the
violence and coercion of wealth defense” (p. 65), but are highly fragmented.
Ruling oligarchies occur when individual oligarchs retain a significant role
in the direct provision of coercion, but rule collectively so that there is “a
higher degree of cooperation” (p. 66) among them. Such arrangements require
some sort of compact among oligarchs that they will abstain from using their
coercive resources against one another, and as a result they can be unstable
(some of the most compelling analysis-and most gruesome scenes-in the
book comes as Winters recounts the escalating violence among rival oligarchs
that doomed the Roman Republic).
Sultanistic oligarchies are when rule is not collective, but individual and
personalized. In such systems, the monopoly of coercion “is in the hands of
one oligarch rather than an institutionalized state constrained by laws” (p. 35).
The chief examples offered are Suharto’s Indonesia and the Philippines under
Marcos. The greater instability of the latter’s rule compared to that of Suharto
was that in the Philippines, oligarchs were already powerfully ensconced prior
to Marcos’s rise to power, and they mounted persistent opposition to his rule.
In contrast, the private economy was weak in Indonesia and oligarchs began
to emerge only under Suharto. Even so, when the greed and depredations of
his children and other cronies constituted a threat to the property of other
oligarchs in the latter years of his rule, oligarchs abandoned Suharto, making
him vulnerable to overthrow when the Asian financial crisis hit in 1997-1998.
Civil oligarchies are when oligarchs are also disarmed, but instead of a
single strongman ordering the system and acting as its supreme arbiter, there
is “an institutionalized collectivity of actors constrained by laws” (p. 36). This
is oligarchy, in other words, that is simultaneously protected and civilized
by the rule of law. In a civil oligarchy, oligarchs do not have to fear lateral
threats from armed rivals, or threats of arbitrary expropriation from above.
Such an oligarchy does not need to be democratic, however: Winters’ chief
examples are the contemporary United States and Singapore. In both places,
oligarchs’ property rights are secure, and they can rely on a strong judiciary
to defend them. However, “taming oligarchs through strong laws in Singapore
has not been accompanied by advances toward democracy” (p. 210). In the
democratic United States, meanwhile, collective security of property rights
is so entrenched that oligarchs can devote their personal riches to the task of
individual income defense. Some of the most compelling analysis in the book
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comes when Winters details what he calls the Wealth Defense Industry in the
United States: the lawyers and lobbyists who work to ensure that the extremely
rich pay an ever decreasing share of their income in tax.
Readers of this journal will be particularly interested to learn what the
book has to say about the relationship between oligarchy and democracy.
Winters pulls no punches in pointing to the inequality of political power that
oligarchy produces. As he puts it, “massive wealth in the hands of a small
minority creates significant power advantages in the political realm, including
in democracies” (p. 5). But this does not mean that democracy is incompatible
with oligarchy. On the contrary:
Democracy and oligarchy are defined by distributions of
radically different kinds of power. Democracy refers to
dispersed formal political power based on rights, procedures,
and levels of popular participation. By contrast, oligarchy is
defined by concentrated material power based on enforced
claims or rights to property and wealth (p. 11).
Thus, provided “the two realms of power do not clash,” “oligarchy and
democracy can coexist indefinitely” (p. 11). But there is an important rider:
oligarchy and procedural democracy, especially in the
representative form that had evolved by the early nineteenth
century, barely conflict at all. The two kinds of politics are
derived from different kinds of power and involve different
kinds of political engagement. The politics of oligarchs is
focused on defending wealth. Meanwhile, the practices and
procedures of democracy evolved and widened in lockstep
with the creation of daunting protections for oligarchic
property against the potential threats that poor majorities,
left unchecked, could pose. No protections, no democracy
(p. 73).
The allusion to Barrington Moore’s famous dictum, “no bourgeois, no
democracy,” is doubtlessly deliberate. For Winters, it is not the emergence of
a super wealthy class that makes democracy possible (such a class has existed
through much of human history), but rather the guarantees for the security of
their property that come with a developed legal system. Without guarantees of
property, oligarchs will resist the imposition of democracy and “the character
of oligarchy reverts to its more martial form” (p. 25).
The emphasis that Winters places on the role of law in moderating
oligarchic rule is one of the most distinctive aspects of his approach (though he
also stresses that oligarchs may be tamed by the rule of a powerful single ruler,
as in a sultanistic oligarchy). He elaborates little on how a sufficiently strong
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rule of law might come into being, except by noting that a sort of Hobbesian
bargain may be struck among rival oligarchs in which, “The trade-off is that
oligarchic fortunes are defended generally in exchange for oligarchs themselves
being as vulnerable to the law-for the first time in history-as are others in the
community whose individual power resources are less intimidating” (p. 209).
For Hobbes, a Commonwealth arises when all men agree that it is necessary to
cede power to a higher sovereignty, “in the foresight of their own preservation”;
for Winters, it is not all people, but the oligarchs who strike the deal.
It is here that we see some of the most striking differences between Winters’
approach and comparable materialist analyses of historical change that are
more firmly rooted in the Marxist tradition. If Marx saw all previous history as
a history of class struggle, Winters sees it primarily as one of struggles among
rival oligarchs. If Marx saw the revolutionary proletariat as the antithesis of the
bourgeoisie, for Winters there seems to be no antithesis at all, though he finds a
perhaps unlikely hero in the rule of law, which may at times tame and moderate
oligarchy. Overall, Winters has relatively little to say about other classes or
even about popular struggles to confront oligarchic power (though he does
not deny their significance and they are sometimes an important part of the
backdrop). Where the plebeian masses-both in ancient and modern timesappear most frequently and memorably in his analysis, it is as foot-soldiers or
protestors hired and mobilized by oligarchs in their own feuds.
No doubt this neglect of other classes is a product of the book’s focus on
varieties of oligarchy, but it also flows from underlying features of Winters’
philosophy of power. For instance, he views “mobilizational” power as
inherently ephemeral (p. 16), in contrast to the flexibility and potency of
material power (p. 17). Another striking difference to the Marxist tradition is
his explicit omission of ideological power from his analysis (it is relegated to
a footnote on pp. 12-13). For much of the last century, writers in the Marxist
tradition wrestled to comprehend the centrality of ideology in the defense of,
and contestation over, class rule; for Winters, it barely counts.
These and many other aspects of Winters’ approach will doubtlessly give
rise to questions and debates among readers. This is just as it should be when an
author presents an analysis of significant originality, precision, and ambition.
There should be no doubt on this score. With Oligarchy, Jeffrey Winters has
produced a great achievement of social and historical analysis. It will challenge
all who read it.
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