![]() ![]() One of the most famous modern uses of the term oligarchy occurs in “ iron law of oligarchy,” a concept devised by the German sociologist Robert Michels to refer to the allegedly inevitable tendency of political parties and trade unions to become bureaucratized, centralized, and conservative. Vilfredo Pareto elaborated the idea in his doctrine of the “elite.” The modern tendency to analyze social patterns in terms of an elite, though greatly reinforced by Pareto’s theory, goes further back than Marx and Engels, who employed elite to describe the class-conscious communists, the leading group within the proletariat. Thus, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels insisted that, throughout the history of capitalism, the key capitalists had controlled the government they coined the dictum, “the state is the executive committee of the exploiting class.” The Italian political scientist Gaetano Mosca likewise insisted that a “ruling class” always constituted the effective oligarchic control. Oligarchs will secure effective control whether the formal authority is vested in the people, a monarch, the proletariat, or a dictator. It is a recurrent idea that all forms of government are in the final analysis reducible to the rule of a few. In the Aristotelian classification of government, there were two forms of rule by the few: aristocracy and its debased form, oligarchy.
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