A bold new approach to combatting the inherent corruption of representative democracy This provocative book reveals how the majority of modern liberal democracies have become increasingly oligarchic, suffering from a form of structural political decay first conceptualized by ancient philosophers. Systemic Corruption argues that the problem cannot be blamed on the actions of corrupt politicians but is built into the very fabric of our representative systems. Camila Vergara provides a compelling and original genealogy of political corruption from ancient to modern (...) thought, and shows how representative democracy was designed to protect the interests of the already rich and powerful to the detriment of the majority. Unable to contain the unrelenting force of oligarchy, especially after experimenting with neoliberal policies, most democracies have been corrupted into oligarchic democracies. Vergara explains how to reverse this corrupting trajectory by establishing a new counterpower strong enough to control the ruling elites. Building on the anti-oligarchic institutional innovations proposed by plebeian philosophers, she rethinks the republic as a mixed order in which popular power is institutionalized to check the power of oligarchy. Vergara demonstrates how a plebeian republic would establish a network of local assemblies with the power to push for reform from the grassroots, independent of political parties and representative government. Drawing on neglected insights from Niccolò Machiavelli, Nicolas de Condorcet, Rosa Luxemburg, and Hannah Arendt, Systemic Corruption proposes to reverse the decay of democracy with the establishment of anti-oligarchic institutions through which common people can collectively resist the domination of the few. (shrink)

This essay identifies ‘oligarchic harm’ as a dire threat confronting contemporary democracies. I provide a formal standard for classifying oligarchs: those who use personal access to concentrated w...

In this paper we show how a realistic normative democratic theory can work within the constraints set by the most pessimistic empirical results about voting behaviour and elite capture of the policy process. After setting out the empirical evidence and discussing some extant responses by political theorists, we argue that the evidence produces a two-pronged challenge for democracy: an epistemic challenge concerning the quality and focus of decision-making and an oligarchic challenge concerning power concentration. To address the challenges we then (...) put forward three main normative claims, each of which is compatible with the evidence. We start with a critique of the epistocratic position commonly thought to be supported by the evidence. We then introduce a qualified critique of referenda and other forms of plebiscite, and an outline of a tribune-based system of popular control over oligarchic influence on the policy process. Our discussion points towards a renewal of democracy in a plebeian but not plebiscitarian direction: Attention to the relative power of social classes matters more than formal dispersal of power through voting. We close with some methodological reflections about the compatibility between our normative claims and the realist program in political philosophy. (shrink)

Historically, oligarchy has been a great political and intellectual competitor to democracy. Indeed, much of the early history of political thought centred on the clash between democracy and oligarchy. Unfortunately, while Greek notions of democracy have received much attention from political scientists, correspondingly less has been paid to oligarchy. This article seeks to address that imbalance by examining Plato's treatment of oligarchy in Book VIII of the Republic. It focuses on Socrates' investigation of the oligarchic soul and concludes that for (...) Plato, oligarchy is an enduring political problem because it is an attractive alternative to democracy for a certain kind of acquisitive but morally-serious person. Such people are attracted to oligarchy because they have a particular moral passion that is not satisfied in a democratic political order. (shrink)

Modifying the conjecture of Wolfgang Helbig by means of the distinction between Xenophon and his various narrators introduced by Benjamin McCloskey, this paper uses the insights of Hartvig Frisch to show how drawing a distinction between the first-person speaker in pseudo-Xenophon’s Constitution of the Athenians and its author indicates that the former is Alcibiades and the latter is Xenophon himself.

This study addresses the problem of Arrovian preference aggregation. Social rationality plays a crucial role in the standard Arrovian framework. However, no assumptions on social rationality are imposed here. Social preferences are allowed to be any binary relation (possibly incomplete and intransitive). We introduce the axiom of hybrid invariance, which requires that if social preferences under two preference profiles make the same judgment, then a social preference under a “hybrid” of the two profiles must extend the original judgment in a (...) certain way. Then, we characterize the structure of decisive coalitions under hybrid invariance. (shrink)

The prevailing historiographic reconstruction of the political struggle in Athens during the last years of the fifth century originates from the discovery of the text of the Aristotelian Athenaion Politeia [Ath.]. According to this reconstruction, three political options and three political programmes were in effect. These were, on the one hand, traditional democracy and opposing oligarchy; on the other, a new third way, that of ‘the moderates’, who under the leading of Theramenes represents a solution to the stasis. The political (...) program of themoderates is supposed to include the following fundamental items: a return to an ancient constitution, the reduction of the number of citizens and their political rights, the sovereignty of law, and the recuperation of accord between citizens. This paper tries to highlight the weakness of this interpretation by analysing the difficulties in grasping from the sources this whole program and their adscription to a leader and to a distinctive political group. The misinterpretation was already implicit in the author of the Athenian Constitution, perhaps a disciple of Aristotle. He wrote influenced by the Aristotelian political theory and thereby he interpreted all that he had read about Theramenes, the Five Thousand and the patrios politeia as if the Aristotelian ideals of the mesotes and of mese politeia were actually proposed and temporally achieved in Athens by the efforts of Theramenes and his supporters. (shrink)

The concentration of socio-economic power and social inequality are characteristic features of contemporary society. Not the least, they tend to undermine democratic legislation: Democratic constit...

Camila Vergara’s Systemic Corruption is an extraordinarily rich, provocative and original work of political theory, which makes several compelling interventions in the normative literature. It deve...

Political theorists concerned with ways to counteract the oligarchic tendencies of representative government have recently paid more attention to the employment of “class-specific institutions” (CSIs)—that is, political institutions that formally exclude wealthy elites from decision-making power. This article disputes a general objection levelled against the justifiability of CSIs, according to which their democratic credentials are outweighed by their explicit transgression of formal political equality—what I call the political equality objection. I claim that, although CSIs do not satisfy political equality fully, (...) their exclusionary thrust is inter alia justified in virtue of the fact that they unfold against the background of badly ordered, class-divided societies. Parallel to recent arguments in nonideal theory arguing for the priority of the right to resist economic oppression over the protection of private property rights, access to the empowering properties of CSIs should take priority over the full satisfaction of formal political equality. Yet, I also claim that the justification of CSIs depends on their orientation toward overcoming class divisions because, otherwise, we might end up wrongly naturalizing those divisions—a conclusion that needs to be avoided to reply to the political equality objection. The result is, I believe, a convincing egalitarian case for the democratic justifiability of CSIs. (shrink)

Republic 554c-d—where the oligarchic individual is said to restrain his appetites ‘by compulsion and fear’, rather than by persuasion or by taming them with speech—is often cited as evidence that the appetitive part of the soul can be ‘persuaded’. I argue that the passage does not actually support that conclusion. I offer an alternative reading and suggest that appetite, on Plato’s view, is not open to persuasion.

Four years after the Panama Papers scandal, tax avoidance remains an urgent moral-political problem. Moving beyond both the academic and policy mainstream, I advocate the “democratization of tax enforcement,” by which I mean systematic efforts to make tax avoiders accountable to the judgment of ordinary citizens. Both individual oligarchs and multinational corporations have access to sophisticated tax avoidance strategies that impose significant fiscal costs on democracies and exacerbate preexisting distributive and political inequalities. Yet much contemporary tax sheltering occurs within the (...) letter of the law, rendering criminal sanctions ineffective. In response, I argue for the creation of Citizen Tax Juries, deliberative minipublics empowered to scrutinize tax avoiders, demand accountability, and facilitate concrete reforms. This proposal thus responds to the wider aspiration, within contemporary democratic theory, to secure more popular control over essential economic processes. (shrink)

This edition of early Greek writings on social and political issues includes works by more than thirty authors. There is a particular emphasis on the sophists, with the inclusion of all of their significant surviving texts, and the works of Alcidamas, Antisthenes and the 'Old Oligarch' are also represented. In addition there are excerpts from early poets such as Homer, Hesiod and Solon, the three great tragedians Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, the historians Herodotus and Thucydides, medical writers and presocratic (...) philosophers. Besides political theory, areas represented include early anthropology, sociology, ethics and rhetoric, and the wide range of issues discussed includes human nature, the origin of human society, the origin of law, the nature of justice, the forms of good government, the distribution of wealth, and the distribution of power among genders and social classes. (shrink)

The border is an area where the rule of law has often found difficulty taking root, existing as law-free zones characterized by largely unbounded legal and administrative discretion. In his important new book, The Rule of Law in the Real World, Paul Gowder deftly combines historical examples, formal models, legal analysis, and philosophical theory to provide a novel and compelling account of the rule of law. In this paper I consider whether the account Gowder offers can provide the tools needed (...) to bring the border under the rule of law. I argue that on Gowder’s account, there are two ways in which we might try to extend the rule of law to the border.The first is to look at concrete connections that current citizens or members of the political community have with non-citizens. Just as the interests of current citizens give them strong reasons to coordinate to establish the rule of law in their own community, so may the interests of current members in connections with nonmembers give them reason to work to extend the rule of law to the border. These interests can include family ties, other forms of personal relationships, offers of employment, intellectual connections, and others. Some of these connections already serve to give greater legal protections, including protections from arbitrary decision-making, to some non-citizens, and the general trend, I argue, can and should be further strengthened The second method for extending the rule of law to the border involves appealing to certain universal norms so as to build a sense of community that stretches beyond borders. While these norms are not as robust or well established as domestic law, and therefore are unlikely to extend all of the protections of the rule of law to all people at the border, they can, I argues, be a basis for working against the worst arbitrary actions by border officials. I conclude by considering the vexed dispute about providing “amnesty” for unauthorized immigrants in the United States and other countries. I argues that Gowder’s account of the amnesty provided to supporters of the oligarchic coups in ancient Athens provides a model for thinking about when and how amnesties for unauthorized migrants can be done without offending the rule of law, thereby making them more palatable to current citizens. (Please download this paper for free from SSRN on the link provided on this page). (shrink)

Neorepublicanism holds that domination is the foremost political evil. More, it claims to be able to address today’s most pressing issues. It follows that neorepublicanism should, then, speak to questions of migration, membership, and domination. However, this is not the case. Some critical voices inspired by the idea of non-domination arrive at interesting critiques of migration, membership, and domination, but their answers are often partial and in some ways problematic. They are also largely ahistorical. The contemporary paucity of neorepublican reflections (...) on migration contrasts sharply with its centrality in republican history. In the US, from the colonial period until late into the 19th century, some republicans understood the domination of migrants and citizens as conjoined concerns. They developed a robust account of the relationship between domestic domination and exclusionary migration regimes. They conceptualized the republic as a global asylum where membership is based on volitional allegiance, and they vigorously defended the right of aliens to expatriate. Those ideas were ultimately defeated by aristocratic, oligarchic, and statist forces. This article explicates that history through a genealogical account of what I call ‘insurgent republicanism’. The article then returns to contemporary theorization to diagnose its limitations, continuities, and potentials as seen from the perspective of the insurgent republican tradition. (shrink)

As part of the Common Knowledge symposium “Antipolitics” — which concerns the present confrontation and confusion of democracy and populism — this essay begins from the observation that populism is a word of Latin, not Greek, derivation. The Roman populus did not have the independent democratic power of the Athenian demos, though both words can be translated as “people.” Whereas today, in representative democracies, the conflict of populism and democracy can and does do serious damage to the latter, under the (...) regime of ancient Greek direct-democracy populism was more a demon fantasy, conjured by its diehard, oligarchic opponents, such as Plato, than a real, viable alternative mode of doing democratic politics. Thus, ancient Greek political history has its limits as a guide through our present troubles. (shrink)

In the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis, an important conceptual battleground for democratic theorists ought to be, it would seem, the capitalist firm. We are now painfully aware that the typical model of government in so-called investor-owned companies remains profoundly oligarchic, hierarchical, and unequal. Renewing with the literature of the 1970s and 1980s on workplace democracy, a few political theorists have started to advocate democratic reforms of the workplace by relying on an analogy between firm and state. To (...) the extent that a firm is an organization comparable to the state, it too ought to be ruled along democratic lines. Our paper tests the robustness of the analogy between firm and state by considering six major objections to it: the objection from a difference in ends, the objection from shareholders’ property rights, the objection from worker’s consent, the objection from workers’ exit opportunities, the objection from workers’ expertise, and the objection from the fragility of firms. We find all of these objections wanting. While the paper does not ambition to settle the issue of workplace democracy at once, our goal is to pave the way for a more in-depth study of the ways in which firms and states can be compared and the possible implications this may have for our understanding of the nature of managerial authority and the governance of firms. (shrink)

This paper tackles some issues arising from Plato's account of the democratic man in Rep. VIII. One problem is that Plato tends to analyse him in terms of the desires that he fulfils, yet sends out conflicting signals about exactly what kind of desires are at issue. Scholars are divided over whether all of the democrat's desires are appetites. There is, however, strong evidence against seeing him as exclusively appetitive: rather he is someone who satisfies desires from all three parts (...) of his soul, although his rational and spirited desires differ significantly from those of the philosopher or the timocrat. A second problem concerns the question why the democrat ranks so low in Plato's estimation, especially why he is placed beneath the oligarch. My explanation is that Plato presents him as a jumble of desires, someone in whom order and unity have all but disintegrated. In this way he represents a step beyond the merely bipolarised oligarch. The final section of the paper focuses on the democrat's rational part, and asks whether it plays any role in shaping his life as a whole. For the disunity criticism to hold, Plato ought to allow very little global reasoning: if there were a single deliberating reason imposing a life plan upon his life, the fragmentation of life and character discussed earlier would only be superficial. I argue that Plato attributes very little global reasoning to the democrat. Aside from the fact that the text fails to mention such reasoning taking place, Plato's views on the development of character and his use of the state-soul analogy show that the democrat's lifestyle is determined just by the strength of the desires that he happens to feel at any one time. (shrink)

During the turbulent last years of the fifth century BC, Athens twice suffered the overthrow of democracy and the subsequent establishment of oligarchic regimes. In an in-depth treatment of both political revolutions, Julia Shear examines how the Athenians responded to these events, at the level both of the individual and of the corporate group. Interdisciplinary in approach, this account brings epigraphical and archaeological evidence to bear on a discussion which until now has largely been based on texts. Dr Shear particularly (...) focuses on the recreation of democracy and the city, both ritually and physically, in the aftermath of the coups and demonstrates that, whilst reconciliation after civil strife is difficult and contentious, it is also crucial for rebuilding a united society. Theories of remembering and forgetting are applied and offer a new way of understanding the dynamics in Athens at this time. (shrink)

While standard histories of Western political thought represent women’s rights as an offshoot of the earlier movement for the equal rights of men, this essay argues that the eighteenth-century push for democracy and equal rights was grounded in arguments first used to defend women’s right to moral and religious self-determination, based on their rational and spiritual equality with men. In tandem with the rise of critiques of absolute monarchy, ideal marriage, which had previously involved lordship and subjection, was transformed into (...) an equal companionate relationship based on inclination and affection. The essay argues that the transformation, by the time of the American and French revolutions, of neo-Roman republicanism—which had been aristocratic and oligarchic—into egalitarian, democratic republicanism had been mediated by the extension of arguments, widely distributed in the literature criticizing the slavery of marriage, into a general critique of slavery and support for the equal rights of men. (shrink)

In his Florentine Histories, Machiavelli offers an ambivalent portrayal of the revolt of the textile workers in late fourteenth-century Florence, known as the tumult of the Ciompi. On the face of it, Machiavelli's depiction of the insurgent workers is not exactly flattering. Yet this picture is undermined by a firebrand speech, which Machiavelli invents and attributes to an unnamed leader of the plebeian revolt. I interpret this speech as a radical and egalitarian vector of thought opened up by Machiavelli's text. (...) The revolutionary address reveals an untimely and not entirely self-conscious political radicalism, a plebeian politics that repudiates the logic of oligarchic privilege and is simultaneously not available for subsumption under the mantle of civic republicanism. (shrink)

Demetrius of Phalerum (c. 355-280BCE) of Phalerum was a philosopher-statesman. He studied in the Peripatos under Theophrastus and subsequently used his political influence to help his teacher acquire property for the Peripatetic school. As overseer of Athens, his governance was characterized by a decade of domestic peace. Exiled to Alexandria in Egypt, he became the adviser of Ptolemy. He is said to have been in charge of legislation, and it is likely that he influenced the founding of the Museum and (...) the Library. This edition of the fragments of Demetrius of Phalerum reflects the growing interest in the Hellenistic period and the philosophical schools of that age. As a philosopher-statesman, Demetrius appears to have combined theory and practice. For example, in the work On Behalf of the Politeia, he almost certainly explained his own legislation and governance by appealing to the Aristotelian notion of politeia, that is, a constitution in which democratic and oligarchic elements are combined. In On Peace, he may have defended his subservience to Macedon by appealing to Aristotle, who repeatedly recognized the importance of peace over war; and in On Fortune, he will have followed Theophrastus, emphasizing the way fortune can determine the success or failure of sound policy. Whatever the case concerning any one title, we can well understand why Cicero regarded Demetrius as a unique individual: the educated statesman who was able to bring learning out of the shadows of erudition into the light of political conflict, and that despite an oratorical style more suited to the shadows of the Peripatos then to political combat. The new edition of secondary reports by Stork, van Ophuijsen, and Dorandi brings together the evidence for these and other judgments. The facing translation which accompanies the Greek and Latin texts opens up the material to readers who lack the ancient languages, and the accompanying essays introduce us to important issues. The volume will be of interest to those interested in Greek literature, Hellenistic philosophy, Hellenistic history, and generally to persons captivated by the notion of philosopher-statesman. (shrink)

The question of man is a question of philosophical anthropology. It raises a particular problem because man is both the subject and object of any knowledge of man. This question has ontological consequences, because man is the one being that can have knowledge of himself and can change himself and the laws of his existence. Such knowledge and change, however, are not innate to man but are creations that have both psychical and social-historical presuppositions and implications. The question of de (...) jure validity arises with the creation of politics and philosophy and can be made more precise in the question: How can the valid be effective and the effective be valid? Politics, as the lucid and reflective activity that interrogates itself about society's institutions and attempts to change them, is a creation of a new anthropological type: reflective and deliberative subjectivity. Today's `liberal oligarchies', falsely labelled `democratic', proclaim liberty and equality, but an analysis of the present heteronomous situation of a majority of the world's population and of the compromise nature of liberal oligarchic regimes shows how partial has been their realization. (shrink)

: There has been an intensive scholarly debate about the developmentof Indonesia’s post-New Order democracy. Some scholars have laudedIndonesia’s surprisingly successful transition to democratic consolidation,while others have disputed such a notion, arguing that Indonesia’s democraticprocess tends to be stagnant and even regressive. However, the absence ofa progressive civil society as a result of the increasingly dominant positionof oligarchic political elites in the structure of state power and democraticinstitutions, are a number of important factors that encourage the declineof democracy. This article (...) investigates the conditions that drive the role ofmoderate Islamic organizations weredeclining rather than increasing in fighting for a democratic agenda. Referringto the research data obtained through interviews, documentation and casestudies on Nahdlatul Ulama activism - the largest moderate Islamicorganization in a predominantly Muslim country, this article arguesthat the decline of civil Islamic organizations is closely related to socio-politicalfragmentation and the strengthening of the conservative wing within moderateIslamic organizations. At the same time, the decline of the organization whichhad a glorious reputation as a champion of tolerance, pluralism, and democracyin the 1980-1990s had implications for the regression of Indonesian democracymarked by, among other things, the exclusion of religious minority groups suchas Shi’a from the public sphere. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Mapping out the Problem: The “Old Oligarch” Modern and Ancient Quandaries The Challenge of Thrasymachus and Callicles Thucydidean Imperialists Revisit Nomos and Phusis Socrates and Nomos Logos and Ergon Democratic Epistemology and Relativism Democratic Epistemology and Untrustworthy Rhetoric ‐ or, Where Does the Truth Lie? Socrates and Athens.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Tyrant’s Writ: Myths and Images of Writing in Ancient GreeceThomas ColeDeborah T. Steiner. The Tyrant’s Writ: Myths and Images of Writing in Ancient Greece. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. xiv + 279 pp. Cloth, price not stated.Literacy, as the author correctly points out in her introduction (5), tends to be seen nowadays as “a tool of cultural progress, of rational thought, of scientific analysis, a critical marker (...) that separates the developing from the developed world”; and so the spread of literacy in the Greek world of the Archaic and Classical periods is almost inevitably treated as an event that “heralds in a new rational, skeptical and objective approach,” leading to “advances... in logic, science and technology.” What follows this observation—by way of supplement or corrective to the communis opinio—is an attempt to show that for the Greeks themselves—insofar as their attitude can be documented down to the early fourth century B.C.—writing was something rather different: a multivalent and at times mysterious system of signifiers only partially differentiated from the nonalphabetic symbols and signs that preceded its introduction (chap. 1), a talismanic means of giving greater solemnity and efficacy to the contents of oaths, curses, prayers, and oracles (chap. 2), a frequent source of a “conservative and backward looking” vehicle (metaphor) for carrying on psychological and cosmological speculation (chap. 3), and a medium highly suspect as being the one preferred by tyrants, Greek or oriental, when communicating with their subjects or deputies (chap. 4) and by various types of subversives (conspiring oligarchs, religious fanatics, apolitical shunners of assembly and agora) when communicating among themselves (chap. 5).The attempt, though carried out with energy and imagination, strikes me as ultimately unsuccessful—inconclusive at best and at times dedicated to establishing theses which are refuted by the very evidence that has been assembled to support them. This is especially apparent in chapter 3, which suffers from a failure to allow for the existence of highly traditional modes of argumentation such as metaphor alongside the use of metaphorical vehicles in conjunction with highly “progressive” or revolutionary tenors. The habit of comparing perception, remembering, and forgetting to the inscribing, preservation, and erasure of texts on the wax tablets of the mind (100–5) is surely inseparable from the development both of an empiricist psychology and epistemology and of a materialistic view of the soul; and the atomist analogy between letters and the basic constituents of the cosmos (116–22) stands in equally close relationship to the concern of the scientist—be he ancient or modern—to draw distinctions between primary and secondary sensory qualities and to produce an accounting for the apparently qualitative differences between phenomena in ultimately quantitative terms.While not actually refuting the author’s theses, chapter 2 reveals the existence [End Page 145] of a fairly strong argumentum ex silentio against them. Its discussion is based almost entirely on inferences as to the attitudes whose existence might be posited to explain the frequency with which writing is used in certain contexts, and this frequency is, to my mind, more efficiently and plausibly accounted for as the result of nothing more mysterious than a general recognition of the superiority of written to verbal texts in situations where permanence, transportability, visibility, or reliability and authenticity are called for. We are still far from the skepticism, rationalism, and objectivity posited by the modern communis opinio, but much nearer to that than the obscurantism and authoritarianism of the alternative vision offered here. One would certainly not be surprised if, “as documents came to supplement and then to replace symbolic objects,” the former came to acquire some of the sacral character of the latter, and Steiner cites evidence (63 n. 8) to suggest that this actually occurred in medieval England. Parallels can also be cited from medieval Tibet, where monks sought to secure to themselves the spiritual benefits of Buddhist scriptures by wadding pages from the texts in question into small pellets and swallowing them; or even twentieth-century America, where college students seem to derive comparable reassurance from the photocopies of unread articles that line their bookshelves. But nothing in the evidence Steiner cites... (shrink)

The author builds a realistic theory of democracy to end the false idea that corruption, state crime, and public immorality are democracy's products, not the natural and inevitable fruits of oligarchic regimes. Important theories of the state and constitution exist, but none can be called a theory of democracy.

This article is devoted to the phenomenon of hybrid war. Based on the fact that the military actions can be represented as the particular process, it is proposed to analyze the phenomenon on the technological approach. In addition, the study of the phenomenon does not occur within the traditional "democratic paradigm", and based on the assertion that in modern Ukraine the model of social and political order with an oligarchs in the center was formed. All state institutions and segments of (...) civil society are in a tough financial and economic dependence from the social group of oligarchs. The goals, objectives, principles, directions, forms, methods and techniques of conducting hybrid warfare are discussed. The general and the particular to the phenomena of the conventional war and the hybrid war is determined. Focuses on the complex nature of the phenomenon, its layered structure. In this connection, emphasizes the fact that the main actors of the war at different levels perform different roles, which is fixed by experts who analyze the situation. In particular, Ukraine can be considered as the subject of a hybrid war at the regional level, but it also becomes the purpose and the object as to the subjects of higher geopolitical level. In general, the phenomenon of hybrid war characterized by a lack of principles in building of the technological process. In the specific case of Ukraine, the lack of clear principles in the organization of the process dictated by economic interests of oligarchic clans that joined the struggle for the redistribution model in securing ownership of tools and means of production. Other elements of the process of the hybrid war are serve the implementation of the corporate interests of the oligarchs. In addition, the Ukrainian oligarchic structures are the link, the conductor for the interests of oligarchic structures of higher global level. The main tool in this struggle is the information - the main resource of the era, on which the oligarchs try to win a monopoly. Thus, we can talk about the oligarchic discourse of the hybrid war in Ukraine, as invariably present oligarchic component in all its elements. (shrink)

In Democracy in Australia I argued that the Australian system is a mixture of features, some democratic and some oligarchical. In this lecture I want to outline the thinking behind this mixture. It is not an inconsistency or an accident, as if the drafters of our constitution meant to make a democracy but did not quite succeed. Rather, the Australian constitution is an intelligent and successful solution to certain problems which worried educated people in the 19th century but are now (...) largely forgotten. Perhaps their problems have turned out to be unreal; or perhaps the problems are forgotten because their solution was so successful. The drafters of the Australian Constitution set out to balance Democracy and certain other values, in a tradition of the mixed or balanced constitution coming down from Aristotle. (shrink)

Scholars have generally held that Xenophon the Athenian favoured oligarchic constitutions and was therefore opposed to the Athenian democracy. Yet Xenophon's writings often seem to display remarkable sympathy for the democracy, and the issue is complicated by the difficulty of assigning any ancient author to a definite place on the political spectrum. Using the categories that M. Walzer employs to analyse modern social critics, this study finds that although Xenophon can take an external/rejectionist approach to the criticism of the Athenian (...) democracy, he more commonly takes an internal/immanent stance. Moreover, his works sometimes seem to express a sympathy for the democracy that extends beyond a patriotic desire for the betterment of his native city regardless of constitution to a solidarity with the foundational ideology of the democratic regime. This suggests, among other things, that the ideological hegemony of the people over the traditional aristocracy in fourth-century Athens was wider than is usually thought; it is reflected not only in the speeches of the active politicians, the orators, who needed the approval of the masses to win honour in the city, but also in the writings of a politically uninvolved philosopher, who had no clear, practical motivation for supporting democratic ideology. (shrink)

En aras de restituir la experiencia histórica de un sujeto histórico anónimo por antonomasia, como es el sujeto campesino, emerge la necesidad de aproximarnos a sus comportamientos políticos; en suma, a sus respuestas individuales y colectivas ante la articulación de un sistema de poder que adquiere la forma de liberalismo oligárquico hasta la instauración del sufragio universal masculino, en 1890. Así pues, el análisis de los marcos político-electorales, en tanto que continuum de la realidad social, se presenta como eje fundamental (...) para aprehender las complejas relaciones entre campo y ciudad, al tiempo que permite proyectar una mirada «desde abajo», hacia las clases campesinas, como «desde arriba», hacia la génesis histórica de las élites. Palabras clave: campesinado, caciquismo, relaciones de poder, sufragio, Restauración.For the sake of reinstating the historic experience of a historic anonymous subject par excellence, as is the peasant subject, as is the peasant subject, the need to approach his political attitude emerges; in short, his response, both individually and collectively to the articulation of a power system which comes in the shape of oligarchic liberalism until the establishment of male universal suffrage, in 1890. So, the analysis of the political-election frames, as continuum of the social reality, shows up as the fundamental axis in order to seize the complex relationships between the countryside and the cities, at the same time enabling us to take a look, both ‘from below’, at the peasant status, and ‘from the top’ to the historical genesis of the elites. Key words: peasantry, caciquism, power relations, suffrage, Restauración. (shrink)