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Foster, Richard

University of British Columbia

Jeffrey Winter’s return to the material foundations of oligarchy has facilitated the reinvigoration of a typology typically reserved for classical political thought. Oligarchs, he suggests, are the ultra-wealthy individuals who deploy vast amounts of material wealth for the purpose of personal wealth defence and subsequent social position. This understanding, contrary to popular scholarly discourse, implies the mutual inclusivity of democracy and oligarchy. How then can one characterise the relationship between the active deployment of material wealth by oligarchs and democracies? Typically, the empirical literature suggests that the contingencies and complexities of the policy-making process (e.g. mobilised opposition, public opinion, legislator preferences) mean that the deployment of material wealth in pursuit of an individual interest is broadly impotent, and thereby political, and by extension, democratic, implications are limited. However, the oligarchic deployment of material wealth is different: its immense concentration, coordinated deployment through the Income Defence Industry, low public salience, and minimally resourced opposition ensures that typical contingencies faced by interests can be avoided. The primary implication of this is that inclusion of this interest (oligarchic wealth defence) is empowered in the democratic system on the basis of wealth - disempowering the inclusion of the less affluent and reducing the system's capacity for collective agenda-setting.

Text

2023-09-01

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/85768

Political Science

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/