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The term plutocracy is generally used as a pejorative to describe or warn against an undesirable condition. [3] [4] Throughout history, political thinkers and philosophers have condemned plutocrats for ignoring their social responsibilities, using their power to serve their own purposes and thereby increasing poverty and nurturing class conflict and corrupting societies with greed and hedonism.
Meritocracy (merit, from Latin mereō, and -cracy, from Ancient Greek κράτος kratos 'strength, power') is the notion of a political system in which economic goods or political power are vested in individual people based on ability and talent, rather than wealth or social class. [1]
Term Description Examples Autocracy: Autocracy is a system of government in which supreme power (social and political) is concentrated in the hands of one person or polity, whose decisions are subject to neither external legal restraints nor regularized mechanisms of popular control (except perhaps for the implicit threat of a coup d'état or mass insurrection).
Elitists tend to favor social systems such as technocracy, combined with meritocracy and/or plutocracy, as opposed to political egalitarianism and populism. Elitists believe only a few "movers and shakers" truly change society, rather than the majority of people who only vote and elect the elites into power. [4]
[4] In order to reduce the danger of misuse of political power, Calvin suggested setting up several political institutions that should complement and control each other in a system of checks and balances. [5] In this way, Calvin and his followers resisted political absolutism and furthered the growth of democracy. Calvin aimed to protect the ...
According to Weber, the ability to possess power derives from the individual's ability to control various "social resources". "The mode of distribution gives to the propertied a monopoly on the possibility of transferring property from the sphere of use as 'wealth' to the sphere of 'capital,' that is, it gives them the entrepreneurial function and all chances to share directly or indirectly in ...
In philosophy, political science and sociology, elite theory is a theory of the state that seeks to describe and explain power relations in society.In its contemporary form in the 21st century, elite theory posits that (1) power in larger societies, especially nation-states, is concentrated at the top in relatively small elites; (2) power "flows predominantly in a top-down direction from ...
It is a form of consensual domination made possible by the structural domination of the global capital, which allows concentration of political power. [8] Robert A. Dahl and Charles E. Lindblom noted that political bargaining is an essential feature of polyarchy, particularly in the US.