Plutocracy and Pluto-democracy: The Pervasive Power of Wealth in Modern Society as Polemics and Social Science

In the late 19th century the word ‘plutodemocracy’ was minted in several European languages as a polemical term with strong negative connotations. Its use did not remain confined to journalistic invective: it found its way into the terminology of social and political theorists such as Vilfredo Pareto, Gustave Le Bon, and Georges Sorel. Etymologically related to the more established, classically derived ‘plutocracy’, which itself experienced a revival, in its double meaning as a system of rule and a ruling group, plutodemocracy was intended to describe a specifically modern phenomenon. The state of affairs it stigmatized was the outcome of the age’s experiment with participatory politics in mass society, coupled with the extreme wealth inequalities wrought by the second industrial revolution, with its giant trusts and circumscribed state intervention. The failure of the ideals of popular sovereignty inherited from 1848 to produce radical change for the working class was matched by a more general reappraisal of the watchdog role of public opinion in upholding the general interest. The critique of ‘sham democracy’ that emerged from this encounter mixed the old republican mistrust of wealth with the aristocratic lament over the disappearance of quality and honest confrontation in public life. However, in many national contexts the age experienced precisely a cooptation of the new economic elites into the old status-based ruling class. The paper retraces the theoretical and political contexts associated with the notion of plutodemocracy and plutocracy among representative social critics of the turn of the century, with a view to reconstructing the potentially unorthodox alliances afforded by such a conceptualization of the social space, in its ambiguity, as well as the decisive inflection in usage occasioned by its adoption in wartime propaganda, which internationalized (and ethnicized) the term in ways subsequently appropriated by fascism in the interwar years.