Plutocrat is a back-formation to refer to the individual rich people exercising power. Plutocracy has been used in English since the middle of the 17th century to refer to the rule or power of the wealthy. But the two terms seem to show up in very different political contexts. It ought to be a useful synonym for oligarch, as the disheartening coverage from Crimea continues. Plutocrat is another Greek-derived term suggesting a combination of wealth and power. While we're visiting oligarch, we might want to drop in on a related term that lives nearby. Firtash, detained in Vienna last month at the request of the FBI, turns out to be, according to Forbes, more like a mere half-billionaire. Though widely described as a "billionaire," Mr. Indeed, Forbes, a publication that knows about such things, reported recently with some apparent astonishment on Dmitry Firtash, a Ukrainian businessman associated with Ukrainian former President Viktor Yushchenko.
#Use plutocracy in a sentence how to#
There's an implication of wealth, and in a system where great public wealth was suddenly "available" for privatization (e.g., the Soviet Union as it was dissolving), oligarchs could be counted on to figure out how to enrich themselves, and many certainly did.īut the essence of oligarchy is the fewness of those at the top, not their wealth.
The front end of the word is from oligos, meaning "few." That arch element, meaning "rule," is familiar from other words in English such as monarch or hierarchy. The "businessmen" in the inner circles of Russian President Vladimir Putin and the ousted Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovych, are referred to as "oligarchs."Īn oligarch is part of an oligarchy, a system of "government by the few." This term came into English around 1570, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary, from French, but it's rooted in Greek. "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me," we children used to sing-song on the playground.īut that hasn't stopped the news media from fixing on some set terms to describe key actors in the unfolding crisis in Ukraine and Crimea.
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