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TWO MODELS OF GOVERNMENT
Dr Michael Arnheim
Barrister at Law
Sometime Fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge
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This book offers a fresh and original analysis of the power structure of a number of societies, past and present.
- There are and ever have been only two essential models of government: minority rule of all types (labelled “Oligocracy”) and regimes in which power is concentrated in the hands of a single individual (labelled “Monocracy”).
- Vaunted democracies are in reality either Oligocracies or Monocracies.
- The present-day “democracies” of Britain and the United States are in reality composite Oligocracies made up of several disparate elements.
- Oligocracies are by definition regimes with a high degree of inequality, but with variable levels of liberty.
- Oligocracy and inequality are the “default” features of human society.
- Equality is unattainable except by a radical Monocracy like Fidel Castro’s Cuba, and then only with difficulty and at the expense of liberty and probably of lives as well.
- Equality of opportunity must not be equated with equality. Equality of opportunity means an equal opportunity to become unequal.
- Paradoxically, however, for genuine equality of opportunity to exist there has to be equality – which is practically unattainable.
- For genuine freedom of expression to exist there also needs to be equality, because the little man standing on his soap-box and shouting his lungs out at Speaker’s Corner in London’s Hyde Park cannot compete with the media moguls – which is why genuine freedom of expression is rare.
- Once these truths are recognised, it becomes clear that for one state to attempt regime change in a foreign country is likely to be futile.