Politics & SocietyGreek → English
Ochlocracy
/ɒˈklɒkrəsi/noun
Government by the mass of the people acting as a crowd rather than through law.
The Greek roots
ὄχλος
óchlos
crowd, mob
κράτος
krátos
power, rule
Literally: “mob rule”
The story of the word
Polybius coined ὀχλοκρατία in the second century BC as the degenerate end-stage of democracy, the point at which a constitution collapses into whatever the crowd shouts for. His cycle ran monarchy to tyranny, aristocracy to oligarchy, democracy to ochlocracy. Roman and later republican theorists took the scheme wholesale, which is why the founders of the United States were so nervous about the word democracy itself.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
- First recorded
- 16th century
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
democracyaristocracybureaucracy
In a sentence
He warned that stripping out the courts would leave nothing between the republic and ochlocracy.