critocracy

English

Alternative forms

• kritocracy, kritarchy

Etymology

Neologism, formed from Ancient Greek κριτής (kritḗs, “judge”) + -ocracy. Alternatively, from crit[ic] + -ocracy.

Pronunciation

• Rhymes: -ɒkɹəsi

Noun

critocracy (plural critocracies)

1. A system of rule by judges.
   • 1912, Herman Isidore Stern, A Socialist Catechism, page 52:

     In the United States it may be called a Plutarchy or pure rule of money with a Critocracy or government by Judges because through the complicated machinery of checks and balances in the Constitution to prevent the people's rule ...

   • 1913, Pennsylvania. General Assembly. Senate, Journal - Part 5, page 6178:

     Ye are not come to the mount that cannot be touched and fire, and smoke and deep darkness in so much that Moses himself said I exceedingly quake and fear, but ye are come unto Mount Zion and the new covenant unto the general assembly of the critocracy or government of judges that it was popularly accepted that judges were unjust.

   • 1990, UNB Law Journal - Volumes 39-40, page 100:

     One is driven to conclude that the authority to restrain democratic power under our constitutional order is reserved to the critocracy.

   • 2005, Chronicles - Volume 29, page 18:

     How can we fail to notice that what was once a federal republic, then more or less a mass democracy, has become a critocracy, a land where judges rule?

2. A system of rule by critics.
   • 1962, Motif: A Journal of the Visual Arts, volume 9, page 1:

     Literature and the literary critocracy have an advantage over the visual arts, they can be read and enjoyed at leisure in direct and frequent contact with the author; but for paintings, sculpture and architecture we have to get up and go […]

   • 2015, Contemporary Literary Critics, →ISBN, page 190:

     The problem is that Authority is likely to be abused; and hence Enright's frequent attacks on the “critocracy,” on the fetish that has been made of Eliot's insistence on the importance of “tradition,” and on totalitarianism in general