kret-es-
“power, ruling force”democracy, aristocracy, bureaucracy
Abstract giving Greek kratos, English democracy, aristocracy, bureaucracy, autocracy.
Discussion
The PIE root *kret-es- (power, ruling force) is a nominal derivative of the verbal root *kret- (strength, force), which gave Greek krátos (κράτος, power, strength, authority) and its vast progeny of political and philosophical vocabulary. The suffix *-es- forms an abstract noun of quality — *kret-es- is literally "the state or essence of power."
Greek krátos is the single most productive political morpheme in the Western vocabulary. The compound dēmokratía (δημοκρατία, democracy, literally people-power) was coined in Athens in the 5th century BCE and remains the world's dominant political term. Aristokratía (rule of the best), autokratía (self-rule), and theokratía (god-rule) follow the same pattern. Ploutokratía (rule by the wealthy), bürokratía (rule by the desk, coined in 18th-century French from bureau + Greek -kratía), and technokratía (rule by technical experts) are modern extensions. In every case, the second element -krat- continues the PIE root with its original meaning intact: power, dominion, control.
The zero-grade *kr̥t- appears in forms where the root bears no accent: Greek karteros (strong, mighty), from an earlier *kr̥t-eros, shows the expected vowel treatment. The personal name Polykrates (Πολυκράτης, "much-power") and Socrates (Σωκράτης, perhaps "whole-power" or "safe-power") embed the root in anthroponyms that have survived for two and a half millennia.
Outside Greek, the root is less transparently preserved but its reflexes are significant. The Celtic branch shows Old Irish cruth ("form, shape, appearance"), where the semantic development from "power" to "form" may reflect the conceptual link between strength and shape that appears in other IE branches. Welsh pryd ("form, time") is sometimes connected to the same root, though the phonological details are debated.
The Vedic Sanskrit derivative śrátus ("obedience") and the verbal form śrád-dhā- ("to place faith in") have been connected to this root by Benveniste (1969) and others, though the precise phonological development requires the satem treatment of the initial palatal: PIE *ḱ > Sanskrit ś. If this connection holds, the semantic field of the root extends from raw physical power in Greek to trust and obedience in Sanskrit — a development that parallels the Latin distinction between potentia (physical power) and auctoritas (social authority).
The root's confinement to primarily Greek and possibly Celtic and Indo-Iranian — with no clear Germanic or Italic reflexes — has been noted by scholars as an example of differential root survival. The concept of "power" was expressed in Latin by different roots: potentia from *poti- (master, able), vis from *weyH- (force), and imperium from *per- (to prepare/order). The absence of *kret- reflexes in Latin is not evidence against the PIE status of the root — it merely reflects the lexical replacement that occurs independently in every branch as languages develop their own preferred vocabulary for core concepts.