Yeah. Though, I would suggest that governments (in conjunction with or as tools of unelected aristocrats, feudal overlords, warlords, strongmen, etc.) have always ruled, and it's only in the past 200-300 years that the people have started to take the power unto themselves.

Democracy's a very new and quite brilliant invention, really, when you look at it in the perspective of tens of thousands of years of human social and political development.