Aristotle defined aristocracy, one of his three types of good government (see also monarchy and democracy), as the rule of the best in the public interest, and opposed it to oligarchy, the rule of a few in their own interest. In reality aristocracy has always been the rule of the rich, though often justified by ideologies which argued for the moral and intellectual superiority of the rulers, and which purported to show that the rule of a small hereditary élite was in the public interest. The origins of aristocracies have varied, but two elements are usually present. Firstly, aristocracies usually derive from war leaders who, in return for allegiance and material support from a population, undertake to protect them from violence by other groups. Secondly, aristocracies usually involve a connection to land, so that the descendants of the war-lords continue to hold the estates and the allegiance of the lower orders living on them.
The surviving European aristocracy derives from feudalism, in which a monarch granted lands to a nobleman in return for his military support and general obedience.
In turn a great noble might grant subordinate lords smaller estates from his own holdings in return for an equivalent allegiance. As the Middle Ages gave way to modernity the nature of aristocracies changed considerably, with the noble titles of earl, count and others being granted for a wide range of support to European monarchs who were actively centralizing their nations and ruling in a much more direct and organized way. Many hereditary peerages in Britain date only from the 17th or 18th centuries, or even later, and were more likely to have been given, in reward for a variety of services, to men already rich and landed. The continued, if minor, constitutional role of the House of Lords means that a hereditary aristocracy, rather than just a rich élite, has retained some political power, although legislation passed in 1999 removing the right to a seat in the Lords of all but 92 hereditary peers, pending a definitive reform, eroded this further. In France two orders of nobility evolved, known as the ‘sword’, the traditional military aristocracy, and the ‘robe’, granted, for example, to leading civil servants and lawyers. Aristocracies everywhere have diminished in power either through actual revolutions, as in France and Russia, or through the impact of the Industrial Revolution, as in Britain and Germany, where the rising capitalist bourgeoisie and the relative decline of agriculture as a source of wealth have made them largely irrelevant to a modern state. Nevertheless, there remains a self-conscious élite of hereditary aristocrats, often enormously wealthy, throughout Europe, even in countries like France and Italy where the state pays no formal recognition to aristocratic titles at all.
This is the complete article, containing 455 words
(approx. 2 pages at 300 words per page).
