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Aristocracy — Part I

For totalitarian, liberal, and democratic thought, ‘aristocracy’ is an almost exclusively negative concept: a synonym for arbitrary exploitation based on birthright privileges, or, for Marxists, ‘parasitic class rule’. This critique, however, deliberately distorts: it employs a straw man argument which, following the pattern of ‘every king is a tyrant’, identifies the principle itself with its historically contingent and often distorted manifestations. It is as if we were to judge the ideal of justice solely on the basis of the actions of corrupt judges. This critique is also erroneous because it refuses to acknowledge either the original philosophical meaning of aristocracy or its vital political function.

The etymology of the concept of aristocracy is clear: aristos kratia, that is, the ‘rule of the best’. The aristocrat, as an ideal, originally designates not a social caste but a qualitative and spiritual principle. The ‘best’ here does not mean the wealthiest or the most powerful, but the most excellent in terms of virtue (aretē), wisdom, courage, and sense of duty. True and legitimately understood ‘aristocratic consciousness’ is never ‘mere arrogance’—as the enemies of aristocracy claim—but precisely the opposite. Critics, from the Sophist Protagoras to the present day, insist that the aristocrat ‘did nothing’ other than being ‘born into’ the good. Yet ‘mere arrogance’ is in fact not characteristic of the born aristocrat, but of his opposite, the ‘social climber’ or the ‘nouveau riche’ who has come into the limelight in modernity.

In ancient Athens, the Sophists already claimed that aretē is not an innate ‘noble quality’ but teachable (techné). The traditional philosophy grounding aristocracy derived the social order from nature (physis), that is, from the divine order grounding it; the Sophists’ argumentation, however, held that laws and social ranks are merely ‘human agreements’, conventions (nomos). Precisely this same Sophist tradition reappears in a renewed guise at the dawn of the modern age in the theories of the social contract (Hobbes, Locke). It is no coincidence that, like the Sophists, both early modern British thinkers are adherents of an anti-metaphysical tradition (Hobbes is a materialist, Locke an empiricist), and both—although the concepts of the state they profess seem radically opposed—essentially repeat Protagoras’s famous relativist thesis: ‘Man is the measure of all things.’ This relativism denies the existence of an objective ‘Good’ known by the excellent, to which the others should align themselves. If every opinion is equivalent (liberalism), then the ‘rule of the best’, aristocracy, loses its meaning, and the mere majority decision (democracy) becomes the only justifiable political doctrine: that is, by denying the existence of the ‘better’, we arrive at egalitarianism.

‘Man is the measure of all things’

It is no coincidence that the Sophists echoed the ideology of contemporary Athenian democracy against the Platonic–Socratic ‘aristocratic reaction’. Although few written sources remain regarding the political theory of ancient democracies, Aristotle—who, like Plato, opposed radical democracy and proposed instead the polity, constitutional government limited by laws—correctly presented one of the democrats’ main arguments in the Politics: it may be that individually the members of the multitude are inferior to the excellent, but if they gather together, the wisdom of the multitude may exceed that of the few.

Aristotle seemed to see some truth in the democratic argument that the multitude could, in certain cases, make better decisions than the few excellent men:

‘For the many, who are not as individuals excellent men, nevertheless can, when they have come together, be better than the few best people, not individually but collectively, just as feasts to which many contribute are better than feasts provided at one person’s expense.’[1]

However, he immediately added that this is not true of every multitude!

‘Whether this superiority of the many to the few excellent people can exist in the case of every people and every multitude is not clear. Though presumably, by Zeus, it is clear that in some of them it cannot possibly do so, since the same argument would apply to beasts. For what difference is there, practically speaking, between some people and beasts? But nothing prevents what has been said from being true of some multitude.’[2]

That is to say, even this supposed ‘collective wisdom’, according to Aristotle, only works if the members of the people possess a certain fundamental civic virtue and moderation. In the case of a low-born, uncultivated crowd (ochlos), the multitude adds up not to wisdom, but to chaotic passions. Let us add: generalizing not only to the conditions of ancient Hellas but examining other times and places in history, we may say: a ‘cultivated multitude’ is found in the rarest of cases. That is, the basic condition for the operability of democracy, even in Aristotle’s age, referred to an optimum that must be called not impossible, but exceptional.

All this is even more true of the modern citizen exposed to the stupefying and manipulative effects of mass education and mass media—especially in mediatized societies like ours, where the roles of ‘sages’ are taken over by ‘celebrities’ and ‘influencers’. This banal approach to knowledge eventually led to what Tamás Molnár calls the ‘knowledge industry’ in his book Én, Symmachus – Lélek és gép (I, Symmachus – The Soul and the Machine) and other studies. The knowledge industry places the intellectual in the service of the pragmatic order instead of encouraging the search for truth, thereby stripping the traditional educational institution—the university—of its dignity. Even if the young student possesses a thirst for knowledge for its own sake, the knowledge industry soon replaces it with the hope of successful integration into society.

Furthermore, a new priestly caste (the successors of the enlightened-Jacobin sociétés de pensée) maintains the system. Their task is continuous ‘education’: to explain to the masses that what they see in reality (chaos, the disintegration of families, migration) is actually ‘progress’ and ‘necessity’. School, therefore, never ends: the modern citizen is the subject of re-education from the cradle to the grave, stripped of the past so that he may obediently march toward the technological utopia.[3]

In contrast, the ‘consciousness’ of the true aristocrat is an inner moral tension that separates the excellent from the mediocre: it is an inherent sense of the unity of thought and action, and of the doctrine of ‘duty’ felt toward transcendence (God, Nation, ‘Fate’), pointing beyond the individual. This is a quality that is either present in a person or it is not. Of course, this is not necessarily tied to birth, but birth—if we assume the metaphysical order of the cosmos and do not believe that human beings (self-conscious spiritual beings) are born into the world with the same ‘randomness’ as atoms and electrons connect—cannot be ‘accidental’. An aristocrat, like a king, can be unworthy, and an entire civilization with an aristocratic spirit can ‘corrupt’; this, however, does not mean that the fault or sin of those who carry the function invalidates the essential principle itself.

Among the Cynics, in the early Stoa, and even among the Chinese Taoists, the argument appeared that social rank, birth, wealth, and power are all ‘smoke and appearance’ (typhos). The only real difference is between the ‘wise man and the fool’. This apparent ‘democratism’, however, signifies a deeper and more clearly understood spiritual aristocracy: the Stoics and Taoists certainly believed in a spiritual hierarchy, but many of them completely rejected the existing political aristocracy, saying that it was based merely on luck and violence, not on true virtue.[4] This critique may be valid from an aristocratic perspective as well, but the modern (and ancient) anti-aristocratic argumentation was rarely based on such a spiritual distinction.

‘The argument appeared that social rank, birth, wealth, and power are all “smoke and appearance” (typhos). The only real difference is between the “wise man and the fool”’

An aristocrat—if he does not measure up to this high ideal—can naturally lose his rank and sink; at that point, he can no longer be called ‘one of the best’—just as one can also rise into the aristocracy.[5] Birth, however—at least in ages that turn toward the idea of order and seek to live according to laws recognized in the cosmos—is by no means a poor point of orientation. In a spiritually conceived world order, there exists a ‘prenatal will’ which—even prior to the establishment of individual birth—comprises a kind of fateful orientation, that is, it ‘sets’ the being to be born in a certain direction.[6]

If, following the dominant philosophy of history of the ancients, we start from the premise that humanity ‘ages’ and that the spiritual momentum evident at the creation and in the expansive periods of cultures gradually dies away, then it is also obvious that old elites require fresh blood; indeed, new elites can and must be put in the place of the former if an anciently founded state or an old, prestigious civilization shows signs of exhaustion.

The democratic-liberal revolutions of modernity, however, did not challenge a fallen or pseudo-aristocracy to replace it with a new one, or—like Plato and Aristotle—to call its attention to the fact that it no longer ‘fulfils its task’, but attempted to portray the aristocratic principle itself as irrational and ridiculous. They made no attempt to ‘open’ a narrowed aristocracy or a worn-out elite to new excellences, but offered a remarkably flat ‘diagnosis’: only the ‘wisdom’ of the mass counts, and ‘excellence’ does not exist.

A ‘creative minority’—as Toynbee’s famous ‘challenge and response’ theory formulated it—is the source of all higher culture and great deeds.[7] Alongside Toynbee and other important names, Leo Strauss was one of the 20th-century thinkers who pointed out with the greatest force that classical political philosophy (from Plato to Aristotle) was aristocratic by nature, because it was guided by the search for the ‘best regime’ (politeia), in which the wise rule. Modernity, according to Strauss, consists precisely in the fact that man, at a certain point in history, simply renounced this higher goal: the goal of politics is no longer the cultivation of human excellence, but mere survival and, above all, the assurance of a comfortable life.

The replacement of the classical aristocratic goal, striving for ‘human excellence’ (virtue), with the modern goal, focusing on ‘comfortable self-preservation’, is one of the most painful and—from the perspective of the world order emerging after the anti-aristocratic modern revolutions—one of the most catastrophic factors. Strauss writes most clearly about the ‘lowering of the horizon’ in his work Natural Right and History, particularly in the chapters on Hobbes and Locke. While according to Strauss, Hobbes reduced the fundamental goal to mere self-preservation (based on the fear of death), it was Locke who expanded this goal into ‘comfortable’ self-preservation.[8]

Beyond this philosophical ideal, aristocracy also had a crucial practical-political function. This function was recognized most sharply by Alexis de Tocqueville, perhaps the deepest analyst of democracy. Tocqueville, examining the aristocracy of the French Ancien Régime, pointed out that the nobility, for all its faults, functioned as an indispensable ‘intermediary body’ (corps intermédiaires) between the royal power and the people. It prevented the total centralization of power and maintained the ‘aristocratic spirit’ of freedom, honour, and—genuine—self-governance within the monarchy.

With the inevitable rise of democracy—Tocqueville predicted—these intermediary bodies disappear. Society becomes an atomized mass of equal but isolated individuals who stand defenceless before an omnipotent, centralized, and tutelary state power. This is the danger of the ‘tyranny of the majority’ and of ‘soft despotism’: a condition where people surrender their freedom in exchange for comfort and security.

The totalitarian and liberal-democratic critique of aristocracy simply ignores this double reality. It forgets the philosophical ideal of the ‘rule of the best’ (Plato, Strauss), and it ignores the freedom-protecting, power-sharing political role of the aristocracy (Tocqueville). Thus it happened that, in the subsequent stages of modernity, the liquidation of the historical aristocracy led, ultimately, not to the desired elevation of the ‘people’, conceived as an aggregate of abstract individuals, but to the rule of a new, faceless oligarchy based on wealth, and to the increase of the social vulnerability of ‘the people’: we have seen, and see, this in systems called ‘socialist’ just as in ‘capitalist’ ones. The modern oligarchy, however—unlike traditional oligarchies—is faceless.

‘Modernity, according to Strauss, consists precisely in the fact that man, at a certain point in history, simply renounced this higher goal’

Aristotle also analyses oligarchy in detail in the Politics as the deviant version of aristocracy. Oligarchy exists when the rich—who are generally few—rule following their own private interest, and not the common good. While the basis of aristocracy is virtue (aretē), that of oligarchy is wealth (ploutos).[9] According to Aristotle, oligarchs believe that justice lies in inequality, and since they are unequal in wealth (that is, wealthier), they therefore need not be equal in rights and political power either, but deserve more. Aristotle considers this erroneous because it makes the difference in wealth the sole measure of rule.[10] Following Plato, we can see that in such a system the political community effectively ceases to be unified; instead, ‘two cities’ come into being—that of the rich and that of the poor—which, as Aristotle recalls in his critique of Plato, stand in perpetual war with one another.[11]

The reader may perceive a paradox here, and not without cause: while the atheist, anti-metaphysical political theory of modernity destroyed traditional hierarchies in the name of ‘equality’, the form of government based on total equality and on the ‘equal’ information and ‘accumulated’ wisdom of virtuous citizens proved to be a mere utopia at the very moment of its birth. As a result, the system immediately required a new ‘elite’ to step into the place of the old aristocratic elites.

Here, however, it was not that a ‘worn-out’ knightly caste was replaced by a new one, but—in accordance with the expansion of industrialization and capitalism (later socialism)—the wealthiest, who acquired enormous fortunes in this process, seized the institutions of the state. Meanwhile, with their specific (liberal, democratic, ‘right’ or left-wing totalitarian) ideologies, they did not resort to the open ideology of the classical Aristotelian oligarchy, but maintained the appearance of egalitarianism. This summoned the socialist-communist response on the one hand, and the National Socialist and Fascist-type anti-capitalisms on the other; however, the totalitarian ‘cure’ they offered was, according to all relevant historical experience, far worse than the disease itself.

Undoubtedly, in the past, before democracy was identified with concepts such as ‘advanced society’ and ‘freedom’, it was mainly those progressive radicals who believed in inevitable historical development and the possibility of some kind of ideal equality, who were enthusiastic about democracy. This ‘ideal equality’, however, never occurred in practice. One of the most important premises of the radical-democratic progressivist idea, however, appeared already in early Anglo-Saxon liberalism: any external restriction that does not favour the purely economic principle is something inherently harmful. The future, however, undoubtedly signifies happier prospects than the past; society develops ‘automatically’ (if allowed to), and the prospects realized in the happy future will bring about the minimization, and, if possible, the elimination, of power. The ideology of ‘liberty and equality’ therefore applied primarily to those inclined to give up traditional life forms—the ‘warrior-knightly’ (nobility), priestly, or peasant—and, turning their backs on the past, to become the ‘knights’, ‘priests’, or ‘peasants’ (workers) of the ‘industrial society’.[12]

One of the basic dogmas of modern political science, determined by liberalism or socialism, is the unconditional affirmation of ‘civil society’ (which is the breeding ground of the modern capitalist oligarchy or ‘plutocracy’) against the ‘oppressive’ state. One of the most insightful critics of modernity, Tamás Molnár, in his book The Liberal Hegemony and other works (The Counter-Revolution, The Two Faces of Power: Politics and Sanctity), not only radically opposes this consensus but claims outright that civil society is not the ‘innocent’ terrain of freedom, but a historical force rapaciously hungry for power by nature, which—if released from constraints—strives to devour order.

With a brilliant turn, he re-evaluated the ‘trinity’ of modernist dogmatics. According to Molnár, it is in fact civil society that stands under the rule of the limitless, self-destructive desires of imperfect man with a fallen nature. While the state and the church—although composed of humans too—are always limited by aristocratic consciousness, the ‘wisdom of ancestors’, or, in the case of the church, the legitimacy of the dogma of divine sovereignty, civil society is completely exposed to economic ‘rationality’, that is, the limitless greed of human desires.

This civil society, unsanctified by nature and obeying the gravitation of mere material interest, is the true oppressor in the absence of church and state, which the other two powers should precisely keep in check: primarily with the aim of ‘saving from himself’ the man who might otherwise be lost in mere worldly desires and material hedonism. As Molnár writes in his essay Civil Society: in Western history, civil society is the principle of ‘restlessness’ versus the static State and the eternal Church, which ‘…constantly initiates, organizes, redraws structures, and tries to break out of existing frameworks.’[13]

‘Since history has proven multiple times that social and political democracy is utopian in nature, elite formation appears in many new forms’

It is not that modernity is less ‘elitist’ than previous eras. As Tamás Molnár also refers to the ‘masked wearing of the elite’,[14] he implies that democratic systems, which are nominally anti-elitist, cannot in reality exist without some kind of elite: for the ‘people’ are incapable of governing themselves. Since history has proven multiple times that social and political democracy is utopian in nature, elite formation appears in many new forms; modernity, however, is hypocritical, because instead of a cultural, spiritual-intellectual, or military elite, it has increasingly interpreted elites—in direct proportion to the unfolding of capitalist money management, mass industrialization, and technical world civilization—as financial and economic ‘elites’.

This is not, however, a matter of ‘conspiracy theory’.[15] It is undoubted, of course, that it was an ideological minority that successfully persuaded a significant part of the upper classes of society that the system must be transformed; yet what is extraordinary in this process is precisely that this persuasion succeeded. The essence here is not ‘secrecy’, but that the former social elites (in large part) themselves became proponents of the revolution—only in this way, and for this reason, did the revolution finally win, for the nobility for the most part did not itself wish to maintain the previous system, and in many cases, aristocrats stood at the forefront of revolutionary processes.

The new elite later hypocritically claims to be not closed, but open—as if François Guizot’s famous saying (‘Get rich by work and thrift, and you will become electors!’) could still be true. But while Guizot’s sentence in its original context still contained a kind of moral requirement (work and thrift), the modern speculative oligarchy has abandoned this.

In reality, the situation looks completely different: the modern oligarchy is just as little open as the aristocracy of feudalism was; only the locks are elsewhere, and the doors open differently. One could enter the feudal elite—provided feudalism had not yet become a ‘caste system’—much more through the practice of traditional virtues: military service for the kingdom, or through the priestly order, theoretically open to everyone, even if the chance of this was not too high. The modern oligarchy, however, manipulates power through completely different networks; economic ‘success’ and the largest trusts and technocratic lobbies are not open to ‘everyone’ at all.

This modern oligarchy—unlike the traditional aristocracy, which possessed a distinct, sharp contour and a visible status fixed by law and custom—is diffuse in nature. It has no definite outlines; its boundaries are blurred in the fog of economic, media, and political networks, making its identification and resistance to it much more difficult. The traditional hierarchy was ‘visible’, thus responsibility could be concretized; the modern hierarchy is ‘invisible’, thus responsibility evaporates.

This mechanism is described with precision by Hans-Hermann Hoppe, pointing out one of the most shocking consequences of modernity: the democratic transformation ultimately did not reduce, but actually increased the power of the state and the degree of possible concentration of power. The principle of equality blurs the dividing line—clearly distinguished in other systems—between the governors and the governed. Since the democratic illusion leads us to believe that ‘anyone can be included’ among the governors, and that ultimately ‘we govern ourselves’, social resistance to arbitrariness decreases drastically, and the barriers to the exercise of power collapse.[16]

The modern oligarchic ‘elite’ calling itself democratic is therefore in practice nothing other than this oligarchy in the classical sense, from which, however, the legitimizing force of aristocracy (aretē) is missing. At the same time, by referring to democracy and exploiting the myth of egalitarianism, it makes legitimate critique directed against it virtually impossible. The outcome was described most accurately by Hilaire Belloc in his work The Servile State: ‘If slavery were restored in England, then, that a particular man should be not the slave of Capitalism in general, but, say, of the Shell Oil Trust, is a very probable development.’[17]

[1] Aristotle, Politics, Book III, Chapter 11, Trans CDC Reeve, Indianapolis/Cambridge, Hackett Publishing Company, 1998, p. 83.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Tamás Molnár, ‘A gondolkodók egyesülete’ [‘The Association of Thinkers’], Havi Magyar Fórum, August 2003, pp. 30–31.

[4] A similar system of argumentation appears in the case of the ‘Populares’ and the historians (eg, Sallust). In Rome, the Gracchus brothers or later Julius Caesar (the populares party), did not attack the principle of aristocracy (since they themselves were patricians), but its corruption. According to this, nobilitas (nobility) had become a closed caste that served its own enrichment rather than the public good (res publica). The historian Sallust (who stood with Caesar’s party) paints a dark picture of the Roman aristocracy: according to him, ‘virtue’ had departed from them, and its place was taken by ‘ambition’ and ‘greed’.

[5] This was one of the basic ideas of ennoblement and knighthood in feudal times, but even earlier, in connection with services rendered to the king possessing sacred legitimacy.

[6] In Far Eastern (Hindu and Buddhist) societies, this was explained by the doctrine of karma or reincarnation (which is by no means identical to the popularly understood ‘transmigration of souls’), while in Christian and Muslim civilizations it was attributed to the ‘will of God’. Whatever the explanation, every non-materialist (liberal) civilization accepted that birth is not simply ‘accidental’.

[7] Arnold J Toynbee (1889–1975), the British historian, in his 12-volume magnum opus, A Study of History. Toynbee’s model is not democratic; the engine of historical action, according to him, is not the mass, but a narrow elite, the ‘creative minority’. These are the visionaries, politicians, artists, and religious leaders who recognize the nature of the challenge and are capable of working out an innovative response that propels society as a whole forward.

[8] ‘…It required, above all, that the function of civil society be radically redefined: “the good life, for the sake of which men enter civil society, is no longer the life of human excellence but ‘commodious living’ as the reward of hard work. And the sacred duty of the rulers is no longer “to make the citizens good and doers of noble things” but to “study, as much as by laws can be effected, to furnish the citizens abundantly with all good things…which are conducive to delectation.”’ Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1965, p. 189.

[9] Hence the term ‘plutocracy’, which Xenophon was the first to write down—using it in a sense almost identical to the Aristotelian oligarchy—but the expression only became generally widespread later, from the mid-1600s.

[10] Aristotle, Politics, Book III, Chapter 11, p. 83.

[11] ‘It is also absurd to claim that an oligarchic city-state is really two city-states, one of the rich and one of the poor. For why is this any more true of it than of the Spartan constitution, or any other constitution where the citizens do not all own an equal amount of property or are not all similarly good men?’ Ibid, p. 174.

[12] László Ottlik also interprets ‘absolute liberalism: the reduction of politics to the minimum that protects the free activity and safety of homo oeconomicus’—while in reality, according to him, the unlimited free competition appearing in the wake of liberalism’s expansion ‘ruthlessly tramples the one who was not born to earn his bread in business life and does not devote himself to his vocation with heart and soul.’ (László Ottlik, ‘A politikai rendszerek’ [Political Systems], In: Gyula Kornis et al (eds), A mai világ képe, II köt, A politikai élet [The Picture of Today’s World, Vol, II, Political Life], Budapest, Királyi Magyar Egyetemi Nyomda, 1939, pp. 361–530, 382.)

[13] Tamás Molnár, ‘Civil társadalom’ [‘Civil Society’], Havi Magyar Fórum, July 2002, 49–51, 49.

[14] Tamás Molnár, A liberális hegemónia [The Liberal Hegemony], Budapest, Gondolat, p. 102.

[15] In his work The Counter-Revolution, Molnár writes several times that the revolution can be explained solely by the ‘conspiratorial’ activity of organizations similar to Freemasonry.

[16] Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Democracy: The God That Failed: The Economics and Politics of Monarchy, Democracy, and Natural Order, New Brunswick/New Jersey, Transaction Publishers, 2001, p. 24.

[17] Hilaire Belloc, The Servile State, London and Edinburgh, T N Foulis, 1912, p. 22.

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