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Aristocracy — Part II

The foundation of the traditional order was provided by a worldview that conceived the political sphere as part of a higher, transcendent order; thus, both the sacred institution of kingship and the virtue-based ideal of aristocracy reflected this hierarchical, qualitative perspective. It may be that power—like any institutional system operated and represented by humans—was full of flaws, hiatuses, and abuses in the premodern world as well. However, in this framework pointing beyond earthly goals, the idea of power was not self-serving rule, but was coupled with responsibility and duty toward God and the common good. The anti-aristocratic fury of modern, egalitarian revolutions did not, of course, spring from nothing, for the criticism they formulated possessed partial truth—but only when the historical aristocracy had forgotten its original vocation and degenerated from the ‘rule of the best’ into a self-serving reality based on hereditary privileges; and in extreme cases, into decadence.

Revolutionary fervour was often fuelled by justifiable outrage against the abuse of rights. In some cases, this may have taken the form of certain peasant revolts (by no means all), or at times the Hungarian nobility’s ‘constitutional struggle’. It is a mistake, however, to lump all such movements together and ‘justify’ them, as if history were merely a struggle between ‘oppression and freedom’. This is a one-sided, almost naïve narrative that describes the complex dynamics of authority, rule, and power in history with precious little realism.

The ‘Golden Bull movement’ in Hungary may have been legitimate from the nobility’s perspective, but indirectly it laid the groundwork for the later rule of ‘oligarchs’ (petty kings), which nearly led to the country’s fragmentation and internal collapse in a subsequent era. The peasant uprisings of Dózsa or Antal Budai Nagy may have contained legitimate elements hic et nunc, yet the latent ideology they raised—which for some culminated in a naïve, utopian anarchism—harboured far more destructive possibilities than the revolutionary fervour dictated by ‘peasant’ (or rather, lesser noble) outrage against the specific injustices of the nobility ‘there and then’.¹

As in the case of the French Revolution, numerous shocking cruelties were committed during medieval peasant revolts against the life and property of ‘lords’ and ‘nobles’, which can never be morally justified as ‘righteous vengeance’. The cruelty of the French revolutionaries in the Vendée, for instance, so outraged the peasantry that they fought a ‘crusade’ alongside the ‘lords’ — much like the peasant masses who fought alongside the Whites in Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution. The error of revolutionary ideologies generally lay not in the diagnosis but in the proposed therapy, which sought to excise the entire hierarchical principle along with the diseased organ.

‘The error of revolutionary ideologies generally lay not in the diagnosis but in the proposed therapy’

At the turn of modernity, there emerged an attempt to find a third way between Europe’s ‘corrupted’ ancien régime and the egalitarian fury of revolutionary democracy: this was the American Revolution and the founding of the Republic. The American Founding Fathers, particularly Thomas Jefferson, sharply distinguished between artificial and natural aristocracy. In Jefferson’s words to John Adams:

‘I agree with you that there is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents…There is also an artificial aristocracy, founded on wealth and birth, without either virtue or talents…’²

Jefferson and several of his fellow Founders (though with varying degrees of optimism—John Adams, for instance, was far more sceptical) believed that the purpose of a well-constructed republic was precisely to create a system—through widespread education and the representative principle—that would allow the ‘natural aristocracy’ to rise to the surface and be chosen by the people as leaders, regardless of their lineage. The American experiment, therefore, was originally aimed not at modern mass democracy, but at the creation of a kind of aristocratic republic in which the best govern.

However, this original ideal did not prove durable in America either. In the first half of the 19th century, during the so-called Jacksonian turn, populist, egalitarian forces gained the upper hand, treating every kind of elite—whether natural or artificial—with suspicion. The ideal was no longer the election of the ‘best’, but the empowerment of the ‘common man’. Alexis de Tocqueville observed the consequences of this turn with a keen eye: the decline in the quality of political discourse, the rule of mediocrity, and the tyranny of the majority.

The American Republic in the first half of the 19th century gradually drifted away from the Founders’ original vision and embarked on the path of modern mass democracy. The final result of this, paradoxically, became exactly what the Founders had feared: after the rejection of the ideal of natural aristocracy, power was taken over by a new ‘artificial aristocracy’, now based purely on wealth—that is, a plutocracy—one far less responsible than its predecessor. The Jacksonian rejection of the principle of hierarchy led not to the fulfilment of freedom, but to the rise of a new, faceless form of tyranny.

This historical trajectory validates the realism of Gaetano Mosca, who shattered the illusion of ‘majority rule’. In his analysis, the distinction is not merely between different forms of government, but lies in a fundamental social law. As he famously posited, in all societies—from the most primitive to the most advanced—‘two classes of people appear: a class that rules and a class that is ruled.’³ The victory of the former is guaranteed not necessarily by superior virtue, but by the mechanics of organization which the masses lack.

Mosca asserts that the democratic ideal collapses before this reality, for ‘the dominion of an organized minority, obeying a single impulse, over the unorganized majority is inevitable. The power of any minority is irresistible as against each single individual in the majority, who stands alone before the totality of the organized minority.’⁴ Thus, the rejection of a visible, responsible aristocracy does not lead to freedom, but to the rule of a clique that is harder to identify—and therefore harder to hold accountable—than the open hierarchies of the past.

‘The rejection of a visible, responsible aristocracy does not lead to freedom, but to the rule of a clique that is harder to identify’

This rejection of hierarchy ignores the central tenet of classical natural right, which posits that the difference in human quality is the decisive political fact. As Leo Strauss argues with clarity: ‘The best regime is that in which the best men habitually rule, or aristocracy. Goodness is, if not identical with wisdom, at any rate dependent on wisdom: the best regime would seem to be the rule of the wise. In fact, wisdom appeared to the classics as that title to rule which is highest according to nature.’⁵

He further states that since the classics viewed moral and political matters in the light of man’s perfection, they were not egalitarians: ‘Not all men are equally equipped by nature for progress toward perfection, or not all “natures” are “good natures.”…Hence equal rights for all appeared to the classics as most unjust. They contended that some men are by nature superior to others and therefore, according to natural right, the rulers of others.’⁶

Are we justified in seeking the origin of all evil in power, and can we rightly expect that power might be eliminated in some possible future? If we disagree with the sentences cited above, this question naturally arises. If the application of the so-called ‘Acton formula’ without qualifications encounters difficulties, and we do not accept Lord Acton’s assertion that ‘Great men are almost always bad men,’⁷ it is worth reflecting further on the issue. Regarding the first half of the question—that ‘power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely’—another liberal and Catholic thinker, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, offered an interesting response: if this were necessarily so, then all the kings, popes, and emperors of history with ‘absolute’ power would have to be villains and tyrants, or at least men of somehow corrupted spirit.

Undoubtedly, the exercise of power presents a vast opportunity for corruption, but only with some cynicism could one claim that this corruption always occurs. Marcus Aurelius, or Emperor Ashoka in India, who converted to Buddhism, are not merely rare examples in history of great—even ‘saintly’—rulers. If, for instance, we examine the line of kings of the Árpád dynasty in historical Hungary, we find relatively few corrupt ‘politicians’ or bloodthirsty tyrants among them; on the contrary, this dynasty earned the reputation of being ‘holy kings’—and not merely because they spread Christianity.

‘Power does not necessarily corrupt; rather, it is the loss of transcendent constraints that opens the door to true tyranny’

Furthermore, the ‘absolute’ power of the past was never truly absolute in the modern sense; it was constrained by Divine Law, tradition, and custom. Paradoxically, it is modern democracy, claiming to represent the ‘will of the people’, that exercises far more absolute authority, for the ‘people’s will’ acknowledges no transcendent limit and can rewrite any law at a whim (legal positivism). Thus, power does not necessarily corrupt; rather, it is the loss of transcendent constraints that opens the door to true tyranny.

Regarding the inherently corrupting nature of power, the experience drawn from 20th-century totalitarianisms is far from definitive, for throughout modern history atrocities have been committed by democracies and republics (where power is nominally ‘limited’) just as they have by so-called dictatorships. Without claiming exhaustiveness, it suffices to consider the massacres committed by republicans during the French Revolution of 1789, the Paris Commune, or the Spanish Civil War—but one could just as well mention the bombing of Dresden during the Second World War or the atomic bombs dropped on Japan.⁸

Considering all this, it seems a valid option to examine how the origin and function of power were viewed in the period preceding modernity, when the state was not expected to ‘cease to exist’. The truth is that, unlike the moderns, the most significant political authors of antiquity and the Middle Ages, when reflecting on power, recognized it—not as a negative to be necessarily eliminated—but as a principle capable of contributing to man’s ‘earthly and heavenly happiness’. Dante, in De Monarchia, mentions the universal empire as the realization of the ideal state:

‘Therefore it is better for the human race to be ruled by one than by many, and so the Monarch, the unique Prince; and if it is better, it is more acceptable to God, since God always wills what is better…Consequently, the human race is in its best state when it is ruled by one. Thus Monarchy is necessary for the well-being of the world.’

Or elsewhere:

‘The human race is son to the heaven, which is most perfect in all its works; therefore, it is man’s best state to follow the track of heaven, as far as his nature permits. And as the whole heaven is regulated with one motion, to wit, that of the primum mobile, and by one mover, who is God, in all its parts, movements, and movers (and this human reason readily seizes through philosophy); so, if our reasoning has been sound, the human race is at its best when all its movements and movers are regulated by a single Prince as by a single mover, and by one Law as by one motion.’⁹

All this is not overly surprising, since for the classical authors of the Middle Ages the most characteristic and self-evident form of state was monarchy. Their thinking was shaped by the symbol of the Roman Empire, for the ‘universal monarchy’ embodied in history by Rome represented an archetype to which they all sought to return. For Dante, however, the power embodied in the emperor and the freedom of the subjects do not necessarily stand in opposition to one another.

What appears to contradict freedom in power is, for moderns, primarily the element of coercion. But who could claim that rule can never be based on actual wisdom and genuine pre-eminence? Plato’s ‘Statesman’ is clearly a king, not an oligarchic, aristocratic, or indeed democratic politician. The philosopher also states that the so-called ‘royal art’ (technē basilikē) is fundamentally nothing other than a kind of ‘commanding science’—a science that cannot be possessed by many at once. A multitude of people can never attain this knowledge, for the art of ruling is not something that anyone can easily acquire (countering here the democratic arguments of Protagoras and Pericles).

Plato seeks the answer to the question of what constitutes that ‘political art’ (technē politikē) which the ‘philosopher-king’ can oppose to the demagogic rhetoric of the democratic politician. The acquisition of the ‘art of ruling’ demands sense, time, teaching, and education; it is ‘practically the most difficult and at the same time the most important thing that can be acquired.’¹⁰

The transition from the monarchic to the democratic age is customarily regarded as the path from servitude to the age of freedom—as if the doctrine of popular sovereignty were inherently linked to a (desired) ‘autonomous man’, one who freely shapes his own destiny and is not subject to any other sovereignty, whether Divine or royal. The autonomous man is conceived as someone who carries his centre within himself, while the modern state becomes merely the emanation of this subjective centre, its realisation in objectivity.

‘The transition from the monarchic to the democratic age is customarily regarded as the path from servitude to the age of freedom’

Putting aside cynicism, let us allow ourselves the assumption that the goal of modern political egalitarianism was not necessarily, from the outset, solely to drag down what was already high. Perhaps it could also have been—to the extent that idealistically formulated principles were concerned—to ‘elevate’ what was low. Precisely this was the spirit, for example, of the so-called ‘noble liberalism’ of the 19th century, which sought to educate everyone into an aristocrat; it did not aim to abolish noble privileges, but to allow all to partake in them, thereby dismantling class society not by making everyone a proletarian, but by making everyone noble. This was a benevolent yet naive endeavour. Did it at all take anthropological reality into account? From the perspective of so much time passed, the answer is readily apparent.

As long as equality was not attempted in practice—that is, as long as suffrage remained ‘census-based’—one could argue that the people were still ‘immature’, and that they had not yet attained the level of the leading classes of society solely due to ignorance and ‘unenlightenment’. However, this argument becomes increasingly difficult to sustain if the ‘enlightenment’ of the people, despite all relevant efforts, continues to be indefinitely delayed.

This benevolent illusion was shattered by the emergence of a new psychological type described by José Ortega y Gasset: the mass-man, who inherits the benefits of civilisation without accepting the responsibilities that sustain it. Ortega argues that the 19th-century liberal order offered the masses a life largely exempt from restrictions, fostering a ‘radical ingratitude’ towards the efforts that made such ease possible.¹¹ Unlike the traditional noble, for whom life was defined by discipline and obligations—‘noblesse oblige’—the modern mass-man views his rights as ‘gifts’. As Ortega writes:

‘Let us recall that at the start we distinguished the excellent man from the common man by saying that the former is the one who makes great demands on himself, and the latter the one who makes no demands on himself, but contents himself with what he is, and is delighted with himself. Contrary to what is usually thought, it is the man of excellence, and not the common man who lives in essential servitude. Life has no savour for him unless he makes it consist in service to something transcendental. Hence he does not look upon the necessity of serving as an oppression. When, by chance, such necessity is lacking, he grows restless and invents some new standard, more difficult, more exigent, with which to coerce himself. This is life lived as a discipline—the noble life. Nobility is defined by the demands it makes on us—by obligations, not by rights.’¹²

Thus, the attempt to universalize aristocracy failed because the masses adopted the privileges of the nobility but rejected the servitude and self-demanding effort (askesis) that constituted its essence. As Ortega concludes: ‘Human life, by its very nature, has to be dedicated to something, an enterprise glorious or humble, a destiny illustrious or trivial. We are faced with a condition, strange but inexorable, involved in our very existence.’¹³

If we truly regard aristocracy in the strict sense of the word as the ‘rule of the best’, we perhaps cannot fully apply this concept to the nobility manifesting in historical aristocracy. If the aristocrat—that is, the ‘most excellent man’—stands before us primarily not as a social class but as a spiritual-psychological type, then we should indeed say that he is found—potentially—in every stratum of society. This potentiality, however, is realized rather rarely.

Furthermore, it would be unjust to claim that nothing of this higher, spiritually understood type was reflected in historical aristocracy. The aristocrat differed in Egypt, in China, in Rome, and in the Middle Ages. Yet in every great culture, there existed a spiritual type that combined both intellectual and military roots and which, through a process of selection, separated itself from the majority, from the ‘people’.

The people saw themselves—or wished to see themselves—reflected in the aristocracy according to their higher reality and best qualities. The root of aristocracy lay in the distinction between individual and individual, the principle of differentiation, which is fundamentally also that of freedom. It could exist because there have always been those repelled by the warmth of the herd, the thought of dissolution in the ‘majority’, who feel at home not in the flock but in solitude, for whom the idea of abstract identity with the majority is ab ovo repulsive.

‘The root of aristocracy lay in the distinction between individual and individual, the principle of differentiation’

The characteristics of the Roman aristocrat provided a pattern for the entirety of medieval Christian civilization, primarily through the measured and stern dignity radiating even from the faces of Roman patrician statues. According to Livy, when the Gauls sacked Rome and broke into the Senate building, they initially dared not touch the senators, believing them to be a gathering of gods—or at least kings.

The aristocratic ideal in Europe perhaps reached its second peak in medieval chivalry. In St Bernard of Clairvaux’s In Praise of the New Knighthood, we can read firsthand what chivalry looked like in practice—and, if only as an ideal, what the monk-knight, the most aristocratic type, represented. Europe’s medieval aristocracy was a military nobility, selected in battle; when the development of military technology rendered the nobility idle, in many cases it degenerated into a noblesse de robe (robed nobility), losing its purpose to such an extent that, by the 18th and 19th centuries, it ultimately dissolved itself.

Yet historical aristocracy was not merely a privileged caste, but a spiritual vocation. It is by no means certain that all those considered ‘noble’ in a given social constellation were nobles in reality, in the psychological or, especially, the spiritual sense of the word. Aristocratism could also be narrow, false, haughty, or arrogant pseudo-elitism—and few things are more repulsive than class pride. It could also take the form of conformity, though not conformity of the ‘majority’, but of the ‘minority’. However, only a distorted and cynical view of history could claim that all aristocrats were bad, or that ‘holy kings’ were merely products of ecclesiastical propaganda.

Finally, we must distinguish between the legitimate function of wealth in the traditional order and its distortion in a plutocracy. Not just ‘plutocrats’, most of the high nobles were also the wealthiest in society. In the classical view, wealth was not an end in itself, but a necessary means for the ‘equipment’ of the soul. As Strauss explains, the ‘gentleman’ is distinguishable from the mere oligarch by the purpose to which he directs his property:

‘The classics held that this type of man is the gentleman. The gentleman is not identical with the wise man. He is the political reflection, or imitation, of the wise man…He differs from the wise because he has a noble contempt for precision, because he refuses to take cognizance of certain aspects of life, and because, in order to live as gentlemen, they must be well off. The gentleman will be a man of not too great inherited wealth, chiefly landed, but whose way of life is urban.’

Thus, the justification of the traditional ruling class was not their wealth per se, but that their property allowed them the leisure and independence required for public service: ‘Noble actions require, as Aristotle says, a certain equipment; without such equipment they are not possible. But we are obliged to act justly under all circumstances. A very imperfect regime may supply the only just solution to the problem of a given community; but, since such a regime cannot be effectively directed toward man’s full perfection, it can never be noble.’¹⁴

The modern oligarchic ‘elite’ lacks this justifying virtue. This shift represents more than a mere change in ruling personnel; it is, as Werner Sombart articulated, a spiritual conflict between two irreconcilable worldviews: the ‘Trader’ and the ‘Hero’. The traditional order was sustained by the heroic ethos, which regarded life not as a claim to happiness, but as a duty to be fulfilled. As Sombart writes, the Hero enters existence asking: ‘What can I give life?’, whereas the Trader approaches it with the question: ‘Life, what can you give me?’¹⁵

‘The traditional order was sustained by the heroic ethos, which regarded life not as a claim to happiness, but as a duty to be fulfilled’

While the aristocrat legitimized his status through the ‘giving virtues’ of sacrifice and risk—willing to dissolve himself for a higher order—the modern oligarchic elite is defined by the mercantile values of profit, security, and comfort. Consequently, the organic bond of loyalty has been replaced by the mechanical contract,¹⁶ and the very substance of political life has been reduced from a destiny to be carved out to a business transaction to be negotiated.

True aristocratism resembles kingship, which—at least according to the political thought of the Middle Ages—is in reality the culmination and true meaning of aristocratism. The king is selected from the aristocracy; he embodies the ideal, the par excellence aristocrat. Historically, the king often functioned not merely as the apex of this hierarchy, but as the protector of the people against the excesses of the oligarchy. Throughout history, whenever royal power waned, the people were left defenseless against the predation of local potentates and the ‘faceless’ power of money. The monarch, by virtue of his supreme position, was the only authority strong enough to curb the ambitions of the commercial and political elites.

1. On a religious level, this is illustrated by the history of the Western ‘Reformation’, which—in the long run—did far more harm to religion than good. The fury of Luther and Calvin may have been justified ‘there and then’, but in the wake of the schism they created, Western Christianity was so weakened that it was unable to stem the tide of atheism and materialism. These forces undermined Christianity not only by attacking it directly, but even more so by permeating it from within. ↩︎
2. The Adams-Jefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence Between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams. ↩︎
3. Gaetano Mosca, The Ruling Class (Elementi di Scienza Politica), McGraw-Hill Book Company, New York and London, 1939, p. 50. ↩︎
4.  Ibid, p. 53. ↩︎
5. Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1953, p. 140. ↩︎
6. Ibid, p. 134. ↩︎
7. Lord Acton, ‘Letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton, April 5, 1887’, In: Historical Essays and Studies, J N Figgis and R V Laurence, Macmillan, London, 1907. ↩︎
8. This is unaltered by the fact that, following Raymond Aron, for example, we distinguish between ‘liberal’ and ‘totalitarian’ democracies. Putting aside the concept of the ‘rule of law’ for the moment, we must not forget that the very notion of law becomes relative and self-justifying if its source is merely a fictitious sovereign such as the ‘will of the people’, in whose name anything—or its opposite—can be carried out. ↩︎
9. Dante Alighieri, De Monarchia, Book I, Chapter 14 and Chapter 9, Adapted from the Aurelius O Smith translation, Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1904. ↩︎
10. Plato, The Statesman, 292d4. ↩︎
11. ‘This leads us to note down in our psychological chart of the mass-man of to-day two fundamental traits: the free expansion of his vital desires, and therefore, of his personality; and his radical ingratitude towards all that has made possible the ease of his existence…And these spoiled masses are unintelligent enough to believe that the material and social organisation, placed at their disposition like the air, is of the same origin, since apparently it never fails them, and is almost as perfect as the natural scheme of things.’ José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses, George Allen & Unwin Ltd, London, 1932, p. 63. The ‘old liberal’—termed conservative—Count István Tisza represented precisely this view during the parliamentary debates regarding the expansion of suffrage. (See eg, Schlett István, A politikai gondolkodás története Magyarországon III [The History of Political Thought in Hungary III], Századvég Kiadó, Budapest, 2018.) ↩︎
12. José Ortega y Gasset, p. 69. ↩︎
13. Ibid, p. 157. ↩︎
14. Leo Strauss, pp. 142-142. ↩︎
15. Werner Sombart, Traders and Heroes: Patriotic Reflections, Arktos Media Ltd, London, 2021, p. 42. ↩︎
16. Ibid, p. 21. ↩︎

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