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Aristocracy
The term aristocracy derives from the ancient Greek aristokratia, or “rule by the best.” In modern usage, it normally designates a ruling elite whose political powers and wealth are invested with titles and privileges and transmitted through hereditary succession. Modern parlance reflects the term's original meaning insofar as it plays on a moral contrast between aristocratic powers, legitimated by the responsibility and self-restraint supposedly attendant on good breeding, and oligarchic powers, acquired through ambition, calculation, eager new money, and similar vices, which are thought to prevail in self-appointed or otherwise illegitimate regimes.
In ancient Greece, however, no actual group of people or government was known officially under the designation aristocracy. Exclusive gentile clans of the kind familiar from later European history, with hereditary status and landholdings that depended on royal grant or sanction, never existed, despite the longevity and pretence of some prominent families. The term aristocracy was coined no earlier than the fifth century BCE to denote a type of political system or constitution in which authority and moral excellence were inherently connected and attainable by few. Its usage probably was uncommon outside the sphere of theory, notably the debates on the relative merits of different constitutions, which had been triggered by the twin Athenian innovations of radical democracy at home and empire over Greek communities in the Aegean. Accordingly, although ancient aristocracy could not have had a real institutional legacy, the concept itself enjoyed a rich afterlife in both political analysis and polemic. This entry considers the three contrasting and complementary conceptions of aristocracy prevalent in different forms and periods from antiquity to the present—aristocracy as a constitution, a class, and a theory of elite leadership.
Aristocracy as a Constitution
The term aristocracy can be traced back in classical literature to the Peloponnesian War of 431 to 404 BCE, a prolonged conflict between two interstate leagues led by the two foremost powers of the Greek world, democratic Athens and oligarchic Sparta. Our main source for the period, Thucydides, was surely not alone in trying to explain this conflict in terms of the political organization and interests of the two polities involved, although the flaws that the crisis revealed on either side were too numerous to permit praise and blame along ideological lines. As a result, it became necessary to supplement the existing quantitative classification of constitutions into monarchy (rule by one man), oligarchy (rule by few), and democracy (rule by the people) with a qualitative scale, either (as in Thucydides) through the use of adjectives or (in Plato) through the invention of new compound words, such as plutocracy (rule by the wealthy), timocracy (rule by the ambitious), and cheirocracy (rule by the worst).
The precise meaning of aristocracy could vary according to author or context: (1) In literary records of Socrates's dialogues (Xenophon, Memorabilia 4. 6. 12), the term denotes a positive variant of oligarchy, in which the “few” rich and powerful prioritize consistently the well-being of the whole community; (2) In Plato's work (e.g., Republic 4. 445d), aristocracy features as an ideal constitution alongside, and closely akin to, monarchy, or rule by a single “best” man; (3) According to Thucydides (2. 37. 2) and the fourth-century BCE orator, Isocrates (Panathenaicus 131–2), aristocracy was in fact a subspecies of democracy, in which the masses had voted the best men into office and willingly submitted to their rule, a state of affairs that was widely thought to have prevailed sometime in Athens's glorified past, under the “ancestral constitution,” and to persist among more traditional societies, such as the Spartans and the Carthaginians.
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