Aristocracy

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Aristocracy

The term aristocracy derives from the Greek words aristos and kratos, meaning “rule by the best.” In denoting hierarchy and social differentiation, aristocracy has often been used synonymously with elites or oligarchy. More broadly, the term has been used in modern formulations such as “America’s aristocracy” to denote a plutocracy of wealth and privilege in the United States, or as “labour aristocracy” in the United Kingdom to refer to a privileged stratum of skilled workers within the nineteenth-century working class. Indeed, its modern usage is so broad that many commentators have concluded that aristocracy is now impossible to define.

The aristocracy in preindustrial European states combined specific economic, social, and political characteristics that differentiated it from other social strata at the time, and from subsequent notions of aristocracy in industrial and postindustrial societies. For a period of over five hundred years, before the rapid spread of industrialization in the nineteenth century, predominantly agrarian societies in Europe were structured in feudal hierarchies and governed by monarchs in varying alliances with landed aristocrats. In these hierarchies, aristocrats were differentiated from monarchs in one, upward direction, and from gentry, merchants, and peasants in the opposite direction.

In economic terms, aristocracy in preindustrial societies was defined in relationship to the land. Initially in feudal systems, monarchs granted feudal lords the rights to income from large estates or manors in return for military support and local administration of justice. Thus, aristocrats derived their income primarily from land, either directly through the extraction of services and dues from peasants, or, latterly, indirectly through sharecrop-ping contracts or lease-renting arrangements with small farmers.

The economic differentiation of the aristocracy was reinforced by social distinctiveness. Monarchs conferred not only economic rewards but also status rewards in the form of titles. Although titles were not an exact indicator of membership in the aristocracy, they were, when combined with land ownership, the most effective defining characteristic of the aristocracy. Noble rank reinforced notions of social exclusivity, and even among the aristocracy there was an internal hierarchy of titles that distinguished landed magnates from lesser nobility.

The aristocracy’s combined economic and social dominance was sustained over centuries through inheritance laws based on primogeniture (where succession passes to the firstborn son). In this manner, the indivisibility and continuity of landed estates was secured and the social status of titular rank was passed from one male generation to the next.

A deliberate cult of ostentation characterized the lifestyle of most European aristocrats. “Living nobly” entailed architectural recognition in the construction of grand country residences and palatial dwellings in capital cities; cultural recognition in the patronage of the arts and music; fashionable recognition in elaborate dress and tailoring; and educational recognition in, for example, the value placed upon multilingualism by European aristocrats.

Political power was closely associated with the economic and social power of the aristocracy. Nonetheless, there were wide variations in the political relationships between monarch and aristocracy from one country to the next. By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there were marked contrasts between France, where the aristocracy was politically enfeebled, and England, where the landed aristocracy effectively restricted monarchical power through representation in Parliament. Eventually, with the transition to industrial capitalist economies, the political, social, and economic ascendancy of the aristocracy was eroded in all European states. Even in the twenty-first century, however, residues of aristocratic status and wealth can still be traced in many European countries.

SEE ALSO Authority; Conspicuous Consumption; Distinctions, Social and Cultural; Elitism; Feudalism; Gentility; Hierarchy; Landlords; Meritocracy; Monarchy; Monarchy, Constitutional; Power; Wealth