Aristocracy
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Aristocracy (from
At the time of the word's origins in
In modern times, aristocracy was usually seen as rule by a privileged group, the aristocratic class, and has since been contrasted with democracy.[1]
Concept
The concept evolved in
In his 1651 book Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes describes an aristocracy as a commonwealth in which the representative of the citizens is an assembly by part only. It is a system in which only a small part of the population represents the government; "certain men distinguished from the rest".[8] Modern depictions of aristocracy tend to regard it not as the ancient Greek concept of rule by the best, but more as an oligarchy or plutocracy—rule by the few or the wealthy.[citation needed]
The concept of aristocracy according to Plato has an ideal state ruled by the philosopher king. Plato describes "philosopher kings" as "those who love the sight of truth" (Republic 475c) and supports the idea with the analogy of a captain and his ship or a doctor and his medicine. According to him, sailing and health are not things that everyone is qualified to practice by nature. A large part of the Republic then addresses how the educational system should be set up to produce philosopher kings.
Differentiation
In contrast to its original conceptual drawing by Aristotle in
History
Aristocracies dominated political and economic power for most of the medieval and modern periods almost everywhere in Europe, using their wealth and land ownership to form a powerful political force. The English Civil War involved the first sustained organised effort to reduce aristocratic power in Europe.
In the 18th century, the rising
Beginning in Britain, industrialization in the 19th century brought urbanization, with wealth increasingly concentrated in the cities, which absorbed political power. However, as late as 1900, aristocrats maintained political dominance in Britain, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Austria and Russia, but it was an increasingly-precarious dominion. The
See also
References
- ^ a b c "Aristocracy". Oxford English Dictionary. December 1989. Archived from the original on June 29, 2011. Retrieved December 22, 2009.
- ^ a b Aristotle. Politics.
- ^ a b Plato. The Republic.
- ^ a b c Plato. The Statesman.
- ^ Xenophon. The Polity of the Athenians and the Lacedaemonians.
- ^ Plutarch. "The Life of Lycurgus". The Parallel Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans.
- ^ Polybius. "The Roman Republic Compared with Others, Book VI, Section 43". The Histories.
- ISBN 978-1-4209-3699-5 – via Google Books.
- ^ Moore, Barrington (1966). The social origins of dictatorship and democracy.
- ISBN 9780385421034.
Further reading
- Bengtsson, Erik, et al. "Aristocratic wealth and inequality in a changing society: Sweden, 1750–1900." Scandinavian Journal of History 44.1 (2019): 27–52. Online
- Cannon, John. History, Oxford University Press, 1997, ISBN 978-0-19-866176-4
- Liu, Jia. "Study on the Decline of the British Aristocracy from the Perspective of Modernization." 2018 4th International Conference on Economics, Management and Humanities Science (2018). Online
- Schutte, Kimberly. Women, Rank, and Marriage in the British Aristocracy, 1485-2000: An Open Elite? (Springer, 2014).
- Wasson, Ellis. Aristocracy in the Modern World, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
External links
- Quotations related to Aristocracy at Wikiquote
- Aristocracy at Encyclopædia Britannica