The nature of aristocracy

[Phrossack]

I trust it won't be news to you, but we don't have a 'noble' v. 'rich burgher' distinction. Modern elites have the powers of both through ownership and, without the responsibilities, the scrambled anonymization called shareholding. Early modern and late medieval societies may have tried to ritualize and formalize their social structures, but such attempts were unstable and semi-fictional just like they are today.



Yeah, income is for much of the modern elite determined by 'birthright' (i.e. inheritance).

Anyway, basically what you are saying is that America has no aristocracy because wealth and power are monetarized and thus, for some reason you haven't explained, more open to 'anyone'. You do know, right, that early modern / late medieval titles and hereditary honours were routinely acquired and lost through failure and success?

What I'm saying is that the American system is not the same as medieval European systems. Then, nobility was inherited, and legally enshrined in law. Nobles explicitly had more rights than commoners. Legitimate children of nobles were automatically nobles themselves. Class mobility was extremely limited. If one man was a noble, and another was a merchant, the noble in most instances automatically had more rights, even if the merchant was wealthier. Only persons of noble, or especially royal, descent could peacefully and legally become king. You'd be hard-pressed to find someone in medieval Europe who became king without having any noble blood. Ivaylo of Bulgaria is one of those very rare exceptions; he was a swineherd who seized power in a rebellion and reigned for just a year before being driven from power and killed, yet he still felt the need to marry a Roman princess before being grudgingly accepted, temporarily, as emperor. Or, if you look to China, the Ming founder was a peasant, but he still felt the need to downplay his ancestry and gave his ancestors posthumous titles. Things like this hardly ever happened.

The US is more comparable to the Republic of Venice. There was a sort of nobility, but the Senate was drawn from the wealthiest families. Wealthy merchants dominated the system.

In America, the primary determinant of political power is wealth. Ancestry can and often does correlate with wealth, as it is often inherited, but merely being a rich man's granddaughter doesn't guarantee power and extra legal rights- after all, the man may have lost most of his fortune in a risky business venture, and his children may have lived as middle-class people. The granddaughter gets no special privileges just because of her genealogy. You don't get any privileges from being formerly rich. It doesn't really matter if you're the granddaughter of a failed ex-CEO. Likewise, when presidents are elected, their ancestry does not qualify or disqualify them from running. A family background in politics obviously helps due to connections and resources, but if a candidate with famous parents loses an election to a lesser-known candidate of unremarkable ancestry, he's still lost. In theory, everyone has the same rights and freedoms, and candidates downplay their heritage and like to pretend to be common people who can relate to their common voters, who still (usually) have the final say in who gets what office.

Now, obviously, in practice the US is different. Money can help sway voters with advertising, and having moneyed ancestors can help ensure that one has money. But let's not pretend that anyone wishing to run for office must prove to be of distinguished birth, or that America is literally the same as medieval states. To use medieval analogies, it's rule/tyranny by the burghers, not rule/tyranny by the nobles, and while the peasants still aren't really in charge, they're not exactly the same. Neither system is fair, and both are imperfect and are therefore complete failures like literally every other social system that has ever existed. But at least it's easier to make money than to change your background and become a noble.

 

[Traitorfish]

What I'm saying is that the American system is not the same as medieval European systems. Then, nobility was inherited, and legally enshrined in law. Nobles explicitly had more rights than commoners.

I'm going to have to raise the point again that nobility is a legally class, not a social class. Nobles had more rights than commoners, but that only tells you that they constituted a legally privileged class, not that they constituted an actual elite. In Castile, around 10% of people held noble status, and most of those were minor landowners who wouldn't even have merited a knighthood in France or England, and many others were actively engaged in commerce or manufacture. Similar figures are found in Poland-Lithuania and Hungary; in the latter case, "noble" and "Magyar" were often pretty much interchangeable. Meanwhile, in England, the nobility had ceased to exist as a distinct legal category in the Middle Ages. its sole remnant being the peerage, which excluded most of the aristocracy itself.

So the legal privileges of nobility were not limited to the aristocracy, nor were they guaranteed to the aristocracy: they're simply not the same thing. They were historically related, certainly, but they weren't ever identical, so the absence of a formal nobility in the United States has no bearing on the existence of an aristocracy in the United States.

 

[Pangur Bán]

What I'm saying is that the American system is not the same as medieval European systems. Then, nobility was inherited, and legally enshrined in law. Nobles explicitly had more rights than commoners. Legitimate children of nobles were automatically nobles themselves. Class mobility was extremely limited. If one man was a noble, and another was a merchant, the noble in most instances automatically had more rights, even if the merchant was wealthier. Only persons of noble, or especially royal, descent could peacefully and legally become king. You'd be hard-pressed to find someone in medieval Europe who became king without having any noble blood. Ivaylo of Bulgaria is one of those very rare exceptions; he was a swineherd who seized power in a rebellion and reigned for just a year before being driven from power and killed, yet he still felt the need to marry a Roman princess before being grudgingly accepted, temporarily, as emperor. Or, if you look to China, the Ming founder was a peasant, but he still felt the need to downplay his ancestry and gave his ancestors posthumous titles. Things like this hardly ever happened.

The US is more comparable to the Republic of Venice. There was a sort of nobility, but the Senate was drawn from the wealthiest families. Wealthy merchants dominated the system.

In America, the primary determinant of political power is wealth. Ancestry can and often does correlate with wealth, as it is often inherited, but merely being a rich man's granddaughter doesn't guarantee power and extra legal rights- after all, the man may have lost most of his fortune in a risky business venture, and his children may have lived as middle-class people. The granddaughter gets no special privileges just because of her genealogy. You don't get any privileges from being formerly rich. It doesn't really matter if you're the granddaughter of a failed ex-CEO. Likewise, when presidents are elected, their ancestry does not qualify or disqualify them from running. A family background in politics obviously helps due to connections and resources, but if a candidate with famous parents loses an election to a lesser-known candidate of unremarkable ancestry, he's still lost. In theory, everyone has the same rights and freedoms, and candidates downplay their heritage and like to pretend to be common people who can relate to their common voters, who still (usually) have the final say in who gets what office.

Now, obviously, in practice the US is different. Money can help sway voters with advertising, and having moneyed ancestors can help ensure that one has money. But let's not pretend that anyone wishing to run for office must prove to be of distinguished birth, or that America is literally the same as medieval states. To use medieval analogies, it's rule/tyranny by the burghers, not rule/tyranny by the nobles, and while the peasants still aren't really in charge, they're not exactly the same.

In medieval Europe the elite could make their 'nobility' hereditary or try to formalize their status through legislation, but one is rationalization and the other is usually a bi-product of this status being undermined. In twelfth-century England the 'aristocracy' for a large part held land in 'knight service'; not long before a knicht was a slave (the idea is that a ruler has a personal following of landless youths and foreign 'criminal exiles' with no rights, who are subsequently given land to boost his authority). The nobility in fact were not 'noble' in the sense you are talking about. They achieved power in the same way we do today, through patronage and favour from those higher up, and then they developed rituals and titles to exclude competitors, but it didn't exclude them because better knights could come from anywhere with the right patron, and land became a tradeable commodity acquirable by burghal families who could also use their wealth to send their sons to university and acquire more land and titles from the king as bureaucrats.

You are overly distracted by the fact that power is monetarized more today than it was then.

The elite of the US achieve exactly the same thing as their medieval counter-parts, more effectively in fact, through money. They don't need, for instance, to formally exclude their inferiors from challenging them through the legal system, they can do do it more effectively by using 'money' as a barrier. They don't need to call themselves lord of a land to extract the living of their peasants, they can do it more effectively through commodity and property speculation (and, lower down the scale for the latter, 'renting' it out).

 

[Borachio]

Oh, apropos of nothing at all, I've just heard someone say on the radio that one advantage that a hereditary monarchy had is that enabled a woman, or gay man, to become head of state in societies which would otherwise not have dreamt of permitting it.

I found that to be a mildly interesting thought.

 

[Thorgalaeg]

It can also enable a psycho, a fool or a moron to become head of state. OTOH a republic... oh, well...

 

[Borachio]

You win some you lose some, I guess. :shrug:

 

[gay_Aleks]

It can also enable a psycho, a fool or a moron to become head of state. OTOH a republic... oh, well...

You know, maybe the monarchists are right. Think about it - it's frowned upon to stab your president to death with multiple sharp objects in a republic.

Killing a monarch however, well that's just tradition in some countries. Deposing of a bad monarch, an evil and incompetent one - nobody would have problems with you. You might even become a hero.