- What is the aristocracy?
- Characteristics of the aristocracy
- Origin of the aristocracy
- Examples of aristocracy
- Aristocracy and oligarchy
- Aristocracy and bourgeoisie
We explain what the aristocracy is, its origin, characteristics and current examples. Also, differences with the oligarchy and the bourgeoisie.
What is the aristocracy?
With the word aristocracy, at present, we designate the nobility and the upper classes (hereditary or traditional) of any society. It is a term of very ancient origin, with which the nobility (kings, princes, dukes, etc.) who ruled the ancient and medieval societies of Europe and from the East, until finally being displaced by the bourgeoisie What social class dominant in the Modern age.
The origin of the term aristocracy dates back to the Ancient Greece, between the VIII and IV centuries a. C., when the new cops or city-states that would later become Classical Greece.
These new communities were governed, as understood by philosophers such as Plato (c. 427-347 BC) and Aristotle (384-322 BC), or the historian Herodotus (484-425 BC), by the most important individuals. wise and experienced, more intelligent and of greater virtue. That is why they called their governments "Aristocracy", that is, "the government of the best" (from the Greek aristos, "Excellence", and Kratos, "can").
For Plato, studious as he was of the forms of government, this was the best possible, although it could always degenerate into the timocracy, the government of the military, and therefore into the oligarchy, the government of a few.
However, for this philosopher, the ideal form of government (as explained in his book of 370 BC, Republic) should give power to philosophers, capable of achieving "the absolute Good intellectual vision." Something that differs greatly from what happened throughout the history with the aristocracy, whose origins were largely military.
The aristocracy could run organized society as a republic (such as the Roman Republic, in which the Patricians were the nobility), or as a monarchy, through a king of more or less absolute power (as were the Roman Emperors, or the European Christian kings after the fall of the empire), which was inherited from parents to children or to relatives of the same blood line.
At present, the vestiges of the nobility in Europe, and the kings, emperors, emirs and others are considered aristocrats. monarchs from the East. However the absolute power that during the time feudal had the aristocratic monarchy long since lost, once the bourgeois liberal republics were installed in the West and most of the modern world.
In many of these nations, the aristocracy occupies only a representative, diplomatic or cultural position, as it happens with the current kings in Europe.
Characteristics of the aristocracy
The aristocracy is characterized by the following:
- Grants the can politician to a group or a social class considered "the best", that is, the most apt to exercise power, depending on the criteria applied. In practice, this often resulted in power being in the hands of the families of military heroes, especially in periods when the population required continuous military protection against barbarians or other peoples perceived as invaders.
- Nobility titles are necessary to demonstrate membership of the aristocracy and its privileges. Those titles are added to the name to show the noble origin of the person, such as "Duke of Orleans" or "Prince of Wales". These titles used to be associated with a territory specific, although that does not guarantee that the person who wore them came from there, since these titles could also be inherited.
- Not everyone can belong to the aristocracy, but must access the nobility from their very birth (that is, have noble blood, patricia or blue), or to earn his title of nobility through outstanding actions in the military field. It was also possible to "win" the nobility by marrying a citizen noble, which many wealthy commoners did when the European aristocracy fell out of favor in the late Modern Age.
- Political power is inherited from one generation of aristocrats to another, especially in governments of the monarchical type, such as those that flourished during feudal Europe of the Middle Ages. This led to numerous family clashes for access to the throne, but also to many marriage arrangements to match noble families and thus end political or territorial disputes.
- As a social class, aristocrats always distinguished themselves from workers and artisans, but also from foot warriors, thus forming a caste of political and military leaders born among wealth, generally owners of arable land. These aristocrats became known as Feudal lords during the Middle Ages.
Origin of the aristocracy
The aristocracy as a social class arose in the Antiquity, probably in response to the need for military defense of primitive nations, which created a social class of warriors or soldiers. These had to be maintained by the peasantry and artisans, in exchange for timely defense and, at the same time, to guarantee the internal order of society.
While in the humanity In the early days most kings and monarchs were also priests and spiritual leaders, placed on the throne by the divine hand, with the passage of time and the complexity of societies, the clergy (priests) and the nobility (kings) became they were distinguishing among themselves, and from the latter the first aristocrats would have arisen.
Examples of aristocracy
Examples of current aristocratic governments are:
- The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, ruled by absolutist monarch, whose power is limited only by the religious laws of the Qur'an (the Sharia). The King of Saudi Arabia at the beginning of the 21st century is Salman bin Abdulaziz.
- The State of Brunei Darussalam, whose form of government is an absolutist Sultanate, at the head of which at the beginning of the 21st century is Sultan Muda Hassanal Bolkiah, the most recent monarch of a dynasty that has ruled the country since the 14th century.
- The Kingdom of Swaziland, in southern Africa, ruled since 1986 by an absolute monarch, the current King Mswati III, although the spiritual leader of the country and co-ruling in some matters is the Indovuzaki ("Queen mother") Queen Ntombi.
- The State of Qatar, an absolutist emirate of the Middle East, ruled at the beginning of the 21st century by Emir Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, who has ruled since 2013 after the death of his father, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, who in turn he overthrew his father in 1995, Sheikh Khalifa Al Thani.
Aristocracy and oligarchy
The terms aristocracy and oligarchy should not be confused, especially with regard to the forms of government, as the philosopher Plato differentiated them. The aristocracy poses as the government "of the best", while the oligarchy is the government "of a few."
Seen this way, every aristocracy is necessarily an oligarchy, but not every oligarchy is aristocratic. In fact, Plato saw the oligarchy as a corrupt or degenerate form of the aristocracy, in which a few, regardless of their preparation and suitability, jealously held political power.
Aristocracy and bourgeoisie
If the aristocracy was the social class that reigned during the medieval world in the West and East, the bourgeoisie was the one that shaped the world according to its interests at the end of the Modern Age. It was the social class of the merchants and capitalists, that is, those who handled large amounts of money in a world that was barely moving towards Industrial Revolution.
Unlike the aristocratic world, the bourgeois world embraced the democracy and the liberalism, and proposed a model of social classes that was not determined by lineage and birth, but by the monetary capacity of people, that is, by their money.
These philosophical and cultural changes led to numerous ruptures with the aristocratic monarchy, being the French Revolution of 1789 the best known of all, and they ended up displacing the aristocracy from political power, placing the industrial bourgeoisie as the new dominant social class.