famous works,The Origins of Totalitarianism(1951), attacksRousseau,other-
wise seen as an exponent of democracy and an icon of the left since the French
Revolution, as one of the sources of the 20th century’s worst excesses. While
many of her contemporaries, equally famous in their time, have not seemed
relevant to contemporary social thought, Hannah Arendt’s work, whether
accepted or denounced, strikes readers as increasingly, rather than decreasingly,
of concern.
Aristocracy
Aristotle defined aristocracy, one of his three types of good government (see
alsomonarchyanddemocracy), as the rule of the best in the public interest,
and opposed it tooligarchy, the rule of a few in their own interest. In reality
aristocracy has always been the rule of the rich, though often justified by
ideologies which argued for the moral and intellectual superiority of the rulers,
and which purported to show that the rule of a small hereditary e ́lite was in the
public interest. The origins of aristocracies have varied, but two elements are
usually present. Firstly, aristocracies usually derive from war leaders who, in
return for allegiance and material support from a population, undertake to
protect them from violence by other groups. Secondly, aristocracies usually
involve a connection to land, so that the descendants of the war-lords continue
to hold the estates and the allegiance of the lower orders living on them.
The surviving European aristocracy derives fromfeudalism, in which a
monarch granted lands to a nobleman in return for his military support and
general obedience. In turn a great noble might grant subordinate lords smaller
estates from his own holdings in return for an equivalent allegiance. As the
Middle Ages gave way to modernity the nature of aristocracies changed
considerably, with the noble titles of earl, count and others being granted
for a wide range of support to European monarchs who were actively
centralizing theirnationsand ruling in a much more direct and organized
way. Many hereditary peerages in Britain date only from the 17th or 18th
centuries, or even later, and were more likely to have been given, in reward for
a variety of services, to men already rich and landed. The continued, if minor,
constitutional role of the House of Lords means that a hereditary aristocracy,
rather than just a rich e ́lite, has retained some political power, although
legislation passed in 1999 removing the right to a seat in the Lords of all but
92 hereditary peers, pending a definitive reform, eroded this further. In France
two orders of nobility evolved, known as the ‘sword’, the traditional military
aristocracy, and the ‘robe’, granted, for example, to leading civil servants and
lawyers. Aristocracies everywhere have diminished in power either through
actual revolutions, as in France and Russia, or through the impact of the
Aristocracy