Aristocracy: The Constituted Bodies 23
meant to include the British and Irish parliaments, the American colonial assem-
blies and governors’ councils, the parlements and provincial estates of France, the
assemblies of estates in the Dutch and Belgian Netherlands and the princely states
of the Holy Roman Empire, the diets of Sweden, Poland, Hungary, and Bohemia,
and the councils of the German free cities and the city- states of Switzerland and
Italy. All were different, yet all were in some ways alike.
To obtain a comparative view of these bodies has been a recognized problem of
European historical research in recent years. There is a permanent committee of
the International Committee of the Historical Sciences devoted specifically to the
subject. It is called the International Commission for the History of State Assem-
blies; scholars of many nationalities have worked under its inspiration, and many
monographs have been published. Many of them have been sympathetic to corpo-
ratist political theory and correspondingly critical of the modern state and the in-
dividualist conception of legal rights. Most of this work has dealt with medieval
and post- medieval times, and so is only indirectly relevant in the present context;
but some of it has been directed to the European Old Regime before the French
Revolution. The tendency in this case is to show the more favorable side of the Old
Regime, its freedom from enforced uniformity, centralization, and all- embracing
sovereign power.
According to this view, social groups with different interests or functions had
rights and obligations realistically corresponding to their position. They consti-
tuted social “orders,” and were represented in “estates.” “In reality,” says Professor
Lousse, a leading exponent of the school, “there were no privileged orders in the
sense that others were unprivileged, as one would be led to believe by a defective
terminology created in France by the polemics of the eighteenth century. All were
privileged”—but he admits that some were more privileged than others. “The do-
main of common law,” he explains, was reduced, “but the domain of special law
was much enlarged.... Each person’s statute was adapted to his place in society,
his social rank, and in a word to the function of general utility which he
performed.”^1 The nation was a body of cooperating groups each with appropriate
obligations and rights. It was composed of “orders”—not necessarily the three “or-
ders” made familiar by the history of the French Revolution, but orders in the
sense of diverse levels in a harmonious hierarchy. “An order under the Old Re-
gime,” Professor Lousse assures us, “was not a caste but an association,” not a Ge-
burtsstand, or estate determined by birth, but a coming together of people with the
same occupation, function, interest, or manner of life.^2 There were innumerable
1 E. Lousse, La société d ’ancien régime: organisation et reprèsentation corporatives (Louvain, 1943),
constituting volume VI of Etudes presentées à la Commission Internationale pour l ’ histoire des assemblées
d ’ états, 363 and 42.
2 Ibid., 255; cf. Lousse’s more recent article, “Les ordres d’ancien régime n’étaient pas des castes,”
in Studies Presented to the International Commission for the History of Representative and Parliamentary
Institutions, XI (Louvain, 1952). For comparative views of parliaments or estates, but not including the
town councils or American assemblies treated in the following pages, see also R. H. Lord, “Parlia-
ments of the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period,” in Catholic Historical Review ( July 1930),
125–44; O. Hintze, “Typologie der standischen Verfassungen des Abendlandes,” in Historische
Zeitschrift (1929), 229–48; L. Konopczynski, Le liberum veto: étude sur le développement du principe
majoritaire (Paris, 1930).