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{{Short description|Form of government}}
{{about|the form of government|the social class|Aristocracy (class)|other uses|Aristocrat (disambiguation)}}

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[[File:1stEarlOfBolingbroke.jpg|thumb|The [[Oliver St John, 1st Earl of Bolingbroke|1st Earl of Bolingbroke]], a seventeenth-century English aristocrat and politician.]]
'''Aristocracy''' ({{etymology|grc|''{{Wikt-lang|grc|ἀριστοκρατίᾱ}}'' ({{grc-transl|ἀριστοκρατίᾱ}})|rule of the best}}; {{etymology||''{{Wikt-lang|grc|ἄριστος}}'' ({{grc-transl|ἄριστος}})|best||''{{Wikt-lang|grc|κράτος}}'' ({{grc-transl|κράτος}})|power, strength}}) is a [[form of government]] that places power in the hands of a small, privileged [[ruling class]], the [[aristocracy (class)|aristocrats]].<ref name=OED>{{cite encyclopedia |date= December 1989 |title= Aristocracy |dictionary= [[Oxford English Dictionary]] |url=http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50011987?single=1&query_type=word&queryword=aristocracy&first=1&max_to_show=10 |access-date=December 22, 2009 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110629022358/http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50011987?single=1&query_type=word&queryword=aristocracy&first=1&max_to_show=10 |archive-date= June 29, 2011}}</ref>

At the time of the word's origins in [[ancient Greece]], the Greeks conceived it as rule by the best-qualified citizens—and often contrasted it favorably with [[monarchy]], rule by an individual. The term was first used by such ancient Greeks as [[Aristotle]] and [[Plato]], who used it to describe a system where only the best of the citizens, chosen through a careful process of selection, would become rulers, and [[hereditary monarchy|hereditary rule]] would actually have been forbidden, unless the rulers' children performed best and were better endowed with the attributes that make a person fit to rule compared with every other citizen in the polity.<ref name="Politics" /><ref name="Republic" /><ref name="Statesman" /> Hereditary rule in this understanding is more related to [[oligarchy]], a corrupted form of aristocracy where there is rule by a few, but not by the best. [[Plato]], [[Socrates]], Aristotle, [[Xenophon]], and the [[Spartans]] considered aristocracy (the ideal form of rule by the few) to be inherently better than the ideal form of rule by the many ([[politeia]]), but they also considered the corrupted form of aristocracy (oligarchy) to be worse than the corrupted form of democracy ([[mob rule]]).<ref name="Politics">{{cite book|author=Aristotle|title=Politics|url=http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/politics.html}}</ref><ref name="Republic">{{cite book |author=Plato |title=The Republic |url=http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/republic.html}}</ref><ref name="Statesman">{{cite book |author=Plato |title=The Statesman |url=https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1738/1738-h/1738-h.htm}}</ref><ref name="Polity">{{cite book |author=Xenophon |title=The Polity of the Athenians and the Lacedaemonians |url=https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1178/1178-h/1178-h.htm}}</ref><ref name="Lycurgus">{{cite book |author=Plutarch |title=The Parallel Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans |chapter=The Life of Lycurgus |chapter-url=http://classics.mit.edu/Plutarch/lycurgus.html}}</ref> This belief was rooted in the assumption that the masses could only produce average policy, while the best of men could produce the best policy, if they were indeed the best of men.<ref name="Statesman" /> Later [[Polybius]] in his analysis of the [[Constitution of the Roman Republic|Roman Constitution]] used the concept of aristocracy to describe his conception of a [[republic]] as a [[mixed government|mixed form]] of government, along with democracy and monarchy in their conception from then, as a system of [[Separation of powers#Checks and balances|checks and balances]], where each element checks the excesses of the other.<ref name="Polybius">{{cite book |author=Polybius |title=The Histories |chapter=The Roman Republic Compared with Others, Book VI, Section 43 |chapter-url=https://www.gutenberg.org/files/44125/44125-h/44125-h.htm}}</ref>

In [[modern era|modern times]], aristocracy was usually seen as rule by a privileged group, the [[aristocracy (class)|aristocratic class]], and has since been contrasted with [[democracy]].<ref name=OED/>

== Concept ==
The concept evolved in [[ancient Greece]] in which a council of leading citizens was commonly empowered. That was contrasted with [[representative democracy]] in which a council of citizens was appointed as the "senate" of a [[city state]] or other political unit. The Greeks did not like the concept of monarchy, and as their democratic system fell, aristocracy was upheld.<ref name="OED"/>

In his 1651 book ''[[Leviathan (Hobbes 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".<ref name="Hobbes2010">{{cite book |first=Thomas |last=Hobbes |author-link=Thomas Hobbes |title=Leviathan |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=FKLPStfcpjoC&pg=PA81 |date=1 January 2010 |publisher=Digireads.com Publishing |isbn=978-1-4209-3699-5 |page=81 |via=[[Google Books]]}}</ref> 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|date=March 2015}}

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 (Plato)|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 [[classical antiquity]], aristocracy is not in modern times understood in opposition to oligarchy or strictly as a form of government, with entitled [[nobility]] as in [[monarchy|monarchies]] or aristocratic [[merchant republics]]. Its original [[classics|classical]] understanding has been taken up by the modern concepts that can be loosely equivalent to [[meritocracy]] or [[technocracy]].

== 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 [[merchant class]] attempted to use money to buy into the aristocracy, with some success. However, the [[French Revolution]] in the 1790s forced many French aristocrats into exile and caused consternation and shock in the aristocratic families of neighbouring countries. After the defeat of [[Napoleon]] in 1814, some of the surviving exiles returned, but their position within French society was not recovered.

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 [[First World War]] had the effect of dramatically reducing the power of aristocrats in all major countries. In Russia, aristocrats were [[Red Terror|imprisoned and murdered]] by the communists. After 1900, liberal and socialist governments levied heavy taxes on landowners, spelling their loss of economic power.<ref>{{cite book |first=Barrington |last=Moore |title=The social origins of dictatorship and democracy |date=1966}}</ref><ref>{{cite book |first=David |last=Cannadine |title=The decline and fall of the British aristocracy |date=1990|publisher = Anchor Books |isbn = 9780385421034}}</ref>

== See also ==

* [[Elitism]]
* [[Gentry]]
* [[Meritocracy]]
* [[Nobility]]
* [[Old money]]
* [[Timocracy]]
* [[Nicolás Gómez Dávila]]

== References ==
{{reflist}}

== 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. [https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03468755.2018.1480538 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). [https://webofproceedings.org/proceedings_series/ECOM/ECOMHS%202018/ECOMHS97073.pdf 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 ==
* {{wikiquote-inline}}
* [https://www.britannica.com/topic/aristocracy Aristocracy] at Encyclopædia Britannica

{{Social class}}
{{European nobility}}
{{Political philosophy}}
{{Authority control}}

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[[Category:Ancient Greek government]]
[[Category:Oligarchy]]
[[Category:Social classes]]
[[Category:Social groups]]