Intemational Joumal of Comparative Sociology'iiX.

W/, 1-2 (1983)

The Politics of Traditional Aristocratic Empires and their Legacy

JOHN H. KAUTSKY
Washington University. St. Louis, MO, U.S.A.
LN T H E F O L L O W I N G P A G E S , I attempt, in summary fashion, to delineate some of the patterns of politics recurring in traditional Jiristocratic empires and then to illustrate their continuing significance in the modern world. 1 An aristocratic empire is defmed by the presence of an aristocracy, that is, a ruling class in an agrarian economy that lives off the labor of peasants, and must therefore contain not only aristocrats but also peasants living in primitive village societies. To be considered traditional, aristocratic empires must also be defmed as unaffected by any form of modernization, including commercizilization such as developed in ancient Greece and Rome, in China during the Sung period and even during the preceding millennium, in Western Europe in the eleventh century, and in many other empires.2 Aristocratic empires so defined appeared on four continents in the course of five millennia. Examples would include Egypt until about 2,000 B. C ; China in the Shang and Chou periods; the conquest empires of Asiatic nomads, like the early Mongol and Turkic ones and those in Southeastern Europe, and of Germanic invaders of Southern and Western Europe in the early Middle Ages, down to the Carolingian empire; Ethiopia; Inca Peru; and many other major and innumerable minor ones.3 What is more, even their commercialized successors retained major features of traditional aristocratic politics, often for many centuries. Generalizing across huge distances in time and space and differences in culture, I emphasize the existence of patterns and uniformities in aristocratic politics. These are generjJly overlooked by historians who are necessarily concerned with particular ,empires or particular periods. On the other hand, politiczil scientists and political sociologists, who do formulate generalizations and theories about politics, have, by focusing on the modern world, very largely ignored aristocratic empires and thereby most of mankind's postprimitive political experience. An acquaintance with the patterns of aristocratic politics provides us with a broadened base for our understanding of politics. It introduces us to a type of

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politics SO different from modern ones that many of our approaches and concepts cannot be applied to it. In view of its remarkable durability and stability, even our concern with the explanation of social, economic and political change needs perhaps to be replaced by attempts to explain the absence of change. Aristocratic empires are also no "states," "countries" or "nations;" nor are they (but they do contain) "societies," "social systems" or "political systems." Their "governments" are so different from ours that they should really not be described as such, most of their inhabitants are not "citizens," they do not share in some "public opinion" or "participate" in or are "represented" by their government, which, indeed, is not theirs. PoliticaJ behav,ior expresses different values and motives from those of modern men and hence may appear irrational from a modern point of view. Even if one does not feel the need to broaden one's perspective on politics and to question the generjil relevance of one's concepts and is content to formulate generalizations only on contemporary politics, an understanding of premodern politics will be useful or even essential for at least two reasons. First, the process of modernization, the concern of so much social science work in recent decades, is, like any process of change, definable only relative to the pre-change condition. A meaningful anadysis of the political consequences of modernization therefore requires a comparison with the political order that prevailed before there was any modernization at all. Second, there are in all societies, no matter how modern, powerful ideologiczd and institutional elements that can be understood only when they are recognized as remnants of an earlier political order. The second half of this article is devoted to illustrating this point. Patterns of Politics in Aristocratic Empires The distinction between a modern country or a state Jind an aristocratic empire is, in our context, a vital one, because the former is an arena of politics and the latter is not. The bulk ofthe population of an aristocratic empire consists of peasants who lived in their isolated, autonomous, self-sufficient villages long before these were incorporated in an empire. That incoroporation simply results from the superimposition of an aristocracy that comes, not to govern, but to tax the village. Importantly as that change affects the peasants in some ways, each village continues to exist as an isolated, autonomous, zmd selfsufficient unit. It remains, therefore, an independent arena of politics where peasants engage in conflict and make decisions regarding the distribution of scarce resources. As towns develop, their populations, too, function in independent political arenas of their own, insofar as they function politically at all and are not directly attached to the aristocracy, such as servants, soldiers, and lower-level bureaucrats. Finedly, the aristocrats form their own politiczd arena. Institutions that have in modern times become national the monarchy and the court, assemblies of noblerrien, the clergy, the bureaucracy, the army are simply institutions of the aristocracy.

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The superimposition of a society of aristocrats on separate societies of peasants is most easily understood as a result of conquest. And, indeed, it is by means of conquest that most empires expand, whether the aristocracy originally grew out of pastoral nomads who conquered agrarian villages or out of an agrarian elite. Conquest is initially motivated by the desire of aristocrats, and often originally of nomads, to deprive cultivators of their product. The resulting relationship between aristocrats and peasants, which becomes institutionalized, then makes further conquests both desirable and possible. It is a relationship of exploitation because the peasant, like the land to which he is attached, is exploited as a natural resource. The exploitative relationship between aristocrats and peasants is the key to an understanding ofthe political nature of aristocratic empires. It accounts not only for the origins of these empires but also for their long-unchanging character. With the peasants' entire surplus consumed by aristocrats, nothing is left to be invested in improvements in the process of production. (Water works, a major exception, will be mentioned in a moment, but themselves remain unchanged for centuries.) Aristocrats are largely separated from the process of production, and peasants have no incentive to seek improvements in it because they would be deprived of any resulting gains. Thus, neither the natural nor the man-made environment changes, men keep doing the same things in the same way generation after generation, they have no new problems and hence think no new thoughts, and the ideologies of both aristocrats and peasants fortify their acceptance ofthe world including the political world as it is. Furthermore, as I shedl now indicate very briefly, the exploitative relationship between aristocrats and peasants can also serve to explain the governmental functions ofthe aristocracy, principally taxation and warfare, the limited and decentralized character of government, and, more or less directly, the values and ideologies governing aristocratic behavior and thus the staikes in the conflicts that constitute aristocratic politics. Government is instituted in order to tax, its function is to take from the peasants rather than to give anything to them, and it can hence be understood as an extractive enterprise. In a sense, it is a private enterprise, for taxation is imposed for the private benefit of the aristocracy, and there is effectively no public in aristocratic empires if that word refers to all or most of the population. In order to tax peasants, aristocrats do not have to direct their labor or interfere in their internal village politics, but they must be able to deprive them of their surplus and which requires far greater effort to keep other aristocrats from doing so. Since peasants and the land they work are the principal source of wealth in agrarian economies, aristocrats ceaselessly compete for control of land and peasants. Warfare, both offensive and defensive, then, is required to conquer, expand, or maintain a tax base which is, in turn, required to permit warfare. Closely related to taxation, it is the only other essential function of government in aristocratic empires.

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Other functions of the aristocracy that may be characterized as governmental are auxiliary to the taxing or military function or both. Flood control and irrigation works may be constructed by corvee peasant labor to regularize and increase the yields of agriculture and hence of taxation; canals and roads may be built to move the taxes in kind from the villages to the residences of aristocrats and to move troops to expand or defend frontiers; food may be stored to feed soldiers and bureaucrats and even peasants while they perform corvee labor; fortifications and walls may be erected to keep nomads or rival aristocrats from raiding or occupying the aristocracy's tax-yielding land. Religious administration, involving- the performance of ceremonies and the construction and upkeep of religious buildings, is carried on by a more or less specizJized priestly aristocracy for the benefit of the aristocracy. By perpetuating its religion, it serves to legitimize the role ofthe aristocracy in its own eyes. To the extent usually slight and superficial that its religion is accepted by the peasants, it may also help make aristocratic rule, that is, taxation acceptable to them. It follows from two facts already stressed that aristocratic government is, measured by modern standards, extremely limited. For one thing, it provides no services for the nonaristocratic population. Even the military protection from which villages and towns may benefit, and which is often held to be a service furnished by the aristocracy in return for the taxes it receives, is better understood as a mere incident of intraaristocratic competition that involves no reciprocity between the peasantry and townspeople and the aristocracy. Secondly, the peasant villages zind, to a degree, those elements in the towns not directly tied to the aristocracy, form autonomous societies. They govern themselves, and there is little, if any, need for the jiristocracy to carry on local government and administration or police and judicial functions. Only the tix collector in his inevitable periodic visits and, sometimes, the military recruiter represent the aristocracy in the villages and towns. Put in modern terms, the government of an aristocratic empire consists cilmost entirely of an interned revenue service and a war department. Aristocratic government is also highly decentralized. Even so-called centralized bureaucratic empires are, in fact, decentralized by modern standards and differ from feudal empires in this respect only as a matter of degree. Decentralization is, in part, simply a result of poor communications, but it is also due to the exploitative relationship between aristocrats and peasEints. Although power relationships between the central and the local aristocracy vary from empire to empire and from time to time, the central aristocracy always depends on the local U"istocracy for its taxes; it has no independent taxcollecting machinery. This is clearly true where the local aristocrats are feudal lords who tax their own peasants and are supposed to pass part of what they collect on to the higher aristocracy, be it in cash or in kind or in the form of services. But, in fact, bureaucrats, even if appointed and paid by the central aristocracy, are not so different from feudal lords. They, too, are recruited from a narrow stratum, often the lower aristocracy; they, too, tend to become

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hereditary; and in order to function effectively they must cooperate with the local landed aristocracy. It is always the local aristocrats, whether they are feudal lords or bureaucrats, who collect the tzixes and they always retain as large a part of them as possible and pass on to the central aristocracy as small a part as possible. Thus, aristocratic empires are decentralized because the aristocrat who has direct control of the land and the peasants enjoys considerable independence from the so-called central government. Provincial governors or satraps, like feudal lords, may then easily become or be tempted to become independent rulers in their own empires, that is, to retain all the taxes they collect from their peascmts. The fact that aristocrats live off the labor of peasants also shapes, directly or indirectly, their values and attitudes, so that with respect to aristocratic ideology, too, striking patterns and uniformities prevail across very different empires. Free from the necessity to do productive physiceil labor, aristocrats everywhere look down upon it with contempt. With growing commercialization, this contempt, now mixed with resentment, is often extended edso to trade and moneylending. Only the aristocratic ways of gaining wealth from taxes and tribute, from robbing and raiding are considered honorable. What distinguishes aristocrats from nonaristocrats is both their wealth and the fact that they gain it simply by virtue of being aristocrats. To set themselves apart from others, then, and to legitimize their status in their own eyes, leisure and the display of wealth are regarded as honorable and desirable in themselves. Conspicuous consumption in the form of elaborate clothing and jewelry, magnificent buildings and works of art, expensive ceremonies, and huge armies of mostly useless servants is not wasteful as it would be in modern societies offering other investment opportunities. As a display of power, it is a weapon in intraaristocratic conflicts used to overawe or to bribe potential opponents. A related aspect of aristocrats' ideology is their universal insistence on their nobility and superiority. They can maintain it simply by ascribing positive value to whatever distinguishes them from nonaristocrats, especially to their role in the economy and government, that is, as exploiters of peasants, but also to distinct racial characteristics or to their peculiar attitudes. In turn, their belief in their superiority justifies and legitimizes what sets aristocrats apart, above all, again, their ability to live off peasants. So convinced are aristocrats of their superiority that they often regard themselves as a distinct human breed. They then become concerned with preserving the purity of their "blood" and outlaw intermarriage with nonaristocrats. This practice, too, serves both to maintain and to legitimize the wide gulf between aristocrats and nonaristocrats. Another set of values held by aristocrats can be explained as rooted in the governmental and especially the military functions of the aristocracy and, in turn, serves to justify and facilitate their performance. These values thereby strengthen particular aristocrats or groupings or institutions of aristocrats in

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their conflicts with others. Duty and service to be rendered to aristocratic leaders and especiedly the acquisition of glory and the maintenance of honor are values that may completely dominate the aristocrat's life and may even require him to sacrifice it. All are predominantly military in nature and thus tend to make the aristocrat a good warrior. On the other hand, in order to live and die by these military values, the aristocrat needs wars. The quest for honor and glory, then, may be as important a motive for engaging in wars as the quest for land and peasants though victory will bring the latter as well as the former. Frequent as wars are, they may not suffice to fill the aristocrat's need for honor and glory, and more or less peaceable substitutes may have to be developed to give him the opportunity to display his courage and warlike skills. This accounts for the universal predilection of aristocrats for sports like hunting, horseback riding, and fencing, not to mention tournaments, jousts, and tilts. If politics consists of the conflicts people engage in to obtain what they consider valuable, the above makes clear what the stakes of aristocratic politics are. First, they are the control of land and peasants, that is the capacity to tax the latter, which secures to aristocrats their status as aristocrats, their wealth, their leisure, their conspicuous consumption, their ability to look down on labor and to feel superior and noble. Secondly, there are other opportunities for gaining wealth open to tax collectors, military men, and priests as they carry out their governmental functions as a private extractive enterprise. And fmzdly and equally important, the stakes of aristocratic conflict are opportunities to gain honor and glory, prestige and respect. All of these stakes are variously provided by positions within aristocratic hierarchies, like feudal, military, bureaucratic, and priestly rank orders. Hence aristocratic politics is conflict among aristocrats for positions as well as for the titles, insignia, and privileges attached to particular positions. Such conflicts can take place within and between aristocratic families, within and between aristocratic institutions, like armies and courts, within and between aristocratic empires. Indeed, family feuds, civil wars, and wars may be difficult to distinguish as forms of aristocratic politics. In the process of aristocratic politics and competition, aristocrats ceaselessly change positions, individual aristocrats, their families and factions rise and fall and so do entire dynasties and empires. But throughout this instability and however much aristocrats may differ in individual character and new empires may differ from their predecessors with respect to the culture of their rulers, aristocratic rule as such remains stable, unchanging, and unchangeable. It persists as long as the agrarian economy continues and there is no extensive commercialization or unless an aristocratic empire collapses and peasants regain their independence, that is, freedom from taxation. And while the aristocracy remains in power, aristocrats must behave as such, they must consume without producing and they must live off peasants. This, in turn, conditions the nature of the government of their empires and the content and form of their ideology and their politics. Instability prevails within the

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aristocracy as it may within peasant villages and within towns but the relation of the aristocracy as a class with the peasantry and the townspeople remains stable and unaffected. This, of course, restates that aristocrats and peasants are not mere classes in the modern sense ofthat term; they (and also the townspeople not directly attached to the aristocracy) live in different societies, and each of these societies constitutes a separate arena of politics. There is little contact and hence little conflict between these societies or classes. Conflict takes place not between classes but within them within the aristocracy and within each village and town. Since political change can come about only through conflict, the absence of conflict between the classes explains the absence of change in their relationship to each other. The aristocracy has no interest in changing it, and the peasantry is not in a position to change it. It cannot, intellectually or physically, challenge a relationship clearly disadvantageous to it, because its intellectual and political horizon is limited to the village. The peasants are engaged in a process of production and employ a technology that are far older than the aristocratic empire. That process and technology remain stable through millennia and appropriate to the self-sufficient village economy, and peasants remain unable to think of affecting the world beyond their village, let alone of organizing beyond the village level, as they would have to do to rid themselves of or to modify aristocratic control. Thus, if the absence of conflict explains the absence of change, the absence of change also explains the absence of conflict. The two go together. Consequently, while particular aristocracies and empires rise and decline as a result of intraaristocratic politics, the relationship ofthe aristocracy to the peasants that is, the aristocratic empire as a type endures until it is at last affected by modernization. Remnants and Legacies of Aristocratic Politics As a result of modernization, classes and groups develop and are politicized that can compete with the aristocracy and thus fundamentally change the nature of politics from what it was in traditional aristocratic empires. Here we can merfly note that these political consequences of modernization differ widely depending on whether modernization develops gradually from within aristocratic empires through growing commercizJization and then industrialization, as happened in Western Europe and, to a point, in Japan, or comes relatively suddenly from without in the form of modem industrijilism into aristocratic empires that are already somewhat commercialized (like nineteenth-century Russia) or still traditional (like Saudi Arabia in the 1930s). Whether modernization from without intrudes primarily through colonialism (as in India and China) or arrives principally at the invitation of elements in the native aristocracy seeking military strength or greater wealth (as in Russia and Mexico), it gives rise to a revolutionary process generally led by movements of modernizers that finds the aristocracy institutionally and

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ideologicjJly unprepared to resist. Its power is now irretrievably destroyed aind it may either completely disappear in a matter of years or only some relatively weak remnants, as in the clergy, may survive. In countries modernized from without, it is the peasantry rather than the aristocracy that persists as the major remnant from the days of aristocratic empires. It is in the countries modernized from within, where the traditional peasantry has disappeared, at least in the past century, that remnants of aristocratic institutions zind thinking are strongest, having survived a millennium of advancing commercisdization and even industrialization through a complex process of conflict and adaption.4 The remaining pages offer a few illustrations of the persistence into the present of these remnants and thus of the pervasiveness of traditionalism in the politics of countries modernized from within, referring to Britain, France, and Germany as principal examples. Almost all of the present-day European au^istocracy is a modern creation rather than a survival ofthe traditional past. However, until quite recently at least, most ofthe more or less new aristocrats eagerly imitated the behavior of the old ones and accepted the old aristocratic institutions and values. Thus, though the aristocratic families of the traditional aristocratic empires have long ago become extinct, their institutions and values survive them. Down to our own generation in the industrially most advzmced countries of Western Europe, only a very few careers have been considered proper ones to be chosen by an aristocrat and these are precisely the careers aristocrats have pursued since the dawn of traditioned aristocratic empires, those of rulers and military men, bureaucrats and priests. While aristocrats no longer effectively rule today merely by virtue of being aristocrats, France and Switzerland were until the twentieth century the only republics in Europe, and some monarchs, like the German emperor, were politically quite powerful. Even today, half the countries of Western Europe are headed by monarchs who, as is also true of a majority of the members of the British House of Lords, rest what claim to authority they have solely on the aristocratic basis of descent and noble blood. More importantly, most notably in Britain where modern representative institutions grew out of aristocratic ones without any drastic break, aristocrats learned to appeal to the expanding electorate for votes. As party leaders, legitimated by the voters but partly, no doubt, because of their prestige as aristocrats, they can still pursue the ancient aristocratic career of rulers. In Western Europe, as elsewhere, large estates owned by kings and princes, dukes, counts, and barons, and also by churches and monasteries, and worked by "their" peasants survived from the Middle Ages until recently or to the present day, such as those of the Prussian Junkers east of the Elbe or of French aristocrats, especially in western France. Even where large landowners became predominantly commercial farmers, they might well remain predominantly aristocrats in ideology. As such, they could effectively function as the rulers of the peasant tenants on their estates as aristocrats did in their traditionzd empires.

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Service in the hierarchy ofthe established state church, whether Catholic, Lutheran, or Anglican, has been considered another appropriate career for an aristocrat and so has government service in high bureaucratic positions. These latter positions were, at least until World War II, filled disproportionately by aristocrats, often because their occupants were drawn from the graduates of educational institutions which, in turn, favored aristocrats in their admission policies. Certain elite branches ofthe bureaucracy in particular attracted the aristocracy, such as those ofthe ministry of finance, the colonial service, and, invariably, the foreign service. Most government activities developed, after all, only in the modern, postaristocratic age, but taxation, the governing of occupied territories, and the conduct of foreign affairs have been functions ofthe aristocracy from the very beginnings of aristocratic empires and, hence, are seen by aristocrats as proper fields of activity. Foreign relations are, of course, closely tied to wjirfare and were relations among aristocrats and, indeed, in Europe often intrafamily relations when empires were identified and defined by their ruling aristocrats. Even more than the diplomatic corps, the military has remained what it has been from the beginnings of traditional aristocratic empires, the profession par excellence ofthe aristocracy. Military officers, like high-ranking bureaucrats, have until quite recently been disproportionately recruited from the cU'istocracy, and the aristocracy has considered the military its special domain. The aristocracy's powerful role in the leadership of European armies as late as World War I and even World War II, notably in the Prussian-German general staff, is too well known to require discussion. Given the key position of armies, not only in warfare and foreign policy but also in domestic politics in a number of European countries, including Germany and France, the power of aristocrats holding positions that were open to them because they were aristocrats becomes apparent. Although bureaucracies and military organizations, as well as clergies of established churches, evolved out of their decentralized predecessors into their modern centralized form only in the absolutist phase of aristocratic rule that grew with commercialization and mercantilism, there survived in them the obsessive traditional aristocratic interest in hierarchical arrangements with well-defined ranks, each with its particular powers and privileges and, at least equaJly important, its title and insignia. Another characteristic of the modern military preserved from the days of aristocratic empires when aristocrats led all armies, but peasants were the footsoldiers in some of them, is the distinction between officers and "common" soldiers. Unlike distinctions of rank among the officers and among the men, it is above all a social one, derived from that between the aristocracy and the rest of the population. Aristocrats have generally remained dominant in the military more than in any other institution and have powerfully shaped its structure and ideology down to the present. With its emphasis on duty and honor, on rank, titles, and insignia, and on the visible superiority of an upper over a lower caste, the military comes closer to reflecting the character of the aristocracy in its tradi-

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tional empires than any other modern institution. This is true even in countries without an aristocratic background, like the United States, where the military was copied from European models. Among the surviving values of aristocrats, duty and service remain important in their minds. As in aristocratic empires, so in modern times the proper aristocrat serves what he perceives to be an aristocratic institution, and, in modern armies and bureaucracies as in traditional ones, obedience to the orders of higher authority and performance of duty both guide and can justify the individual member's behavior. However, there may be a question to whom the performance of service and duty is owed. After all, even in traditional aristocratic empires, these values by no means prevented conflict among aristocrats, including defiance by inferior aristocrats of their superiors. If, in the course of modernization, the institutions to which the aristocracy pledged its loyalty and service, for example governments or, more specifically, armies or bureaucracies, cease to be exclusively or even principally aristocratic ones and come to represent the interests of broader strata of the population, aristocrats may nevertheless continue to serve them. Thus, aristocratic French army officers have in this century fought and died for a republic they detested, because they were loyal to the army or even to "France." However, aristocrats may well feel that the bureaucracy and military controlled by them represent the country or the nation, but that a republican government that grew out of a break with a monarchy does not represent the "true" nation. Thus, aristocrats while dominating key executive organs of a government may nevertheless deny its legitimacy, feel alienated from it, and be disloyal to it, all in the name of loyalty, service, and duty to the country. Leading elements in the French army and bureaucracy were hostile to their government from the shaky beginnings of the Third Republic to the end ofthe Fourth Republic. In Germany, the aristocracy had its own government, which it could serve loyally, until 1918. In the Weimar Republic, however, even more than in France, the army and the bureaucracy regarded themselves rather than the elected organs of the government as the real representatives of what they defined as the nation. From the beginning of that Republic to its early end at the hands ofthe Nazis, aristocratic elements in the army and the bureaucracy failed to support or actively opposed the government. In Britain, the aristocracy did not face a new republican government to be alienated from, but even here, army officers, in the so-called Curragh Mutiny, refused to follow orders of a Libercil Government, putting loyalty to what they defined as the national interest above service to the government. If the u-istocracy played a crucial role in the domestic politics of Western European countries until recently, this is even more true in the fields of foreign relations and especiaJly warfare. In domestic politics, numerous nonaristocratic interests have come to participate, but in foreign policy and war, the aristocracy had, through its control ofthe foreign service and the military, managed to limit the influence of such competing interests. As a result, aristocratic ideology has continued, from the days of traditional aristocratic

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empires to the present, to play a powerful role in foreign and military affairs. In addition to the aristocratic conceptions of service and duty, it is those of glory and particularly of honor that matter here. Especially in German history through World War II, the justification and often the glorification of war as a matter of honor and as a source of glory have been powerful ideological elements, but they played an important role also in the thinking of British and French ideologists and political leaders, e.g., Churchill and de Gaulle, to name only two. Even in those few modern countries that lack an aristocratic background, but whose military and diplomatic establishments imitate, organizationally and ideologically, those shaped by an aristocratic past, aristocratic ideology, has remained important in the conduct of foreign policy. Modern prime ministers and presidents who would not dream of demanding lower teixes or higher welfare benefits in the name of national honor do not hesitate to justify their foreign policy or military moves by claiming that the maintenance of honor requires them. To be sure, a multitude of objectives, including very practical ones, can hide behind the concept of honor, but to deny that the concern with honor as such still influences the foreign and military policies of modern governments would be to underestimate the continuing vitality of the original aristocratic values. In passing, I may also refer to other symptoms of the persistence of aristocratic ideologies and culture tied to aristocratic involvement in warfare and hence to war-related activities. Dueling, the aristocrat's response to a challenge to his honor, has remained an aristocratic practice into the present century. Even more striking, the horse is still linked to the aristocracy, with the cavadry always the aristocrat's favorite branch of the army. The aristocratic sport of horseback riding and hunting, especially fox hunting on horseback, continue associated with the aristocracy (and the newer upper classes seeking to imitate it) to this day. Contempt for manual labor is another aspect of aristocratic ideology that has survived into modern times, and commerce, too, long continued to be regarded as demeaning. Thus, as new investment opportunities developed at the onset of industrialization, aristocrats, though then the wealthiest class, were very rarely the ones who provided capital for industry. In societies more and more commercijilized and industrialized, it has, of course, been increasingly hard to maintain the taboo against "going into trade," but in aristocratic ideology a certain aura of disrepute has nevertheless remained attached to participation in business. The condescending attitude of many intellectuals in Europe and some in underdeveloped countries towards America a country without an aristocracy and her culture as materialistic, crude, and crass and the widely held view ofthe city, in contrast to the country, as corrupt and corrupting may both be related to the aristocratic contempt for commerce. Also, the fields of study emphasized in the educational institutions attended by the children of the aristocracy and, hence, those of the newer middle and upper classes, too, have, at least until quite recently, reflected aristocratic values and

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especially aristocratic disdain for msmuaJ labor and commerce and therefore also for science and technology. Finally, another obvious remnant of aristocrats' ideology is their belief in their own superiority to the rest of mankind and their concern with the purity of their noble blood. A proper marriage for an aristocrat is possible only within the aristocracy, though, along with the rest of aristocratic ideology, the prohibition of intermEirriage with nonaristocrats has been crumbling under the impact of modernization. Members of European dynasties have, at least until recently, tended to intermarry with each other, with the consequence that hardly any royal house could claim to be ofthe san\e nationality as the people it ruled. Nationality, however, is an irrelevant concept in this context, for the aristocracy is a remnant of the aristocratic, prenationalist order in Europe, when dynasties and empires were not linked to their subjects by ethnicity or nationadity. Looking now more generally at the modem legacy of eiristocratic empires, it could, in a sweeping historical argument, well be claimed that we owe to the aristocracy all of what is commonly known as civilization beyond that developed by primitive cultivators and nomads. If it is only exploitation that compels peasants to produce a surplus, then all of technology, science, and art, in the material realm as well as that of thought and ideas, beyond the level achieved by subsistence agriculturalists and pastoralists, as well as urbanization, is due to the existence of aristocracies. Of course, one might alternatively speculate that, had cultivators not been prevented from doing so by aristocratic exploitation, they might eventually have developed some more advanced civilization of their own. In any case, the aristocratic empire, by subjecting numerous village societies to a single aristocratic society, brought to humanity for the first time rigid class divisions and large settled territories under one government, however rudinientary. Rigid class divisions have only recently been breeiking down, and territorial states under governments remain dominant features of human organization. Crucial in the relations of those who control modern states is the threat Jind fear of war. The functions and purposes, as well as the forms, of warfare have changed with modernization, but war between large territoriail entities, aiming at and resulting in changes in their boundaries, is another legacy passed down to modem man from aristocratic empires. Furthermore, it was aristocratic empires that made possible the process of commercialization which, in turn, put an end to aristocratic empires. It led to the industrialization of Western Europe that destroyed aristocratic empires elsewhere, relatively recently and suddenly, by impinging on them from without. In Western Europe itself commercialization and then industralization, working more gradually through hundreds of years, changed aristocratic empires from within. The past century or so has finally witnessed the decline of the aristocracy even in Western Europe. Its values have been diluted, its influence, even in what used to be its own institutions of the military, the bureaucracy, and the clergy, has been reduced, and it is now disappearing as a

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distinct social class. In France and Germany, this decline has been punctuated by powerful rearguard actions, some of which were fought successfully and decisively affected world history, as by helping to produce the Nazi regime and World War II. In Britain, the decline has been more gradual, taking place through a merger with the bourgeoisie. In the very process of its decline and disappearance, however the aristocracy has helped to shape the present and the future. The political Right is a direct descendant of the aristocracy. As it came to represent the new business upper classes, too, its commitments to Throne and Altar were modified, but the Right is to this day ideologically more or less associated with the military, the bureaucracy, and the established church, that is, the ancient institutions of the aristocracy, and with the vzJues they stand for. However, the Western European aristocracy had a great deal to do with shaping not only the character ofthe political Right but also that ofthe Left. Western European socialism as a mass movement was in large part a reaction to the inequality and discrimination to which the rapidly growing working class was subjected in an environment still dominated by the rigid class lines first drawn in traditional aristocratic empires. The new bourgeoisie, as a wealthy upper class, eventually found its place in that environment, more or less in alliance with the aristocracy. Industrial labor, however, simply did not fit. It was excluded and treated as an alien element and it reacted as such by creating its own closed society the socialist (and, in this century in France and Italy, also the communist) labor movement within the larger hostile society. The absence of an aristocracy in American history is responsible not only for the absence of conservatism (in the European sense of that word) but also for that of socialism. One of the major demands of the labor movement has been what can be summed up as the welfare state, and its attainment helped to integrate that movement into the larger society socially and politically and to brezik down the rigid class lines created by the aristocracy. But the institution of the welfare state, too, owes something to the aristocracy. Its emergence was eased by the existence and widespread acceptance of powerful bureaucracies inherited from aristocratic absolutism and influenced by an aristocracy that had always identified itself with the "state" and could hence come to think of itself as representing, even if in a somewhat patronizing manner, the "people." Unlike the liberal bourgeoisie, the aristocracy identified with government and had no objection to a strong and active bureaucracy not only in foreign affairs but also in social ones. There were even aristocrats who believed in "tory socialism" and contemplated an alliance against their bourgeois rivals with the new labor movements, especially as long as these were weak and posed no threat to the eu-istocracy. Powerful aristocratic remnants, then, helped neutralize bourgois oppostion to the welfare state and were by no means an obstacle to its growth. Here, too, if one looks for explanations of differences between American and Western European politics, one can do worse than to begin one's analysis with the absence of an aristocracy in the United States.

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JOHN H. KAUTSKY

The persistence of an aristocracy and the political responses to it of the past two centuries conservatism, liberalism, and socialism, clericalism and anti-clericaJism in good part account for the emergence in Western Europe of political parties that have distinct programs and ideologies and that direct their appeals to, and represent, the interests of distinct segments ofthe population, characteristics that are only now in the process of being diluted. Here surely is one of the basic differences between the politics of Western Europe and that of the United States where there are no such parties and where the nature of electoral and legislative politics is, hence, quite different. Modem politics is drastically unlike the politics of aristocratic empires, but modern politics would not be what they are if these empires had not existed. If we would hope to understand the politics of our own time, we must know something of the politics of their antecedents in the traditional aristocratic empires of the past.
REFERENCES
KAUTSKY, John H.

1980 The Political Consequences of Modernization. Huntington, N.Y.: Krieger. (1972) 1982 The Politics of Aristocratic Empires. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. NOTES 1 The first half of this article is a brief condensation of Parts II and III of my book on TTie Politics ofAristocratic Empires (1982), and the second half summarizes its final chapter. I draw on my book, in good pjut verbatim, with the permission ofthe University of North Carolina Press. Documentation as well as evidence and illustrations supporting the generalizations that are merely stated here are omitted in this article because of space limitations, but are provided in my book. Historical sociologists, the only socied scientists who have deetlt with traditional eiristocratic empires, have generally not felt the need to differentiate dearly between these and commercialized societies and can then not distinguish traditional elements from consequences of modernization. For exeimple, f>easant revolts, which almost invariably occur only after the onset of commercialization, are often ascribed to traditional aristocratic empires. Cf Kautsky (1982: 278-319). I list numerous empires meeting or closely approaching my definition or ideal type of a pure traditional aristocratic empire (1982: 29-32). The process of commercialization is defined and illustrated (1982: chapter 2). I deal very briefly with this process (1982: 355-59), and I draw the distinction between modernization from within and modernization from without and analyze the political consequences principally ofthe latter in Kautsky (1980).

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