Abstract
This chapter examines the precursor to the gentry, namely, the warrior-aristocracy, which was a characteristic feature of aristocratic empires. After describing the general traits of the aristocratic empire, the author considers a trio of different cultural traditions which typically arose in the most advanced of the ancient aristocratic societies. He argues that the Greeks, Romans, Chinese, and Hebrews all developed distinctive forms of aristocratic humanism, and that Greece, China, and India also produced their own versions of a dualism pitting ascetic supernaturalism against hedonistic materialism.
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- 1.
As regarded the relationship of his own philosophy to aristocratic values, it is noteworthy that Nietzsche wrote the following in a letter to Danish literary critic Georg Brandes: “The expression ‘aristocratic radicalism’, which you employ, is very good. It is, permit me to say, the shrewdest thing that I have yet read about myself.” (Nice, December 2nd, 1887) [in Friedrich Nietzsche, Werke in drei Bänden (München: Band 3, 1954) S. 1271–1273.] Not surprisingly, the idea of taste was also an important concept for Nietzsche. Consider, for instance, the following passage from Thus Spoke Zarathustra: “And ye tell me, friends, that there is to be no dispute about taste and tasting? But all life is a dispute about taste and tasting!
Taste: that is weight at the same time, and scales and weigher; and alas for every living thing that would live without dispute about weight and scales and weigher!”
- 2.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans. Helen Zimmern (New York: Macmillan, 1907) 223–224.
- 3.
Kautsky, The Politics of Aristocratic Empires, 34.
- 4.
Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class, 8.
- 5.
Gilbert Murray, Five Stages of Greek Religion, 3rd ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1951) 46–47.
- 6.
Kautsky, The Politics of Aristocratic Empires, 31.
- 7.
Robert L. Heilbroner and William Milberg, The Making of Economic Society, 11th ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2002) 33.
- 8.
Ibidem, 16.
- 9.
Kautsky, The Politics of Aristocratic Empires, 42.
- 10.
Heiner Roetz, Confucian Ethics of the Axial Age: A Reconstruction Under the Aspect of the Breakthrough Toward Postconventional Thinking (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993) 34.
- 11.
Kautsky, The Politics of Aristocratic Empires, 34.
- 12.
Peter L. Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (New York: Doubleday, 1967) 86.
- 13.
Ibidem, 132–133.
- 14.
G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970) 83.
- 15.
Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte, 84–85.
- 16.
Flavius Josephus, The Wars of the Jews, trans. William Whiston (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1915) 139.
- 17.
See any of the various Internet copies of W. D. Ross’s translation of the Nicomachean Ethics, Book II, Chapter VI, wherein Aristotle provides the full definition of virtue.
- 18.
Max Weber, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie, Band I (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1920) 244–247.
- 19.
Robert N. Bellah, “Religious Evolution”, American Sociological Review, Vol. 29, No. 3 (June, 1964): 367.
- 20.
See various citations in Kautsky, The Politics of Aristocratic Empires, 257–266.
- 21.
Huston Smith, The Religions of Man (New York: Harper & Row, 1958) 200.
- 22.
Bellah, “Religious Evolution”, 368.
- 23.
Berger, The Sacred Canopy, 56.
- 24.
Ibidem.
- 25.
Karen Horney, New Ways in Psychoanalysis (New York: W. W. Norton, 1939) 272–273.
- 26.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals: A Polemic, trans. Horace B. Samuel (Edinburgh: T. N. Foulis, 1913) 190.
- 27.
Epictetus, The Works of Epictetus, trans. from the Greek based on that of Elizabeth Carter, by Thomas Wentworth Higginson (Boston: Little Brown, 1865) 378.
- 28.
Richard Garbe, s.v. “Lokayata”, in Encyclopædia of Religion and Ethics (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1915); Max Müller, The Six Systems of Indian Philosophy (London: Longman Greens, 1899) 94–104; and Heinrich Zimmer, Philosophies of India, ed. Joseph Campbell (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1952) 613n.
- 29.
John Emerson, “Yang Chu’s Discovery of the Body”, Philosophy East and West, Vol. 46, No. 4 (Oct, 1996): 549.
- 30.
Ibidem, 541.
- 31.
Ibidem, 550.
- 32.
Karl Polyani, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 1944) 57.
- 33.
John Maynard Keynes, Essays and Sketches in Biography (New York: Meridian Books, 1956) 251–252.
- 34.
John Maynard Keynes, Essays in Persuasion (New York: W. W. Norton, 1963) 308.
- 35.
Keynes, Essays and Sketches in Biography, 253.
- 36.
Ibidem.
- 37.
Keynes, Essays in Persuasion, 300.
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Mitchell, J. (2019). On the Origins of Aristocracy. In: On the Decline of the Genteel Virtues. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20354-2_2
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