ARISTOCRACY. — In Plato and Aristotle, this signifies a form of government: that constituted by men who stand out for their intellectual and moral qualities. According to the two Greek philosophers, however, intellectual and moral excellence is connected with economic independence; hence the best can belong only to the higher classes, distinguished above all by inherited wealth and nobility of origin.
In the Middle Ages it did not signify a form of government, but a class of citizens: one which, distinguished from the clergy and the bourgeoisie—the latter of mercantile and industrial origin—was based on the exercise of arms, on a body of political and civil competencies, and on privileges transmissible by inheritance. It could be either monarchical (France) or republican (Venice), depending on whether it relied upon a dynasty or itself assumed the sum of state powers.
In the modern age, especially following the French Revolution, a. lost its political function; and therefore, as it had existed in the Middle Ages, it ceased to exist. The term, however, continued to survive in order to designate a category of persons who, by virtue of their exceptional qualities, came to have directive functions in society.
According to Carlyle, human progress is brought about by heroes: Muhammad, Dante, Luther, Cromwell, Rousseau, Napoleon. For Emerson, representative men are those who express the deepest feeling of the human soul and mark the course of history.
In Nietzsche’s works, on the other hand, the assertion returns very frequently that the reason for society’s existence and the goal of progress is the formation of a body of superior men (the superman); that is, of true aristocrats, whose will must be so vigorous as to break the moral law without the slightest remorse, in order to celebrate their freedom beyond the boundaries of good and evil: “the essential thing in a good and healthy a. is that it should not regard itself as a function, whether of a king or of a community, but rather as their intimate meaning and highest justification; and that it should therefore embrace in good conscience the sacrifice of innumerable individuals, who for its sake must be reduced to incomplete men, slaves, instruments. Its fundamental creed must be summed up in this: that society should not exist for society itself, but solely as a foundation, as a scaffolding, to serve as support and as a means of elevation for an elect species of beings, so that they may attain their lofty tasks and, in general, a higher existence: like the sun-thirsty lianas found on the island of Java, which cling to the oak in order to rise above it and to unfold, in the splendid light of the sun, the pomp of their flowers, thus displaying their happiness to the world” (Beyond Good and Evil, no. 258, trans. by E. Weisel, Turin 1922).
The Nietzschean position perhaps represents the most radical distortion of our age: a hero is not one who prides himself on having broken the moral law; rather, a hero is one who conforms his will to it at every moment and in all the circumstances of life; for the moral law is the deepest demand of the human being, who is enriched by following it and not by violating II.