ARISTOCRACY. — In Plato and Aristotle it signifies a form of government: that constituted by men who stand out for intellectual and moral qualities. According to the two Greek philosophers, however, intellectual and moral excellence is connected with economic independence; hence the best cannot belong except to the highest classes, which are distinguished above all by inherited wealth and noble origin.
In the Middle Ages it does not signify a form of government, but a class of citizens: that which, distinguishing itself from the clergy and the bourgeoisie—of mercantile and industrial origin, the latter—was based on the exercise of arms, on a complex of political-civil skills, and on privileges transmissible by inheritance. It could be as much monarchical (France) as republican (Venice), depending on whether it relied on a dynasty or assumed for itself the sum of state powers.
In the modern age, especially following the French Revolution, aristocracy loses its political function; and thus, as it was in the Middle Ages, it ceases to exist. The term, however, continues to subsist to indicate a category of persons who, by reason of their exceptional qualities, come to have directive roles in society.
According to Carlyle, human progress is carried out by heroes: Mohammed, Dante, Luther, Cromwell, Rousseau, Napoleon. For Emerson, representative men are those who express the deepest feeling of the human soul and mark the path in history.
In the works of Nietzsche, on the other hand, the assertion recurs frequently that the raison d’être of society and the goal of progress is the formation of a host of superior men (superman); that is, of true aristocrats, whose will must be so vigorous as to shatter, without a shadow of remorse, the moral law in order to celebrate their freedom beyond the boundaries of good and evil: “The essential thing in a good and healthy aristocracy is that it should not feel itself as a function, whether of a king or of a community, but as an inner significance and as the higher justification of the latter; and that it should therefore, with a good conscience, envelop the sacrifice of countless individuals, who for its sake must be reduced to incomplete men, slaves, instruments. Its fundamental creed must be understood as meaning that society should not exist for society itself, but solely as a base, as a scaffolding, to serve as a support, as a means of elevation for an elect species of beings so that they may attain their high tasks and, in general, a more elevated existence: just as the two sunflowers that are found on the island of Java, which embrace the oak to rise above it and to display in the splendid light of the sun the pomp of their flowers and thus expose to the world their happiness” (Beyond Good and Evil, no. 258, trans. by E. Weisel, Turin 1922).
Nietzsche’s position perhaps represents the most radical distortion of our age: a hero is not he who boasts of having shattered the moral law; a hero, rather, is he who aligns his will with it in every moment and in all the contingencies of life; because the moral law is the deepest exigency of the human being, who is enriched by following it and not by violating II.