ARISTOCRACY. - In Plato and Aristotle it means a form of government: one 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, which are distinguished above all by inherited wealth and by nobility of origin.
In the Middle Ages it does not mean a form of government, but a class of citizens: the one which, being distinct from the clergy and from the bourgeoisie - the latter being mercantile and industrial in origin - was founded on the exercise of arms, on a body of political and civic competences, and on privileges transmissible by inheritance. It could be either monarchical (France) or republican (Venice), depending on whether it relied on a dynasty or itself assumed the sum of state powers.
In the modern age, especially following the French Revolution, the a. loses its political function; and therefore, 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 their exceptional qualities, come to have directive tasks 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 path in history.
In the works of Nietzsche, on the other hand, there very often recurs the assertion that the reason for being 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 break, 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 a. is that it should not feel itself to be a function, whether of a king or of a community, but rather an intimate meaning and a higher justification of these; and that it should therefore envelop in good conscience the sacrifice of innumerable individuals, who for its sake must be reduced to being 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 base, as a scaffolding, to serve as a support, as a means of elevation for a chosen species of beings, so that they may attain their high tasks and in general a higher existence: just like the llana vines thirsting for sun that are found on the island of Java and that cling to the oak to nestle above it and to unfold in the splendid light of the sun the pomp of their flowers and thus expose their happiness to the world» (Beyond Good and Evil, no. 258, trans. by E. Weisel, Turin 1922).
The Nietzschean position represents perhaps the most radical distortion of our age: a hero is not he who takes pride in having broken the moral law; a hero, rather, is he who conforms his will to it at every instant and in all the contingencies of life; because the moral law is the deepest exigency of the human being, who enriches himself by following it and not by violating it.
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Pietro Pavan