ARISTOCRACY

government by a relatively small privileged class or by a minority consisting of those felt to be best qualified to rule. Politically, as conceived by Plato and Aristotle, aristocracy means the rule of the best few, the morally and intellectually superior, governing in the interest of the people. Such a form of government differs from the rule of one (monarchy or tyranny), of many (democracy), or of the selfish or militarily ambitious few (oligarchy or timocracy). Unfortunately, because the best is an evaluative and somewhat subjective notion, it is difficult objectively to distinguish aristocratic from oligarchic or timocratic governments. Because monarchy has its own aristocracy and because, in democracies, the people try to elect the best as their rulers, the aristocratic element is also present in these regimes. For these reasons aristocracy, in a more objective sense, means the upper layer of a stratified group. Thus, the upper ranks of the government form the political aristocracy of the state. The stratum of the highest dignitaries constitutes the aristocracy of the church. The richest captains of industry and finance constitute an aristocracy of wealth in an economic group. The Brahman caste in the caste society of India, the Spartiates in Sparta, the eupatridae in Athens, the patricians or optimates in Rome, and the medieval nobility in Europe are examples of the social aristocracy or nobility in these groups and societies. Moreover, most such social aristocracies have beenboth legally and factuallyhereditary aristocracies (i.e., those by reason of birth). Other aristocracies have been nonhereditary, recruited from different strata of the population, such as the upper stratum of the Roman Catholic Church, the ruling aristocracy of elective republics and monarchies, the leaders of scientific and artistic organizations, certain aristocracies of wealth, and even some emperors like the emperors of the Roman Empire, of whom about 43 percent were upstarts. The distinction between aristocracy of birth and nonhereditary aristocracy is relative, however, because even in a caste society some lowborn persons climb into the higher castes and some of the highborn members slide down into the lower castes. On the other hand, even in open aristocracies there is always a tendency for the upper stratum to become a hereditary group filled mainly by the offspring of the aristocratic parents. In the United States, for example, among the living multimillionairesthe aristocracy of wealththe percentage of those born of wealthy parents is notably higher than among the American multimillionaires of the middle of the 19th century.