Open Left

"Aristocracy"

If there's no aristocracy in the United States, because there are no "aristocratic titles," as Paul Rosenberg now claims, it doesn't make sense to talk about rooting out "royalism/aristocracy," which was the premise of his silly diary..

The usual definitions of "aristocracy" cover anything at the top of a social pyramid (and it's more or less superfluous to include a hereditary component in the definition, because every ruling class is adept at perpetuating itself)...

The aristocracy are people considered to be in the highest social class in society, who traditionally have land, money, and power.

And apart from the internet currency of Wikipedia, there's also a long line of American historians like George Bancroft,  Frederick Jackson Turner, and especially Charles A. Beard, who analyzed the early history of the United States as an interplay of the "counter-revolutionary" aspirations of the old colonial aristocracy against populist resistance on the frontier.

Although Beard was much more hostile to the aristocracy than Turner and Bancroft (Beard actually called the Framers of the Constitution "anti-American"), Turner was also haunted by a vision of the old dichotomy between aristocrats and frontiersmen transformed into permanent classes of plutocrats and proletarians, and yet...

In spite of infinite differences in emphasis and approval, no reputable American historian ever denied that the Constitution and Declaration of Independence were designed and enforced by American aristocrats.

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by: Jacob Freeze @ Sun Jul 05, 2009 at 13:09:04 PM CDT