There used to be an American nobility

Aristocracy III: How we collapsed into plutocracy

…the high quality of Virginia's political leadership in the years when the United States was being established was due in large measure to these very things which are now detested. Washington and Jefferson, Madison and Monroe, Mason, Marshall, and Peyton Randolph, were products of the system which sought out and raised to high office men of superior family and social status, of good education, or personal force, of experience in management: they were placed in power by a semi-aristocratic political system.

— Charles S. Sydnor, American Revolutionaries in the Making

Introduction

Every society will always have inequality, and will always have leaders. The question is: who are they, and what are their values?

Removing inheritance to prevent multi-generational elites does not reduce the corruption of the rich. As I noted in my essay The rich should leave their wealth to their children, not to charity:

…society will always have elites. If one generation hamstrings their children from taking its place - someone else will fill the elite vacuum. The actual effect of this hamstringing is to ensure that our societal elites are perpetually first-generation wealth - the latest fund manager or entrepreneur to take a morally dubious tech product to IPO. The tyranny of the nouveau riche.

There is a name for rule by a rich class which exercises power without a sense of history or noblesse oblige: plutocracy. The question is: is there a viable alternative?

In Part I of this series, we established that - theoretically - inequality can be desirable and just, and in Part II we extended this logic intergenerationally. Some readers took this to be an absolute defence of every inequality, and argued in the comments that my position is invalid because certain elites are corrupt.

But these criticisms misunderstood what I was attempting, which was to show that in principle, when virtuous and properly ordered, inequality can be good and just. This is the difference between an aristocracy and a mere oligarchy.

Today, we clarify that difference. What does order look like? What is the exact form that a properly ordered aristocracy takes, and how does its function emerge out of that form?

‘WASP’ historian and sociologist E. Digby Baltzell

The absence of order

Two observers of American society, Alexis de Tocqueville and Walter Lippmann, noted a threat to American governance which has now fully materialized: disorder, short-sightedness, and self-interest amongst a random elite of purely self-made men.¹

I believe that ambitious men in democracies are less engrossed than any other with the interests and judgments of posterity; the present moment alone engages and absorbs them... and they care much more for success than for fame. What appears to me most to be dreaded is that in the midst of the small, incessant occupations of private life, ambition should lose its vigour and its greatness.

— Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Our rulers today are a random collection of successful men and their wives… They have been educated to achieve success, but few of them have been educated to exercise power. Nor do they count with any confidence upon retaining their power, nor of handing it on to their sons. They live therefore from day to day, they govern by ear.

— Walter Lippmann, A Preface to Morals

Advocates of individual meritocracy face a conundrum: it takes one set of skills to establish power - typically martial prowess or professional skill - but another to have the understanding and authority necessary to arrange society for holistic flourishing, inclusive of morality, health, religion, art, culture, ritual, and manners.

If the only path to establish leadership is through seizing power oneself, there is never an incentive to develop this latter set of understandings and virtues. Men have only an incentive to develop the power to seize.

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Likewise, a sense of fair play, of reputation, of honour, only becomes essential in an iterative game; one played over time by the same participants - with names to uphold and ongoing relationships to sustain. Thus the fair play of the gentleman is intimately tied to his family name, which ‘plays’ with a similar set of families through many generations. It is no coincidence that these particularly Anglo values arose amongst the British aristocracy.

The great theorist of these mechanics in America was E. Digby Baltzell, who is most known for popularizing the term WASP (‘White Anglo-Saxon Protestant’). But his sociological research was brilliant more broadly (

Aaron M. Renn

provides an excellent overview here).

Baltzell’s sweeping work Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia (1979) argues that a beneficent inegalitarianism amongst the Massachusetts elite led to the formation of families - the Cabbots, the Adams, the Winthrops - capable of great and diverse leadership. Scions of these families were radically overrepresented in every domain of American history, from the Founding Fathers to the creation and stewardship of institutions like Harvard.

In contrast, Baltzell argues, an egalitarian spirit and theology amongst the most capable men of Philadelphia led to them shying away from converting the wealth they created into instruments of lasting societal leadership. This resulted in a paradoxically plutocratic and self-indulgent elite class which made little mark on the broader American story.

All [the Founding Fathers] were reared in Massachusetts or Virginia; none was reared in the colony of Pennsylvania, though Philadelphia was the largest city in the new nation and contained perhaps the wealthiest, most successful, gayest, and most brilliant elite in the land. Not only had Pennsylvanians little to do with taking the lead in our nation's founding, but the state has produced very few distinguished Americans throughout our history…

Why this great difference between Pennsylvania and the two leadership states of Massachusetts and Virginia? Why are wealth, a high standard of living, and success-all characteristic of Philadelphia in the last part of the eighteenth century and of American society as a whole today-not necessarily correlated with leadership? What has all this got to do with the fact that Massachusetts was founded on hierarchical and theocratic values; Virginia, on the Cavalier ideals of aristocracy; and Pennsylvania, on the egalitarian and anti-authoritarian ideals of the Quakers?

— E. Digby Baltzell, Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia

The creation of order

The lack of a definite aristocratic culture which provides the members of this ruling group with common ideals and standards of behavior and thus integrates them into a conscious society is perhaps the most distinctive aspect of the modern condition. Exploiters and exploited have existed since the dawn of history, but the only parallel to the modern situation is that of Rome in the days of the late Republic. Here also power came to be vested in the hands of a group of self-made men who had no common standards and no feeling of responsibility to each other or to the state.

— Ralph Linton, The Study of Man (quoted in Baltzell)

The key distinction in Baltzell’s sociology is between mere elites and the upper class. Elites are the most successful and wealthy men within a given generation. An ‘upper class’, however, forms when these elites intermarry, and successfully preserve and pass on their wealth and status. Elites gain power, while an upper class inherits it. But their continuing authority must be justified by their ongoing excellence and beneficence.

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While elites must learn a trade, their children can learn to rule. Indeed, this was precisely the (now forgotten) purpose of a liberal, rather than vocational, education:

Liberal education is the counterpoison to mass culture, to the corroding effects of mass culture, to its inherent tendency to produce nothing but "specialists without spirit or vision and voluptuaries without heart." Liberal education is the ladder by which we try to ascend from mass democracy to democracy as originally meant. Liberal education is the necessary endeavour to found an aristocracy within democratic mass society. Liberal education reminds those members of a mass democracy who have ears to hear, of human greatness.

— Leo Strauss, What Is Liberal Education?

In Baltzell’s model, there are two key questions for the governance of society. Firstly, do elites successfully form hereditary families? Secondly - and crucially - do elites take advantage of their ability to shape their children to lead from birth?

For the elite concept is merely a sociological category that includes all persons who have been successful in their chosen fields; it is not a real group with normative standards of conduct or admission. This category is all too prone, moreover, to be composed of individuals motivated by the standards of success and individual self-interest rather than by any class standards of honour or duty…

Whereas an elite is a sociological category or concept, an upper class is a real social grouping. All real social groupings, from a band of Bowery thieves to a band of Boston Brahmins, are generators of normative standards; all upper classes create moral milieus in a sense that elites simply do not… An upper class, then, is a translator of talent, power, and accomplishment, over the generations, into a system of traditional moral standards.

— E. Digby Baltzell, Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia

Thus the true function of an upper class is to provide an attractor for emerging elites. New money is presented with an offer: in order for adopting certain standards of behaviour (charity, national service, honourable conduct, shunning divorce) they gain access to social clubs, business partnerships with old money families, and the intermarriage of their children with the established aristocracy.

This presents a compromise between the best of a socially-mobile meritocracy and refined taste and class authority.

“Class authority is a mysteri­ous blend of sentiment and myth, of love and loyalty, and the graceful charm of quiet leadership. It is, above all, a product of faith bred of ancient traditions and long continuing organic relationships between the leaders and the led.”

— E. Digby Baltzell, Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia

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This series will inform my forthcoming book, Leaving a Legacy. If you are enjoying it, please hit the like (heart) button below.

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Sic transit imperium,

Johann

1. Both quoted in Baltzell, Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia