THE aristocracy is an old form of power where the policy is led by a select group of privilege holders which are hereditarily passed on and kept within it. At various times in history, the aristocracy was directly linked to the monarchy, but a more recent form of government, the parliamentary monarchy without caste privileges, guarantees the dissolution of the concentration of power aristocratic.
From the beginning, the aristocracy was also linked to the land ownership, and this characteristic intensified after the Middle Ages, when the feudal system of political organization gave way to creation of national states modern.
Etymology
the word aristocracy originated from the Greek wordaristokratia, which literally means the government of the best. the particle kratia comes from Kratos, which means “power”. aristo derives from aristeus, which means “the best”. Thus, the term was born as a way to designate a government that would supposedly be just because it was commanded by the best and most capable of governing.
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aristocracy and oligarchy
THE oligarchy it is literally the government of the few. Few are the select people who hold the right to citizenship in an oligarchic system, creating a public sphere for the maintenance of privileges. The oligarchy differs from the monarchy, as in the first form of aristocracy there is a need for blood ties, while in monarchies, in general, the only requirement is possession.
Brazil lived through oligarchic moments, even if these were more discreet here. There was, for example, the period calledRepublic Coffee with Milk, which corresponds to First Republic Brazilian. At that time, there was an unofficial agreement between political entities and local leaders (the colonels).
In this agreement, the presidential candidates who won the elections were always coffee growers in São Paulo or dairy farmers in Minas Gerais, with the country's governments alternating between large producers in these two states. Although the Brazilian Republic, at that time, allowed a portion of the population to vote (aged and literate men), the colonels entered the scene to force voters to vote candidates who should win the election.
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aristocracy and monarchy
Monarchies are a form of aristocracy that entrusts political power to members of a family. You Monarchs are the "nobles", belonging to a select group of aristocrats who self-proclaimed better that people, considered by themselves, are common. In this government regime, the monarch holds all political power concentrated in his hands and his successors are his direct descendants or more distant heirs, if the monarch does not have children. However, what matters is the preservation of power among those with blood ties.
The aristocrats of the great monarchic periods in Europe only intermarried. Noble only married noble, extending the family so that the family blood was not mixed with the blood of common people. Sometimes relatives married each other to maintain noble family ties. Sometimes, two distinct families from the same place of origin would get together. Sometimes, people from different families and from different places or countries joined together in marriage, all that mattered was the maintenance of family blood.
Marriages between equals, for successive generations, caused problems to German and Russian aristocracy in the 18th century. Because little genetic variability From the generations of children resulting from marriages between relatives, German nobles began to show health problems and to have children with congenital problems.
Noble castes and titles of nobility began to be conferred still in feudal Europe and were established by the amount of land a family had. After the formation of the National States, this system of nobility was strengthened, and even today there are noble families, but they no longer hold as much land as they used to. This form of aristocracy is called agrarian aristocracy.
agrarian aristocracy
The agrarian aristocracy is a way to establish who is more capable of governing based on the amount of private property, in the case land, that a person has. The problem with this form of aristocracy is that land is an inheritance right, being passed from father to son, and the heirs may not know how to manage well the responsibilities brought with Is it over there.
Even the original landowners tend to use their political power to gain benefits for themselves, which causes a degeneration of the aristocracy and makes it an oligarchy.
Brazilian aristocracy
The Brazilian aristocracy began to be formed when the first Portuguese nobles who came to live in Brazilian colony had children here, that is, she is not originally brazilian. With the transfer of Portuguese administrative power temporarily to Brazil, due to the flight of the royal family, there was a strengthening of this model of government in our country.
The Portuguese royal family was the center of the Iberian aristocracy, and Brazil, as a colony of Portugal, made use of it. After independence of Brazil, was formed around Dom Pedro I, and his descendants, the legitimately Brazilian aristocracy in terms of government. The extinction of the Brazilian Empire with the proclamation of the Republic, in 1889 he removed Brazilian aristocrats from political power, but he did not end the royal family and their aristocratic heirs. The Imperial House of Brazil still exists today, formed by heirs of Dom Pedro II when they were still exiled from Brazil because of the proclamation of the Republic.
The current “prince” head of the Casa Imperial do Brasil, or Casa Imperial Orleans e Bragança, is Dom Bertrand de Orleans e Bragança. there is an heir movement of the Brazilian royal family who defend the restoration of the monarchy in Brazil.
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aristocracy for philosophy
At Ancient Greece, the aristocracy emerged as a way of governing based on the delivery of political power to the fittest, which, in the prevailing view of Archaic Greece (8th centuries a. Ç. the VI a. C.), were the big landowners. With the contestation of this form of government, another call of tyranny was established, as it was illegitimate.
A new form of aristocracy was resurrected in Athens, but it retained the privilege of political power to landowners—it's called agrarian aristocracy. Sparta still spent a lot of time under the domination of the agrarian aristocracies who held, above all, control of the strong Spartan army.
Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle were defenders of the aristocracy. Although Plato lived in the democratic period and witnessed his master, Socrates, participate in political debates made possible thanks to democracy and to the weakening of the Greek aristocracy, the writer of the republic he was a supporter of the second government regime.
Aristotle, a disciple of Plato, was also in favor of an aristocratic government. It is noteworthy that the two philosophers are not advocating the restriction of political power to a land-owning class. They defend that the government must be led by the best and fittest men.
In the republic, Plato he concluded that those most apt to govern cities, because they are the most apt to achieve justice and moderation in their actions, are the philosophers — the most rational men in the Platonic conception. For Aristotle, the best were those who received a better education, moral and intellectual, enabling them to a sober and just government, which made no distinction of social class or origin.
The big problem is that there is a constant tendency for the aristocracy to degenerate, as power remains guaranteed to a select group, tending to be passed on hereditary or among people who have possessions. THE main form of degenerate government of the aristocracy is the oligarchy, which, according to Aristotle, was the tendency to distort the aristocracy by creating what we now call plutocracy (government of the rich). The oligarchy consists of the political power distributed among a select group not because of its capacity, but because of the maintenance of its privileges.
by Francisco Porfirio
Sociology Professor
