Aristocracy, Antiquity and History: Classicism in Political Thought

362 Pages·1996·28.603 MB·English

by  Andreas A. M. Kinneging

ARI STO CRACY,

ANTIQUITY
&

HISTORY

11 ((

ARI STO CRACY,

ANTIQUITY
&

HISTORY

@lassicism in 100litical Thought
J.
Andreas A.M.
I{INNEGING
First published 1997 by Transaction Publishers
Published 2020 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint ofthe Taylor & Francis Group, an
informa business
Copyright © 1997 by Taylor & Francis
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced

or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means,

now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording,

or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in

writing from the publishers.

Notice:

Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks

and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to

infringe.

Library of Congress Catalog Number: 96-5601
ISBN 13: 978-1-56000-222-2 (hbk)
DOl: 10.4324/9780429335976
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kinneging, A. A. M.
Aristocracy, antiquity, and history : classicism in political thought /
Andreas A.M. Kinneging.
p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 1-56000-222-0 (alk. paper)

1. Aristocracy (Political science )-History. 2. Aristocracy (Social class)­
History. 3. Political science-History. 4. Classicism. I. Title
HT647.K55 1996
305.5'2-dc20 96-5601
CIP
FOR MY PARENTS

CONTENTS

Preface IX

PART I THE MODERNS AND THE ANCIENTS
Chapter 1 Politics, History, and Teleology 3

PART 11 THE APPEAL OF THE ANCIENTS
Chapter 2 Anatomy of the Aristocracy 37

Chapter 3 The Rise of Classicism 69

Chapter 4 The Meaning of Antiquity 91

Chapter 5 Roman Traditions 108

PART III THE APPEAL FROM THE ANCIENTS
Chapter 6 The Man of Honor 139

Chapter 7 The Society of Unequals 168

Chapter 8 The Politics of Nobilitas 205

PART IV THE APPEAL TO THE ANCIENTS
Chapter 9 The These Nobiliaire 235

Chapter 10 Montesquieu's Lineage 279

PART V THE ANCIENTS AND THE MOD ERNS
Chapter 11 Classicism, Romanticism, and Modernity 303

Primary Sources 325

Secondary Sources 331

Index 344

PREFACE
The writing of this book has taken me much longer than I had expected. The
delay is due to a number of factors, the most important being that the subject
of the book gradually changed. It is hard to say what caused this change. To
some degree, it is undoubtedly due to a lack of discipline on my part to finish
what I had begun. But mine is not a case of weakness of will pure and
simple. For the path I eventually took was at least partially the outflow of the
questions I had initially set out to answer.
Although I used different labels at that time, these original questions are
most accurately rendered as dealing with the roots and rise of what goes by
the name of 'modernity'. That is to say, I was interested in the great
transformation that changed first the westernmost countries of Europe and the
United States, later the rest of Europe, and at the moment the whole world
from a society that is commonly called ' traditional' into one unlike any
previously known to mankind: modern society. More specifically, I was
interested in the genealogy of the tradition of social and political thought that
is generally viewed as the theoretical vindication of modernity: the tradition
of liberalism.
However, as I was trying to get a grip on the literature I ran into a
seemingly insolvable difficulty. In the endeavor to point down the origins of
modernity one almost inevitably winds up in a virtually infinite historical
regress, terminating only with Socrates or the sophists. Whatever key feature
of modernity one traces back through time -rationality, individuality, the
market economy, and so on- one never encounters its 'spring' and 'fountain­
head'. Each and every modern thinker seems to have had precursors who
apparently knew 'everything' already. Each and every modern institution
seems to have been 'foreshadowed' by yet another, earlier institution. The
logic of this analysis has led many to seek the seeds of the modern age in the
renaissance or even in the high middle ages, and some go so far as to discern
the first signs of the present condition at the dawn of Western civilization. In
effect, the history of modernity is history tout court. History is the genealogy
of modern man and the modern mind. Admittedly, this is a deeply enticing
philosophy of history, and there is a ring of truth to it. For history does of
course lead up to us; we are in a sense the end of history.
But it does not follow that we are the 'star' actor in and of history. If
we -that is, the moderns- were on stage at all in the past, until quite recently
we at best played the part of an extra. This is the central insight of the present