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