Why the Broligarchs are Even Worse than the Robber Barons
Just don't call it an aristocracy
Sometimes historical events align with one’s syllabus in striking ways. I had the strange experience of being very briefly in New York to do some teaching right after the inauguration. What was on the agenda? Aristotle’s classification of different forms of government, paired with a few sections from Alexis de Tocqueville’s seminal study, Democracy in America (1835 and 1840).
You may not have ever read Aristotle (384 – 322 BC), but you’ve surely heard people invoke the authority of this ancient Greek polymath. Aristotle was working in Athens a century after the golden age of Athenian democracy, following the city’s crushing defeat in the Peloponnesian war. To the extent he was a theorist of democracy, it was as it was waning around him.
Building on a classification introduced in Plato’s Statesman, Aristotle divided constitutions (i.e. forms of government) into six basic types: three correct forms, each with its own deviation, as seen below.
The idea, in short, is that there are multiple correct ways to order a polis (the political community, in this case, the city-state), corresponding to forms listed in the column on the left. What marks the legitimacy of a government is not the number of people at its helm, but to what end they direct the state:
The civic body in every city [polis] is the sovereign [to kurion]; and the sovereign must necessarily be either One, or Few, or Many. On this basis we may say that when the One, or the Few, or the Many rule with a view to the common interest, the constitutions under which they do so must necessarily be right constitutions. On the other hand, the constitutions directed to the personal interest of the One, or the Few, or the Masses, must necessarily be perversions.1
The perversions, he continues, occur when the purpose of government shifts from securing the common interest toward securing the personal interest of the ruler, be they the One, the Few, or the Masses:
The perversions that correspond to the constitutions just mentioned are: Tyranny, [the perversion of] Kingship; Oligarchy [the perversion of] Aristocracy; and Democracy [the perversion of] 'Constitutional Government' [or polity]. Tyranny is a government by a single person directed to the interest of that person; Oligarchy is directed to the interest of the well-to-do; Democracy is directed to the interest of the poor. None of these benefits the common interest2
I will not open the democracy can of worms in this post because it will take us far afield, but it is at least worth noting the intense skepticism toward a form of government “directed to the interest of the poor.” For today, however, let’s focus on the claim that aristocracy degrades and becomes oligarchy. What is the distinction between the two?
For Aristotle, aristocracy corresponds with real excellence, not merely inherited wealth and unearned privilege (which are in principle hard to distinguish). To get a fuller picture of aristocracy as a political and social form—and grasp the distinction between it and oligarchy—it is worth skipping ahead a few millennia to consider the words of a real-life aristocrat, the French author Alexis de Tocqueville (1805 - 1859). Tocqueville remains a thinker of singular importance for his study of the political forms and social habits of (chiefly white, male) Americans during the first decades of independence. He pioneered the field of sociology by traveling for nine months around the new country, taking fastidious notes in town halls and assemblies. He praised Americans for their display of civic virtue—best represented by self-governing institutions at the local level that served to pull individuals toward a common goal—and warned that such institutions provided the only real bulwark against despotism.
Tocqueville generally advanced the thesis that equality and liberty were not—per the French revolutionary thinkers—harmonious concepts, but rather existed in a state of acute tension. It is this premise (and his suspicion toward majoritarian rule) that have endeared him to generations of conservative intellectuals, who have have built upon his ideas to argue that true liberty will result in vast inequality. This is, they claim, the price to pay for genuine excellence, and the resulting degradations are best tempered not through law, but via the noblesse oblige of our aristocratic overlords. I think this argument is patently absurd when applied to contemporary conditions, but it did ‘work’ in a certain way during feudal times to sustain a (vastly unjust) social order.
This fact, Tocqueville notes, stemmed from the genuine sense of obligation that the true aristocrats felt toward those both above and below them in the social hierarchy:
Amongst aristocratic nations, as families remain for centuries in the same condition, often on the same spot, all generations become as it were contemporaneous. A man almost always knows his forefathers, and respects them: he thinks he already sees his remote descendants, and he loves them. He willingly imposes duties on himself towards the former and the latter; and he will frequently sacrifice his personal gratifications to those who went before and to those who will come after him. Aristocratic institutions have, moreover, the effect of closely binding every man to several of his fellow-citizens. As the classes of an aristocratic people are strongly marked and permanent, each of them is regarded by its own members as a sort of lesser country, more tangible and more cherished than the country at large. As in aristocratic communities all the citizens occupy fixed positions, one above the other, the result is that each of them always sees a man above himself whose patronage is necessary to him, and below himself another man whose co-operation he may claim. Men living in aristocratic ages are therefore almost always closely attached to something placed out of their own sphere, and they are often disposed to forget themselves.3
We can see here how aristocratic sentiment is nurtured by large, hereditary estates and the claims of both tradition and posterity. Now, one may well quibble with this romanticized picture of the aristocracy, shaped by virtue and bounded by obligation. I’m not sure the feudal peasantry would have offered such a glowing review of a system that afforded it few privileges and no social mobility. And indeed, the United States was interesting as an object of contemplation to Tocqueville precisely because such aristocratic conditions did not widely prevail (except possibly in the southern states, which is an interesting tangent you can pursue here if desired).
It was rather the unprecedented equality of conditions offered by the new country, freed from the shackles of tradition and the Old World’s class structure, that grabbed his attention. The result, he noted, was a distinctive form of political philosophy espoused by the least philosophical of all peoples:
I think that in no country in the civilized world is there less interest in philosophy than in the United States. The Americans have no philosophical school of their own, and they worry very little about all those that divide Europe; they hardly know their names.
It is easy to see, however, that nearly all the inhabitants of the United States direct their minds in the same way, and conduct them according to the same rules; that is to say, they possess, without ever having taken the trouble to define its rules, a certain philosophical method that is common to all of them. To escape from the spirit of system, from the yoke of habits, from the maxims of family, from the opinions of class, and, to a certain point, from the prejudices of nation; to take tradition only as information, and present facts only as a useful study for doing otherwise and better; to seek by yourself and in yourself alone the reason for things, to strive toward the result without allowing yourself to be caught up in the means, and to aim for substance beyond form: such are the principal features that characterize what I will call the philosophical method of the Americans.4
Tocqueville claimed to invent a new word to describe this inward-looking philosophical compass, detached from the claims of custom: Individualism. He noted that the term was a novel one, as “our fathers were only acquainted with egoism….a passionate and exaggerated love of self, which leads a man to connect everything with his own person.” Most interestingly is how Tocqueville describes the origins of individualism:
Egotism is a vice as old as the world, which does not belong to one form of society more than to another: individualism is of democratic origin, and it threatens to spread in the same ratio as the equality of conditions.
In other words, the form of political equality required for democratic life also creates the conditions for each person to erroneously believe themselves to be autonomous. “Aristocracy had made a chain of all the members of the community, from the peasant to the king: democracy breaks that chain, and severs every link of it.” In lieu of this sense of mutual—if vastly unequal—commitments, democratic individualism dissolves social bonds in the name of freedom:
As social conditions become more equal, the number of persons increases who, although they are neither rich enough nor powerful enough to exercise any great influence over their fellow-creatures, have nevertheless acquired or retained sufficient education and fortune to satisfy their own wants. They owe nothing to any man, they expect nothing from any man; they acquire the habit of always considering themselves as standing alone, and they are apt to imagine that their whole destiny is in their own hands. Thus not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants, and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back forever upon himself alone, and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart.5
In our own day, Notre Dame professor Patrick Deneen is among the conservative intellectuals who explicitly draw on Tocqueville’s work to make the case against liberalism. His 2018 book, Why Liberalism Failed, argues that individualism undermines families, communities, and the common good, and he invokes Tocqueville to argue that only the revitalization of civic virtue at the local level can save American democracy. Perhaps more interesting is his more recent book, Regime Change, which openly pines for a true American aristocracy (he coins the term aristo-populism to describe his political ideal). While Deneen is wholly in favor of “disciplining” the elite actors who currently occupy positions of economic, political, and cultural power, his vision is by no means a populist one:
[M]erely limiting the power elite is insufficient. Instead, the creation of a new elite is essential—not just the “meritocrats” whose claim to rule is based upon credentialing at institutions that shroud their status in the thin veil of egalitarianism, but self-conscious aristoi who understand that their main role and purpose in the social order is to secure the foundational goods that make possible human flourishing for ordinary people: the central goods of family, community, good work, an equitable social safety net supportive of those goods, constraints upon corporate power, a culture that preserves and encourages order and continuity, and support for religious belief and institutions.6
There is a lot we could say about Deneen the Tocqueville scholar, longing for an aristocratic order that Tocqueville held to be incompatible with American democracy. Yet, however romanticized or materially impossible to realize, what’s most striking is the chasm that separates the aristocratic ideal from the actual behavior of the contemporary billionaire set: the tech entrepreneurs that Carole Cadwalladr has termed the broligarchy. Having been raised on a particularly lethal brew of techno-libertarianism, the broligarchy appears singularly bereft of any sense of social obligation or constraint. They do not build hospitals or public parks like the robber barons of our first Gilded Age, who at least felt obliged to launder their misdeeds in the cool waters of philanthropy.
To some extent, this is refreshing because there is not even the veneer of goodness when it comes to Elon, et al, who prefer to spend their money on space travel, longevity treatments, and apocalypse bunkers (and leave the charitable giving to their ex-wives). But they also use their gross wealth to build power by championing the politicians, institutions, and media platforms that will deliver the goods: access to vital natural resources, friendly regulatory climates, poor labor and environmental protections, low taxation and maximal mobility for capital. This is crucial to underscore because, as I’ve argued over here and here, libertarianism is out among the tech set. It is Curtis Yarvin’s turbocapitalism, which requires the conquest and deployment of public power to serve private profits, that is the order of the day.
The idea that the broligarchy can be tamed—or transformed into a functional aristocracy—by the cultivation of virtue is a fantasy. Only the demos and the force of law can ever make their uniquely pernicious form of power untenable - which clarifies the appreciable disdain for democracy lately fashionable in Silicon Valley. Remember that capital can flourish under all sorts of regimes, most notably for our purposes, fascist ones.
Odds & Ends
I’ll be speaking online Thursday, January 30 (5 pm GMT/12 pm EST) about the Trump 2.0 world order, as part of a panel discussion organized by Europaeum. You can find out more and register here.
Currently reading:
on corporations acting like states, as you know that corporate sovereignty is very much my jam; and on DeepSeek/Lina Khan’s warning about monopoly power; and (wild card) Kaddish by Leon Wieseltier, written during the height of his cultural power. I’ve been working on a meandering essay about loss, mourning, family relationships, and politics for over a year now, so I figured it was worth checking out the competition. Though I can hardly imagine any editor will afford me 500+ pages for my thoughts…Writing: My book on risk. I’m trying to finish the first six chapters by July, and you can expect some sneak previews in the months ahead.
Aristotle, Politics. Book 3.7. Oxford World Classics: 1995
Ibid.
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy In America. Volume II, Part 1:2.
Ibid., Volume II, Part 1:1.
Ibid., Volume II, Part 2:2.
Patrick Deneen, Regime Change. New York: Forum, 2023. 152.
A terrific reprise of the arguments around the concepts of forms of government. What would we do without 19th Century Aristocrats to remind us of who we saw ourselves to be?