The cycle of Atlantic revolutions reached the intercontinental Portuguese monarchy according to a specific chronology. Between the first French invasion (1807) and the ultimate triumph of liberalism (1834), the fate of the Portuguese kingdom hung in the balance as it was tied in large part either to the interaction between Brazil and Portugal or to more global connections. The independence of the American territory, after sketches failed attempts of a constitutional integration between 1820 and 1822, precipitated a sharp internal political polarization between absolutists and liberals in the European kingdom. For the latter, the collapse of the empire forcibly had as an alternative a radical break with the civil order of the Ancien Régime. After successive political contexts and a civil war, this model, with a marked anti-aristocratic stamp, would ultimately triumph.

Plutarch is commonly viewed as a major exponent of a shared Greco-Roman culture among the imperial elite to which he belonged. However, while dealing with the Greek and Roman worlds on fairly equal terms, he essentially expects the protagonists of his Lives, both Greek and Roman, to display virtues grounded in Greek culture and conforming to Greek role models. Thus, Philopoemen–Flamininus analyzes the Roman conquest of Greece with a strong focus on Greek historical experience; Marius shows the adverse consequences of anti-Hellenism and lack of paideia in a Roman statesman; and Lucullus presents a Roman career shaped by philhellenic benefactions on the one hand and barbarian luxury on the other. Beyond the Lives, the Roman Questions frequently invoke Greek concepts and traditions to explain Roman customs and institutions, whereas Advice on Statesmanship is predominantly concerned with the autonomy of the Greek cities and the power of the local aristocracy, thus epitomizing the Hellenocentric perspective that characterizes Plutarch’s oeuvre as a whole.

The concluding chapter contextualizes the study of ancient Doric architecture against the backdrop of European colonialism and modern globalization. The evolutionary explanation of the Doric temple can be seen as part of a broader tendency in the West of naturalizing and normalizing Greek/Western culture as world culture by tracing it back to universal principles. The critique of the evolutionary narrative makes it possible to appreciate the disruptive and innovative character of the Doric order as part of a historical shift in the wielding of religious and political power and in the relation between Greek communities and the landscapes they inhabited. Population growth, social change, and political innovation led to urbanization, colonization, and land reclamation on an unprecedented scale. These processes challenged the traditional religious system, which was based on an intrinsic relation between the divinities and the natural features of the landscape. The Doric temple can be seen as a response to this situation: by redefining the sacred space, “inhabited” by the gods, it also redefined what was outside the sacred precinct, the “profane” land that was subject to new forms of exploitation, land distribution, and colonization.

The sanctuary of Artemis on the island of Korkyra, modern Corfu, is presented as a case study of the relationship between the changing environment and the monumentalization of Greek sanctuaries through Doric stone architecture. Although the sculptural decoration of the Artemis temple, which is one of the earliest Doric temples known so far, is relatively well preserved, modern scholars disagree on the interpretation of the sculptures. The question of how the representations of Medusa and other mythological figures on the pediments and metopes related to the divinity worshipped in the sanctuary and to the local context are particularly controversial. However, as the chapter argues, the builders of the temple had no interest in highlighting this relationship in the first place. The temple and its sculptural decoration were meant to express Panhellenic values and standards rather than local traditions. Thus, the local elite of Korkyra presented themselves as part of a Panhellenic elite network. At the same time, the elite showed the local population that they were taking care of the religious landscape in an unstable and radically transformative situation.

Chapter 3 provides the key historical antecedents for Chapters 4-7, focusing on changes in the domains of kinship, religion, and law. It examines the decline of traditional authority in medieval Europe, specifically the weakening of inherited monarchical and aristocratic rule, and of the Church and associated belief in supernatural beings. At the same time, the power of state-based law was consolidating and expanding, developing new ideas of ‘legal persons’, as ‘fictions of law’, that would become crucial to the creation of new corporate actors and the domestication of competition. This shift combined with intensifying trans-Atlantic competition among European empires, and novel experiments in republican and democratic government in America and France, created a new context for the development of law and competition.

Chapter 5 is structured according to the uses for which noble clients commissioned magic. The range of uses is broader than the five identified for other social classes and they have therefore been grouped under three wider ambitions: political or social advancement; money; and practicalities. By structuring the discussion in this way we are able to interrogate the motivations behind the upper classes’ use of magic, and investigate the role it played in elite culture. The conclusion of this discussion is that the few aristocratic magic cases that survive are indicative of a wider culture of use

This chapter focuses on how and when elite persons employed magicians; what sort of relationship was enjoyed between employer and employee; and how such relationships were allowed to continue in a courtly context. Through the course of this discussion we see that the culture of magic use among the elite was substantially different to that of society more broadly. For example, whereas generally the lower classes had a ‘pay per use’ arrangement with service magicians, upper classes were more in the habit of keeping magicians as part of their household, normally requesting the services from a cleric on retainer. The implications of this, and other habits peculiar to the elite, are explored in some detail.

Pacts or “social contracts” form the basis of sovereignty in many early modern theories of political authority, and in Pufendorf’s too. Most such theories treat the pact as the means by which a pre-existing right—for example, divine right, or the natural right of individuals grounded in their strength, reason, or property—is transferred to a sovereign on the condition that the right be protected, to be rescinded if it is not. For Pufendorf, however, there is no pre-existing right since the sovereignty pact creates a new right—the right to issue unchallengeable commands for the purposes of achieving social peace—by instituting two new moral personae: the citizen who obeys the sovereign in exchange for protection, and the sovereign invested with the right of absolute command to provide social peace. Since Pufendorf’s sovereignty is constituted not by a prior moral right, but rather by the capacity to exercise unchallengeable authority for the end of social peace, there is no naturally rightful form of government. Pufendorf thus takes a neutral and pluralistic view of the three traditional forms of government—monarchical, aristocratic and democratic—insofar as each is capable of exercising the capacity for sovereign rule.

When England was declared to be governed as a free state, parliament stopped short of defining its precise constitutional form. Although historians, once again, had paid almost no attention to it, there was a lively debate amongst the supporters of the free state about its precise constitutional form, whether it was an aristocracy or democracy. Chapter 4 explores the aristocratic arguments for the free state. The aristocratic defenders of the free state, following a traditional line of argument, argued that, whereas a democracy denoted the direct rule of all the people, in an aristocracy sovereign power was in the hands of the few. Since in the English free state sovereign power was exercised by the House of Commons, it was, for these aristocrats, in the hands of a few, and the free state was, accordingly, an aristocracy. However, the free state was also presented by Ephraim Elcock as an Aristotelian politeia, a perfect mixture of oligarchy and democracy. According to Elcock, in the free state, ‘the peoples election of their Delegates is Democratical, the Government of these Deligates is Oligarchical, they being chosen out of the wealthiest of every County’.

This chapter focuses on the interactions of the Roman aristocracy – the members of the senatorial and equestrian orders – with the court, taking as its theme the interplay between routine and disruption. The scale of these interactions fluctuated over time, as did the methods by which emperors signalled their favour for particular aristocrats, thereby creating an (unstable) hierarchy of aristocrats at court. The amici principis (‘friends of the emperor’) formed their own subgroup, with an internal hierarchy; the emperor’s relationship with them was shaped by cultural expectations about amicitia. Some aristocrats were important advisers to the emperor, so the chapter examines advisers and the role of advisory councils (consilia). The chapter reflects on whether the relationship between the emperor and aristocratic courtiers should be characterized as one of ‘domestication’, arguing for an often-volatile situation in which attempts by emperors to control aristocrats (and vice versa) were ad hoc and short-lived.

This chapter explores Nietzsche’s endorsement of agonal conflict (Wettkampf). I address three points of contention in the critical literature. First, commentators disagree about the relation of agon to physically destructive conflict. While some claim that the Nietzschean agon is distinctly nonviolent, others maintain that it includes physically destructive forms of conflict (such as war, for example). Second, there is disagreement regarding the social inclusivity of Nietzsche’s ideal agon: some claim that he wants agonal relations to be democratically realized across the breadth of society; others, though, maintain that he confines his endorsement to an aristocratic minority. Finally, there is disagreement regarding the means by which Nietzsche thinks that agonal moderation is concretely realized. Some maintain that such conflict merely requires a self-initiated shift of attitude on the part of the individual contestants; others, however, submit that agonal restraint can only be imposed externally, by means of fashioning a balance of powers within which contending parties are too equally matched to domineer over one another. I argue that for Nietzsche (a) agon is categorically nonviolent; (b) all can participate in some form of agonal contest; and (c) agonal restraint is founded upon a combination of self-restraint and externally imposed restraint.

Continuing the volume’s third thematic strand (Individuals and Institutions), this chapter studies the nobility and aristocracy in the age of William the Conqueror. The discussion begins by pointing out the importance of hierarchy and status before drawing attention to the subjects of ancestry, culture, and education amongst the elites of the cross-Channel Anglo-Norman world and their neighbours on the Continent. Following investigations of aristocratic splendour and largesse, as well as of violence and competition, it closes by taking stock of the situation on the eve of William’s conquest of England.

In this chapter, Richard Avramenko suggests that Tocqueville’s voyage to America should be understood in light of a lifelong aristocratic concern for unearthing lost remnants of the Ancien Régime. By way of illustrating Tocqueville’s ambivalent relationship to aristocracy, Avramenko draws an etymological distinction between the concepts of “debris” and “remnants,” two words Tocqueville uses in systematic ways throughout his corpus to differentiate certain institutions of the Ancien Régime that are doomed from others that might be rehabilitated for a democratic age. Avramenko traces the etymology of these two words in the French tradition and then locates these usages in Tocqueville’s discussion of various aristocratic or quasi-aristocratic institutions in the United States such as the Native Americans, the American South, the military, the new industrial aristocracy, and the profession of the law. Avramenko finds one inspiration for Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont’s travels in their childhood fascination with a 1798 novella Voyage d’un Allemand au Lac Onéida by Sophie von La Roche. The book tells the story of an aristocratic couple’s exile to Lake Oneida, New York, one of the destinations Tocqueville and Beaumont visited during their travels as chronicled in Tocqueville’s “Journey to Lake Oneida.”

Chapter 8, “Imperial Constantinople,” maps the imperial presence in Constantinople’s urban and suburban space during its lifetime as a Roman capital, looking at the space reserved to the emperor and the court hierarchy, at satellite residences of the imperial hub, and at the use and politicization of public space

This chapter identifies the emergence of an Enlightenment critique of empire in Ireland. This laid the intellectual foundations for the Union of 1801 by connecting the exclusion of the Irish Kingdom from free participation in imperial and European trade with the exclusion of its Catholic subjects, under the terms of the ‘Penal Laws’, from the benefits of property and political representation. For thinkers such as Josiah Tucker and David Hume, the suppression of Irish commerce was striking evidence of how British policy carried ‘jealousy of trade’ to extremes that jeopardised the security of the empire. For Charles O’Connor, Edmund Burke, Arthur Young, and Adam Smith, meanwhile, the Penal Laws had ruined Ireland’s prospects for ‘improvement’ by alienating the Irish majority from property and the state. It was Smith who linked these two problematics together, creating a new kind of argument for a parliamentary union between Britain and Ireland.

A complex, triangular relationship existed between Ireland, Britain and France that structured eighteenth- and nineteenth-century debates over the vicissitudes of empire in Ireland. The significance of this relationship, I have suggested, was not reducible to the military threat France occasionally posed to British rule. It lay instead in the influence of Franco-British rivalry and emulation exerted over the political economy of empire, and in the manner this was interpreted by contemporaries in Ireland, Britain and Europe. The threat, and the example, of France inspired British and Irish efforts to reform and consolidate empire, alongside Irish attempts to escape from it. In Ireland, political thinkers across Europe saw not just a land of religious dissension and emergent ‘nationality’, but a vital case study in the workings of mercantile power politics, and in the consequences of the persistence of aristocratic inequality in an era of commercial growth and agrarian transformation. The government of Ireland was not, therefore, a narrowly Irish problem. It lay at a vital intersection between contemporary understandings of commerce, empire and international order.

This chapter dissects the institution of estate (sosloviye) as pivotal to understanding long-lasting patterns of social stratification in Russian society and, relatedly, the contours, networks, and divisions within the resultant estatist public and political sphere. It focuses on the legal-policy underpinnings of the estate to understand how it found reflection in modern educational, professional, and governance institutions. First, the chapter outlines peculiarities of old-regime Russia’s semi-feudal order as engendering a wedge– or, worse, a chasm – between the estatist, or estates-derived, relatively privileged social group (and substrata within it) and the unfree peasants. It then reviews and critiques historical and sociological sources concerned with the transition from imperial to Soviet society. It argues that most scholars have assumed a clean break between tsarist and communist societies after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and that a paradigmatic shift in our understanding of the communist and post-communist social structure as rooted in imperial social stratification is warranted. Finally, it charts how the fragmentary knowledge about the reproduction of latent social distinctions and equally submerged institutional sources of autonomy among the more privileged social groups sets the stage for the subsequent chapters’ fine-grained analysis of the persistence of the estatist bourgeoisie as a legacy across regime types.

The aristocratic milieu: Hagiography and aristocracy in the early ninth century: Philaretos and Eudokimos. Aristocratic models of feminine holiness (ninth-tenth centuries). The political meaning of the new aristocratic saint: imperial ideology. The military milieu. The court milieu: the family and collaborators of Theophilos in post-iconoclast hagiography. The court of Theophilos and its post-iconoclast reinvention. The family of Theophilos and Theodora. The imperial couple in post-iconoclast hagiography: Theophilos and Theodora