[HN Gopher] Lording it, over: A new history of the modern Britis...
___________________________________________________________________
Lording it, over: A new history of the modern British aristocracy
Author : smushy
Score : 30 points
Date : 2025-10-25 20:27 UTC (6 days ago)
(HTM) web link (newcriterion.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (newcriterion.com)
| BrenBarn wrote:
| Forgive me if I don't shed a tear because somebody can't live in
| a giant house anymore.
| anon291 wrote:
| But but but... It's a fundamental part of his identity!!! /S
| anon291 wrote:
| In most countries the hereditary caste system that has oppressed
| the people of the country for centuries is correctly scorned, but
| the English are very clever and have managed to turn it into a
| reality tv show.
|
| Speaking of a country that desperately needs a no kings
| protest...
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| And speaking of country where reality-TV-stars are Kings ...
| Animats wrote:
| The British monarchy just took another hit with the formal
| degradation of Prince Andrew.[1]
|
| (That's what "degradation" really means - having an aristocratic
| title removed, making someone a commoner.)
|
| [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cnveqgj957dt
| umanwizard wrote:
| Now properly just called Andrew, not "Prince" anything. (It was
| interesting to see most British news outlets make that change
| immediately while the US ones lagged).
| xienze wrote:
| Because most people in the US don't know who "Andrew Windsor"
| is but have heard of "Prince Andrew."
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| It was weird to see coverage refer to him as just
| "Windsor". Ok, it's common to refer to a contextually-
| determined person by only their last name, but in this case
| it obviously shouldn't be done.
|
| Did his titles grant him any powers or privileges that he
| doesn't retain? What's different for him now?
| ender341341 wrote:
| At the very least he lost his free lodging/staff (though
| it sounds like the royal family will pay for his new
| lodging somewhere else).
|
| A large amount he's lost is also ceremonial, it sounds
| like he won't be removed from the line of succession
| cause that would require approval from all the separate
| countries the monarchy reigns over to do so (and he's
| like eighth in line so extremely unlikely given his age).
|
| He's been excluded from a lot of official events already
| so a lot of it is just making it official.
|
| He's still not being criminally charged with anything
| from the government.
| Animats wrote:
| Being a peer of the realm historically confers some
| immunity from civil arrest in the UK.[1] Andrew Windsor
| just lost that.
|
| [1] https://erskinemay.parliament.uk/section/4571/lords-
| privileg...
| pseudalopex wrote:
| > Ok, it's common to refer to a contextually-determined
| person by only their last name, but in this case it
| obviously shouldn't be done.
|
| Why?
| masfuerte wrote:
| Andrew is ungallant so it is reasonable to strip him of his
| knighthoods. But it is rather silly to strip him of the title
| Prince for behaving like a prince.
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| No Kings!
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| > "aristocracy" means "rule of the best."
|
| Should not "rule of the best" rather be called "meritocracy"?
| bell-cot wrote:
| In that sense, all types of government are "rule of the best".
| The differences are just in the metrics used to determine
| who...
| mandevil wrote:
| Merit is from Latin, and cracy is a Greek suffix, so combining
| them together is nonsense. Aristo has the advantage of actually
| being Greek for "the best."
|
| The word meritocracy was actually popularized (1) by British
| Labour Party politician Michael Young in his 1958 satirical
| novel "The Rise of the Meritocracy" which was basically the
| Idiocracy of its day- in the future idiots will reign supreme
| sort of thing. But the book was definitely meant to mock the
| entire idea of society that we live in today. Right down to how
| the society in the book defined "merit" as basically IQ plus
| how hard you work, it was a dystopia that came true.
|
| 1: Apparently someone else actually coined the term two years
| earlier in a peer reviewed paper, but Young was where it broke
| through into general use.
| atmosx wrote:
| That book is pure gold.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| Anyone who thinks mixing roots is nonsense must have a
| hyperventilating grammar nazi fiddling with a monocle in his
| head. Maybe go out and ride a bicycle? Or watch the
| television? Or take your automobile out for a spin?
|
| It would be nonsense in Latin or Greek. But we aren't doing
| that in Latin or Greek, we're doing that in English.
| kubb wrote:
| Tele is from Greek and vision is Latin, so while you're at
| it...
|
| Automobile, sociology...
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Aristo has the advantage of actually being Greek for "the
| best."
|
| Well, yes. You're emphasizing the "Greek" aspect, but if you
| want a word that means "rule by the best", you should
| probably use a word that means "best". The Latin word is
| _optim(us)_.
| phantasmish wrote:
| "Meritocracy" was a satirical term invented to mock the way
| that the markers and abilities suggested by "merit" tend to
| accrue self-reinforcingly to the "meritorious" and those
| connected to them, creating a stratified society that pretends
| to justice and legitimacy by appeals to "natural" outcomes of
| "natural" advantages or "better work ethic", and dismissal of
| calls for reform with pleas that changes could only result in
| "less-meritorious", so, necessarily, worse, rule.
|
| The word itself is basically a joke about the circularity and
| word-game bullshit of "well we assign power according to
| _merit_ , so anything else is necessarily less-just". If it's
| not clear, consider: "Goodocracy" or "Bestocracy", or
| "everyone-gets-what-they-deserve-ocracy". Like... yes, sure,
| but the details are _everything_ , that's just a vague appeal
| to stuff approximately everyone wants.
|
| It's entirely hilarious that it's been adopted as a serious
| term.
| overvale wrote:
| Hot take: hereditary kingdoms were a reasonably successful
| solution to curbing constant civil war in a time when
| representative democracies might not have been viable (for
| various reasons).
| leobg wrote:
| How can you have a democracy when 90% of the populous is
| working 12 hour days 6-7 days a week just to pay the bills? How
| are they going to have an opinion on anything, other than
| "Stuff is too expensive".
| bell-cot wrote:
| Note that the Ancient Greeks very often had democracies, when
| their standard of living was rather lower than what you
| describe. Life expectancy at birth was often below 30 years.
|
| EDIT: Add some cites -
|
| https://acoup.blog/2023/03/10/collections-how-to-
| polis-101-p...
|
| https://acoup.blog/2025/07/18/collections-life-work-death-
| an...
|
| https://acoup.blog/2025/10/10/collections-life-work-death-
| an...
| buildsjets wrote:
| Note that in the Ancient Greek democracies, the people who
| worked 12 hour days 6-7 days a week and had a life
| expectancy of 30 years were called "Slaves", and they were
| not allowed to vote.
|
| Non-laboring, land-owning males were the only ones allowed
| to participate in the democracy, and they lived to ripe old
| ages just as in modern times, even allowing for the
| occasional hemlock ingestion.
|
| The Old Greeks cannot be trusted with historic matters.
| They were victims of indigestion, you know.
| lurk2 wrote:
| Ancient Greek democracy was limited franchise and the
| average life expectancy figure is pop history and not
| accurate.
| csb6 wrote:
| I don't think you could call it reasonably successful. For
| example, much of European history consisted of war and
| succession disputes. The entire system of aristocracy was prone
| to instability and shifting alliances. It turns out hereditary
| succession is not a good way to choose a competent political
| leader.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| >It turns out hereditary succession is not a good way to
| choose a competent political leader.
|
| It beats strange women lying in ponds distributing swords
| overvale wrote:
| Farcical aquatic ceremonies have their uses.
| infinite8s wrote:
| Binding people to a shared worldview due to a fear of an
| unsuccessful afterlife?
| overvale wrote:
| History says: proved useful.
| overvale wrote:
| > It turns out hereditary succession is not a good way to
| choose a competent political leader.
|
| I'm not sure republics have cracked that one either.
| nntwozz wrote:
| Let's try technocracy!
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| I read that at some point the system in Turkey devolved to
| the point that succession was always determined by a civil
| war.
|
| This produced a very long string of extremely competent
| leaders, but the cost was too high.
| overvale wrote:
| The Politics of Succession, by Andrej Kokkonen, Jorgen
| Moller, Anders Sundell
|
| https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Politics_of_Success.
| ..
|
| > this book also shows that the development and spread of
| primogeniture - the eldest-son-taking-the-throne - mitigated
| the problem of succession in Europe in the period after AD
| 1000. The predictability and stability that followed from a
| clear hereditary principle outweighed the problems of
| incompetent and irrational rulers sometimes inheriting power.
| The data used in the book demonstrates that primogeniture
| reduced the risk of depositions and civil war following the
| inevitable deaths of leaders.
| m463 wrote:
| I'm sort of amazed that democracies came into existence at all.
|
| On the other hand, I guess the actions of kings were a
| catalyst. (crazy taxation, closing ports, quartering troops,
| etc)
| adolph wrote:
| I suspect the root of democracy's success lies in Galton's
| observation
| bell-cot wrote:
| Seems a bit shallow.
|
| The real downfall of the great British houses (architectural
| sense) was the financial catastrophe that 1914 to 1946 was for
| the British Empire. Top billing in two world wars - and they went
| from being blatantly the richest and most powerful nation on
| earth, to needing a US Treasury bail-out to avoid national
| bankruptcy.
|
| (Though over in America, most of the historic grand mansions are
| now tourist attractions, for lack of heirs with the wealth and
| interest in maintaining them.)
|
| And the benefits of British aristocratic titles faded over quite
| a few centuries, not just recently. Compare King Charles I of the
| early 1600's (Parliament didn't like his exercise of Divine
| Right) with George III of the later 1700's (a clever King could
| appoint his own Prime Ministers against Parliament's wishes) with
| Queen Victoria of the later 1800's (she complained to the PM that
| the Foreign Secretary was taking actions without her approval)
| with Queen Elizabeth II of the later 1900's (she dutifully read
| her supposed "Queen's Speech" to Parliament, whether she agreed
| with a word of it or not).
| ghaff wrote:
| >(Though over in America, most of the historic grand mansions
| are now tourist attractions, for lack of heirs with the wealth
| and interest in maintaining them.)
|
| Taxes had a lot to do with it--though, really, in the UK as
| well. In Newport RI, a lot of the gilded era mansions ended up
| donated to a local college because, as you say, the heirs
| didn't have either the wealth or the interest in maintaining
| (and playing the taxes on) them. A lot of these places were
| also summer "cottages" and would require a huge amount of money
| to update to modern standards. I know someone whose extended
| family owned one of these places (not in Newport but similar)
| and it was going to be a huge expense; don't know how it ended
| up.
| bell-cot wrote:
| > Taxes had a lot to do...
|
| Kinda? Taxes on the UK's wealthy (not just property taxes)
| skyrocketed from '14 to '46, mostly because the gov't needed
| to seize every farthing it could, to starve off national
| bankruptcy. And taxes were only part of the US issue.
| Wikipedia notes that just
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Breakers needed 50-ish
| servants to run, and 150 tons of coal a year to heat. Imagine
| the payroll and utilities to live at
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biltmore_Estate
|
| Worth noting - in Britain's "good old days", there _mostly_
| seemed to be no lack of heirs with the PSPSPSPSPS to staff
| and maintain those enormous estates, century after century
| after century. Yes, that was partly social. And primogeniture
| certainly helped.
| ghaff wrote:
| Oh I don't really disagree with any of that. In both the US
| and the UK, the interest in staffing and maintaining multi-
| million dollar high-maintenance summer places (typically in
| conjunction with multi-million dollar city places)
| definitely declined over time.
|
| There are still some ultra-wealthy with multiple homes, but
| there are also probably increasingly options for people to
| just rent something for a month or two that's a lot less
| headache with some minimal staff (if that)--or at least
| have one of a couple of places be as low maintenance as
| possible.
| phantasmish wrote:
| > (Though over in America, most of the historic grand mansions
| are now tourist attractions, for lack of heirs with the wealth
| and interest in maintaining them.)
|
| Part of this is that the "old money" tended to withdraw from
| public life after the Great Depression when they decided infamy
| was a serious liability.
|
| That's why one struggles to name any of the living heirs of the
| big names of that era, who are absolutely still filthy stinking
| rich, while newbies like Musk, everyone knows. The culture of
| what Fussell calls the "top out-of-sight" is to remain
| sufficiently anonymous that nobody knows their given names
| unless one goes looking (and even then, it may be hard to find
| much trace of them). A bunch of them don't show up on any of
| those "richest" lists not because they couldn't rank, but
| because you effectively have to opt-in to those, for enough of
| your wealth to be traceable without great effort to get
| counted.
|
| Owning a highly-visible Newport mansion could well be a mark of
| poor taste, among that set.
|
| They still have their grand houses, they just may not (though,
| may) be in the Georgian or Neoclassical style or whatever, and
| they're probably not visible (from remotely close-up, at any
| rate) from any public road. Drive minor highways in the right
| parts of the country and look for nice (though, not necessarily
| imposing or impressive) gates leading into what looks like a
| simple, wooded lot with an unremarkable, perhaps even gravel,
| drive that immediately disappears into the trees, and you've
| probably found one, and they're all over the place... plus
| their families will usually own plenty of extremely nice, but
| not flashy, well-located houses and condos and such in more-
| populated areas.
| green-salt wrote:
| the houses are really easy to find in satellite view on maps
| too
| onetimeusename wrote:
| I read a biography of a British politician who was later
| elevated to the aristocracy (although I guess his family was
| somewhere between commoner and aristocrat prior to that). It
| said his family took a financial hit because of a decline in
| crops in the late 1800s. I dug it up and found out that the US
| was partly responsible for that actually because of cheaper
| imported grains.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_depression_of_British_ag...
|
| Many aristocrats relied on agricultural income from their
| property holdings.
|
| Another interesting point is that it seems like the majority of
| titles were awarded relatively recently as in within the last
| 120-150 years. That doesn't mean there aren't some older ones
| but it changes the perception of them from being a centuries
| old group of warlords or relatives of the king to a group of
| lawyers, military officers, and politicians.
| bell-cot wrote:
| Yes-ish? I might have linked
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_Laws#Repeal In many ways
| that repeal was a direct consequence of the Industrial
| Revolution, and the IR's "new rich" were often eager to
| acquire the architectural trappings of the old rich, pay
| staggering sums to marry into them, and other tricks.
| lostlogin wrote:
| Doughty does not go into the polemical question of whether or not
| the elimination of hereditary peers is a good idea (for the
| record, it isn't...)
|
| If we are proponents of hereditary roles, why not go full hog,
| and just have the monarchy control the show?
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| Why isn't it a good idea? Whatever qualities or services
| performed by the original person probably didn't pass to the
| children
| lurk2 wrote:
| > Why isn't it a good idea?
|
| I had the same question.
|
| > Whatever qualities or services performed by the original
| person probably didn't pass to the children
|
| Maybe if you subscribe to the hard times theory. There's
| plenty of reason to suspect that certain aptitudes can be
| genetically heritable, and that doesn't even address the
| issue of skills transferring by osmosis or deliberate
| instruction in the household.
| hammock wrote:
| I always chuckle (or squirm) when someone suggests "picking a
| random person to be the president" rather than our current
| broken campaigning system.
|
| Far better than that option, would be for a random family to
| _inherit that power forever_ , than for a different random
| family be chosen every 4 years. Because at least then the
| "royal" family has some accountability to govern for long-
| term success, lest their descendants be dragged into the
| street and hung by an unhappy mob with pitchforks.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Well, your way means there's a succession unpredictably
| every ~20 years instead of predictably every 4.
|
| Whether that's a point for or against depends on whether
| you think policy thrashing every 4 years is a good idea.
| lostlogin wrote:
| > lest their descendants be dragged into the street and
| hung by an unhappy mob with pitchforks.
|
| The idea that a monarchy sees itself as accountable to the
| people is hilarious. They have a record of ruling with an
| iron fist and killing opposition.
| roenxi wrote:
| Well that is the question, isn't it. What qualities are
| passed on to their children? It is actually fairly common to
| see ideological continuity between parent and child (eg, most
| members of a religion had parents from that religion). So
| there is a case to be made that if you have a subgroup of
| society with unusually clear governing principles it makes
| sense to put them in change and have their children continue
| to be in charge because it has a chance of preserving the
| principles. In the optomistic case they can propagate for
| generations. That does actually appear to be what happens
| historically in successful countries where a hereditary or
| semi-hereditary ruling elite form with strong capabilities
| and shepherd everyone to success for a few generations before
| their abilities mean revert.
|
| That being said it is comparatively a terrible way of doing
| things vs a more mathematically and psychologically sound
| system. Electing people really is the way to go, all these
| "stable" political systems are stable at being worse than
| just letting people vote for everything. As the saying goes,
| dead is stable. Stable isn't great if unstable means the
| capacity to rapidly improve.
| andy99 wrote:
| Having an apolitical (or unelected) and slow changing second
| chamber is a useful counterbalance to elected officials running
| amok. There's no "great" answer to this that I'm aware of but
| it has been a viable compromise.
| hammock wrote:
| Another compromise in the same vein was (until 1913) the U.S.
| Senate, elected by the state legislature rather than direct
| election and for terms 2.5x as long as that of a House rep
| lostlogin wrote:
| Apolitical? Hardly. They are literally politicians, just
| unelected. It's all the worst aspects of elected officials
| with added nepotism and no ability to remove them.
|
| It's monarchy-lite.
| andy99 wrote:
| They are not political appointees, so have a lower chance
| of being correlated with whatever movement of the moment
| and so serve as checks and balances. The fact that they
| can't be replaced is a feature.
| niemandhier wrote:
| I live next to a baron, next town lives a count. Both are just
| moderately wealthy humans.
|
| There is one distinction that sets them apart from "new money":
| They could not leave without loosing a significant part of their
| identity and influence.
|
| I grew up among socialists, I have no love for aristocracy, but
| in times when the schism between rich and poor widens a caste of
| people that are bound by custom to be loyal to a place, meaning
| they are reluctant to abandon their local community, might be
| worth more than we think.
| aurizon wrote:
| This relic of the days of Kings/Queens/princes/dukes/Lords/Ladies
| has to be extinguished, root, branch and leaf. There are residues
| in many European countries as well, slowly fading to irrelevance.
| The current King should dissolve this system and abdicate and let
| the remnants shrivel. The UK 'House of Lords' = also gone. Create
| an elected second house with spread terms, like the USA has, with
| 6 years and 1/3rd every 2 years. USA has fixed lengths, first
| house 4 years for all, the senate 6 in 3 staggered pairs. Or
| something rational. In the UK/Canada/others, there is party
| discipline and party members vote as told be leader(except for
| free votes). This blocks buying votes, as happens in the USA and
| some, where an elected member is free to vote. This appears to
| 'let the people see', but it creates a fungible vote where a
| briber can see if the elected member voted as paid, yes illegal,
| but the word 'bagman' crops up a lot in politics. Paid lobbies
| need to be outlawed, however they are named\hidden
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-10-31 23:00 UTC)