The Politics of Aristocratic Empires by John H. Kautsky

Author:John H. Kautsky [Kautsky, John H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General, Political Ideologies
ISBN: 9781351303262
Google: _ck3DwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 3367455
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 1982-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Notes

1. The motto of the Prince of Wales is: “Ich dien” (I serve). This does not mean that the Prince of Wales is a Diener, a servant, or, for that matter, a serf. Obviously, the word has very different connotations, as it still does today when servants may be lowly, but leaders of governments are public “servants,” bureaucrats are civil “servants,” and military men “serve” in the armed “services.”

2. Quoted in Bellah, Tokugawa Religion, p. 91.

3. Vagts, A History of Militarism, p. 68. On “status honor” in a number of aristocratic empires, see also Weber, Economy and Society, 3:1104–5.

4. Maquet, “The Kingdom of Ruanda,” p. 179. Maquet ends his paragraph by noting that “an aristocratic caste usually emphasizes those differences which constantly remind others how far removed they are from the noble set” (ibid., p. 180).

5. Levine, Wax and Gold, p. 156.

6. Geertz, The Religion of Java, p. 247.

7. “These li… were designed to cover all the major activities of life and required much time to learn. On the military side they remind us in some ways of the code of chivalry of European knighthood.” Bodde, “Feudalism in China,” p. 59.

8. Maquet, “The Kingdom of Ruanda,” pp. 178–79.

9. Varley, The Samurai, p. 123.

10. Ibid., pp. 123–25. The bushido was formulated in the Tokugawa period, when Japan was no longer traditional and when the samurai “were in fact warriors who had no wars to fight” (ibid., p. 121), but it embodied the values of their idealized warrior past. On the bushido and its emphasis on loyalty, see also Bellah, Tokugawa Religion, pp. 90–98. He says of this code that “the military emphasis is crucial. Military service… typifies selfless devotion to the collectivity and its head, even to the point of death. Death indeed in a military context can come to symbolize that very devotion” (ibid., p. 97). On the samurai, see also the beautifully illustrated Turnbull, The Samurai.

11. Glory, according to Schopenhauer, “must be acquired, but honor must not be lost.” Vagts, A History of Militarism, p. 70.

12. Gouldner, Enter Plato, p. 12.

13. Bloch, Feudal Society, p. 294.

14. Bendix, Kings or People, p. 228.

15. Ibid., p. 231. The prevalence of violence among aristocrats is illustrated by the fact that among the sons of English dukes born between 1330 and 1479—when, to be sure, England was no longer traditional—46 percent died violent deaths. The life expectancy of male members of ducal families born in this period was twenty-four years. Omitting violent deaths, however, it was thirty-one years. Hollingsworth, “A Demographic Study of the British Ducal Families,” pp. 8–9.

16. Vagts, A History of Militarism, p. 42. The quotation is taken from Edgard Boutaric, Institutions militaires de la France (Paris: Henri Plon, 1863), p. 212. According to Shakespeare, the death in battle of common men who fought in the Hundred Years War was no joke, but it did remain an embarrassment to the aristocrats. When the French herald asks for an armistice at the battle of Agincourt (1415), it is

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