A regard for human excellence is the aristocratic ethos. To speak of aristocracy is perhaps a bit eccentric in our time, but consider the paradoxical truth that equality is an aristocratic ideal. It is the ideal of friendship — of those who stand apart from the collective and recognize one another as peers… . By contrast, the bourgeois principle is not equality but equivalence — a positing of interchangeability that elides human difference of rank.

Posted on February 11, 2010