ABSTRACT
This chapter explains the remarkable durability and stability of these characteristics that stand in such striking contrast to the increasingly rapid changes that come with modernization and modernity. The distinction between a modern country or a state and an aristocratic empire is, in our context, a vital one, because the former is, in good part, an arena of politics and the latter is not. Some traditional aristocrats themselves shared my view of the key role of exploitation in aristocratic politics. Hence aristocratic politics is conflict among aristocrats for positions as well as for the titles, insignia, and privileges attached to particular positions. In the process of aristocratic politics and competition, aristocrats ceaselessly change positions; individual aristocrats, their families and factions rise and fall and so do entire dynasties and empires. As in all aristocratic empires, there was in those of feudal Western Europe perennial conflict between higher and lower aristocrats over the distribution of the taxes taken from the peasantry.
