Nobilitas [Paperback]

Dr. Alexander Jacob (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 26, 2000

Nobilitas is a study of the history of aristocratic philosophy from ancient Greece to the early twentieth century that aims at providing an alternative to the liberal democratic norms, which are propagated today as the only viable socio-political system for the world community. Jacob reveals that, contrary to popular belief, the social and cultural development of European civilization has, for twenty-five centuries, been based not on democratic or communist notions but, rather on aristocratic and nationalist notions. Beginning with the political philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, and continuing through Renaissance and Baroque aristocratic philosophers, the German Idealists, and English and Italian nationalists, the study ends with the transformation of aristocratic philosophy in nineteenth century Germany into racist elitism. As such, the study includes a survey of the philosophical bases of racism and anti-Semitism. These topics have been systematically excluded from academic and political debate since the end of the last Great War. This study is a pioneering work in understanding and changing political ideologies.

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About the Author

Dr. Alexander Jacob is the author of Edgar Julius Jung. The Rule of the Inferiour, a translation of 'Die Herrschaft der Minderwertigen' (1930), with an Introduction and Notes, Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1995.

Product Details

• Paperback: 128 pages
• Publisher: University Press Of America (December 26, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0761818871
• ISBN-13: 978-0761818878
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 6 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #884,932 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Voice of the Philosophers Speaks, June 10, 2006

By 

zonaras (Jimbo's House of Pie) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Nobilitas (Paperback)

_Nobilitas_ by is a very brief introduction to what the author terms "aristocratic philosophy." The book is basically a survey, slightly over a hundred pages long of the European philosophic tradition stretching back from ancient Greece, through the Enlightenment, the nineteenth century and the twentieth century. Jacob's perspective does not embrace the non-white races, the "Negros" and "Mongols" and is decidedly anti-Jewish. Instead of embracing the post-enlightenment ideals of "liberty, equality and fraternity," Jacob advocates nationalism, hierarchy, racialism and even slavery--and cites many of the greatest minds in history to show that an "authoritarian" view of society is no half-baked reaction to the continuous onslaught of modern egalitarian movements. Jacob also leans in more than one place toward labeling Christianity a "slave religion" along similar terms as Nietzsche although he generally agrees with Roman Catholic counter-revolutionaries, the best known being France's Joseph de Maistre and Spain's Juan Donoso Cortes. In addition to more famous philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hegel, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, Jacob also quotes from the more obscure works of the Florentine Francesco Guicciardini, the Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico and the Prussian nationalist Heinrich von Treitscke. At the end of the book, Jacob makes some remarks about Hitler, Alfred Rosenberg (the "official" philosopher of the Third Reich) and the notorious French Count, Arthur de Gobineau, an individual who viewed history as the continuous rise and decline of civilizations based upon purity of Aryan blood. The book's only weakness is that the book is too short, moving from subject to subject in a very rapid succession without Jacob developing enough of his own perspective on what the philosophers wrote. That's just a personal criticism of mine. I highly recommend this book to any reader who is interested in the deeper intellectual undercurrents that have stood opposed to the belief in human equality and the various philosophies of egalitarianism from the Greeks to the twentieth century.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Western alternatives to liberal democracy, August 3, 2011

By 

T. Kalamaras "Scrivener" (Midwest USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Nobilitas (Paperback)

As Americans we are ignorant of the European continental tradition of aristocracy as a prefered form of government. To the extent we are aware of it, it rattles around in our collective empty head like a vaguely remembered form of heresy. It invokes for us powdered wigs and Redcoats and not much else. That people could still take the idea of hereditary nobility seriously might seem bizarre to us.

And heresy is precisely what this book is for the American concept of the preferable form of government. Heresy that aristocracy could be prefered over representative democracy and republican forms. And yet there is such a tradition which includes Plato's Republic and much much more in the interim.

While the experience of the Revolutionary Bloodbaths in France and Russia gave Europeans much pause over unfettered invocatikon of secular idols of "democracy" and "equality" and other such liberal slogans, that reservation did not equally resound in America except perhaps in the form of a certain Edmund Burke style reticence that crept into the right and has lingered there among the other vague attachments of conservativism. By the 21st century however the enthusiastic American remodeling of the Middle Eastern political landscape by armed conquest, ititiated under a supposedly "conservative" executive, may suggest that the American political idea is now wholly consumed with the revolutionary democratic fervor that was for a time at least regarded with caution by some in our country. Today one wonders if that caution in the face of a utopian zeal for the imposition of democractic institutions in foreign lands is totally lost and forgotten.

This fantastic survey however gives structure and integrated explanation to that tradition of favoring the aristocratic form and its Janus face the suspicion of democracy. What for an American are only vague feelings, with a proper study starting with and guided by this excellent book the American can gain a precise and useful understanding of alternative political ideas and their legitimate basis in political philospohy.

And this is not some vain archiving of archaic and obsolete constitutional forms. These ideas just like Plato's seminal work on government, The Republic, have relevance not only to centuries past but a contemporary signficance even in this day when the likes of Fukuyama have said that history is over and liberal democracy has triumphed. In the context of 2500 years of European experience with constitutional governance, that is exposed as the hubris it really is.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Exceptional. Unapologetic. Accurate. Even if it feels incomplete., May 12, 2011

By 

Curt D "Economic Philosophy and Political Eco... (Redmond, WA USA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Nobilitas (Paperback)

The book is exceptional. It is the best I have found so far. It is too short. It feels incomplete. It is a survey. And it correctly states aristocratic philosophy as spiritual in structure, rather than oppressive and mechanistic.

The book's weakness is that it left me frustrated in that he proposed no greater context for it, modernizing it, or translating it into rationally articulated economic principles given the necessity of the economy at the time it was employed. Perhaps that's not his objective. But I finished the book wanting more.

As a specialist in economic philosophy, I am consistently frustrated by fact that aristocratic philosophy, because it is largely part of the pre-empirical era, and because its authors thought matters of trade and commerce too pedestrian and soiled to be considered as part of their reasoning, failed to incorporate economic matters into their rhetoric and instead, focused on the application of wealth to the people and the geography that was their domain. I suspect that this was largely because the productivity of the land was so invariant, that people were tied to that land, and because the productivity of individuals only doubled from about the year 100 to the year 1800, if that. So, the emphasis was on the fastidiousness and discipline of the society so that the farmers and craftsmen had the best use of that productivity to concentrate capital, conserve it, and provide risk mitigation for the group for the future.

Modern conservatism is the unarticulated remnant of aristocratic philosophy, ignorant of it's agrarian basis, sanitized of it's justification for aristocratic social and political roles, and de-popularized by the process of immigrating various peoples into the american continent in order to fill up the land after the Louisiana Purchase, and discredited by the first world war. It is still couched in ceremonial and spiritual language. It is aspirational. Historical. Allegorical. While it relies upon natural law, which has scientific basis to it, as is being demonstrated by behavioral economics, it does not rely upon economic well being, does not even mention it, and that is partly because the change in economic structure during the industrial revolution

The difference between social classes is not land or social position or wealth. It is Time Preference. Higher classes have a longer time preference, commonly referred to as 'higher'. Lower classes have a shorter Time Preference, commonly referred to as "lower" time preference. Time preference being the preference for having rewards now (high) or later (low). A conservative, who relies upon military tradition for insights, has a longer time preference than his more hedonistic peers. This makes it very difficult to agree upon ends. And it is difficult for people of different time preferences to agree upon means of achieving ends, even if those ends are shared, because the various stepping stones involved in planning each consist of different time preference decisions -- our universe is kaleidic, and decisions are unclear in the face of uncertainty, and we simplify our decision making by picking a sort of 'periodicity' to our mental planning efforts based upon our time preferences - weaving a web of steps in our plan. Furthermore, since most decisions require tie-breakers, whenever we make a decision, we favor that choice in the set of available choices that contributes to fulfilling our time preferences. Over time, we habituate this decision making to the point where we cannot alter it. So what is important here is that there really are social classes. Even if they were not genetically determinant (which it appears from the work of the human genome project, that they are) they would be culturally deterministic given differences in time preferences.

It's advocates' failure to articulate aristocratic philosophy (conservatism) as a rational economic strategy given our innate and implastic human behavior, is the reason our political discourse is intractable.

Aristocracy and conservatism are a collection of class based principles for the purpose of ensuring group persistence by accumulating all forms of capital: knowledge, human, cultural, fixed, and geographic. We are in a period right now, and have been since the industrial revolution, wherein we have harnessed power in the form of electrical and fossil fuels, and are freed from dependence upon human and animal labor. And as a consequence we are breeding a to a malthusian population limit, which is defended, not by our policies, but by the fact that the capitalist institutions that makes complex societies possible, also makes children extremely expensive, so that the most advanced economies do not breed, while the primitive economies are exploding.

All philosophies are class philosophies. The west has Aristocratic philosophy for the upper class, capitalist philosophy for the upper middle class (libertarianism), managerial philosophy for the middle class (classical liberalism), a collectivist philosophy for the working classes (democratic secular socialism) and a revolutionary collectivism for the lower classes (communism). It is poorly understood that any of these systems will fail in the end, because they attempt to favor one class rather than the other -- instead of having a system of government where each class has a house of government with powers that limit that class' ability to appropriate from other classes, that must cooperate with other houses of government in order to achieve their mutual ends. The british system included the three class model, and so did the american, for some time. It was the abandonment of that hierarchical model and the fantasy of equality that has led us to destroying our own government and society by the use of government for class warfare instead of class cooperation and mutual benefit as a people.

Monarchy is the most common form of government in history, constitutional multi-house monarchy the best form of government yet devised, and why democracies are temporary explosions that quickly dissipate because they are made possible only by either geographic isolation (the usa in the early colonies, or iceland during it's colonization) or by economic and military conquest (the Dardanelles and eastern trade routes under Athens).