Like many terms used to describe government structures, aristocracy is impossible to define. Founded on the Greek word, aristos, which means best, at its heart aristocracy means 'rule by the best'. Its theoretical foundation begins with the political works of Plato and Aristotle, the two central figures in Greek and European philosophy. Both felt that Greek democracy had been a disaster; their fundamental problem with democracy was that it put government in the hands of people who were the least capable of making sound decisions. For Plato, the general run of humanity was driven by its selfish passions and desires; this was a poor foundation for deliberate, considered, and selfless decision-making. While Plato and Aristotle were familiar with an infinite variety of possible governments, they believed that government should be in the hands of the most capable members of society. Above all, people in government should be moral and selfless; they should be highly intelligent and educated, as well as brave and temperate. This was 'rule by the best'.

This is not, however, what we think of when we use the term aristocracy. In early modern Europe and modern Europe, the aristocracy consisted of the nobility or ruling classes of society. Membership in the aristocracy was not through achievement, intelligence, or moral growth, but solely hereditary (sometimes it was given out). How did the Greek idea of 'rule by the best' turn into something more closely resembling a hereditary oligarchy or just simply an upper class?

The answer can be found in part in theories of the monarchy in the Middle Ages. In order to legitimate ta hereditary monarchy, the medieval Europeans theorized that the virtues which made a monarch suitable for the job were hereditary. This led to a segregation of virtues: the monarch and his noble bureaucrats were by nature and heredity more moral and civilized than the rest of the population. They were, then, the 'best' morally and intellectually. In this way, the notion of aristocracy, as 'rule of the best', eventually translated into a concept of a hereditary aristocracy. So ingrained is this notion in the European world view, that we still assume a hereditary superiority in the upper classes.

The founders of American democracy turned back to the original, philosophical definition of aristocracy when they built American government. Very conscious of Plato's and Aristotle's criticisms of democracy, the founders of American government wanted to avoid putting the government into the hands of the worst members of society. They also, however, wanted to avoid the dangers of a hereditary aristocracy, for European history proven amply that the hereditary aristocracy is many things but it rarely consists of the 'best' members of society either in moral or intellectual terms (look at the royal family in England, for instance). So the framers of American government created representative democracy, in which the people collectively decide who the 'best' people are to run the government. In this way, a limited democracy is allowed to co-exist seamlessly with a government that is primarily ruled by the most qualified people morally and intellecturally, well, sometimes.

sir winston leonard spencer churchill
Sir Winston Churchill was the eldest son of the aristocrat Lord Randolph Churchill, born on 30th November 1874. He is best known for his stubborness yet courageous leadership as Prime Minister for Great Britain when he led the British people from the brink of defeat during World War II.

Following his graduation from the Royal Military College in Sandhurst he was commissioned in the Forth Hussars in February 1895.  As a war correspondent he was captured during the Boer War. After his escape he became a National Hero. Ten month later he was elected as a member of the Conservative Party. In 1904 he joined the Liberal Party where he became the president of the Board of Trade.

It was in 1910 he became Home Secretary where he worked with David Lloyd George. In 1911 he left the Home Office and became first Lord of the Admiralty. His career was almost destroyed as a result of the unsuccessful Gallipoli campaign during the First World War. He was forced to resign from the Admiralty. However, he returned to Government as the Minister of Munition in 1917. In this year he joined the coalition party in which he was a member until it collapsed in 1922 when for two years he was out of Parliament. He returned to the conservative government in 1924 and was given the job of Chancellor of the Exchequer. For ten years during the depression Churchill was denied cabinet office. His backing and support for King Edward VIII during his abdication were frowned upon by the national government. However in September 1939, when Nazi Germany declared war on Poland, the public supported him in his views. Once again Neville Chamberlain appointed him First Lord of the Admiralty on September 3rd, 1939.

In 1940 Churchill succeeded Chamberlain as prime minister and during World War II he successfully secured military aid and moral support from the United States. He travelled endlessly during the war establishing close ties with leaders of other nations and co-ordinated a military strategy which subsequently ensured Hitler's defeat.

His tireless efforts gained admiration from all over the world. He was defeated however during the 1945 election by the Labour party who ruled until 1951. Churchill regained his power in 1951 and lead Britain once again until 5th April 1955 when ill health forced him to resign. He spent much of his latter years writing (The History of the English-Speaking People) and painting. In recognition of this historical studies he received the Nobel Price for Literature in 1953 and in 1963 the US Congress conferred on him honorary American citizenship.

In 1965, at the age of 90 he died of a stroke. His death marked the end of an era in British History and he was given a state funeral and was buried in St. Martin's Churchyard, Bladon, Oxfordshire. During all of his life he had served no less than six British monarchs: Queen Victoria, Edward VII, George IV, Edward VIII, George VI and Elisabeth II.

democracy
The power of the democratic idea has also evoked some of history's most profound and moving expressions of human will and intellect, from Pericles in ancient Athens to Vaclav Havel in the modern Czech Republic, from Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence in 1776 to Andrei Sakharov's last speeches in 1989.

In the dictionary definition, democracy is:

"...government by the people in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised directly by them or by their elected agents under a free electoral system."

Freedom and democracy are often used interchangeably, but the two are not synonymous. Democracy is indeed a set of ideas and principles about freedom, but it also consists of a set of practices and procedures that have been molded through a long, often tortuous history. In short, democracy is the institutionalization of freedom. For this reason, it is possible to identify the time-tested fundamentals of constitutional government, human rights, and equality before the law that any society must possess to be properly called democratic.

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Democracies fall into two basic categories, direct and representative. In a direct democracy, all citizens, without the intermediary of elected or appointed officials, can participate in making public decisions. Such a system is clearly only practical with relatively small numbers of people, in a community organization or tribal council, for example, or the local unit of a labor union, where members can meet in a single room to discuss issues and arrive at decisions by consensus or majority vote. Ancient Athens, the world's first democracy, managed to practice direct democracy with an assembly that may have numbered as many as 5,000 to 6,000 persons, perhaps the maximum number that can physically gather in one place and practice direct democracy.

Today, the most common form of democracy, whether for a town of 50,000 or nations of 50 million, is representative democracy, in which citizens elect officials to make political decisions, formulate laws, and administer programs for the public good. In the name of the people, such officials can deliberate on complex public issues in a thoughtful and systematic manner that requires an investment of time and energy that is often impractical for the vast majority of private citizens.

liberalism
Liberalism can be understood as a political tradition, a political philosophy and as a general philosophical theory, encompassing a theory of value, a conception of the person and a moral theory as well as a political philosophy. As a political tradition liberalism has varied in different countries. In England, in many ways the birthplace of liberalism, the liberal tradition in politics has centred on religious toleration, government by consent, personal and, especially, economic freedom. In France liberalism has been more closely associated with secularism and democracy. In the United States liberals often combine a devotion to personal liberty with an antipathy to capitalism, while the liberalism of Australia tends to be much more sympathetic to capitalism but often less enthusiastic about civil liberties. To understand this diversity in political traditions, we need to examine liberalism as a political theory and as a general philosophy.

The Fundamental Liberal Principle holds that restrictions on liberty must be justified, and because he accepts this, we can understand Hobbes as espousing a liberal political theory. But Hobbes is at best a qualified liberal, for he also argues that drastic limitations on liberty can be justified. Paradigmatic liberals such as Locke not only advocate the Fundamental Liberal Principle, but also maintain that justified limitations on liberty are fairly modest. Only a limited government can be justified; indeed, the basic task of government is to protect the equal liberty of citizens. Thus John Rawls's first principle of justice: ‘Each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive total system of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar system for all.

marxism-leninsim
A label of Lenin's approach to Marxism at the beginning of the 20th-century, in a capitalist Russia emerging from feudalism. While Lenin considered himself only a Marxist, after his death his theory and practice was given the label of Marxism-Leninism, considered to be an overall evolution of Marxism in the 'era of the proletarian revolution'. Marxism-Leninism was the official political theory of the former Soviet state and was enforced throughout most of the former Eastern European socialist governments of the 20th-century.

The creation and development of Marxism-Leninism can be divided into two general categories: the creation and development by Stalin, and the revision by Khrushchev and continual revisions by the Soviet government to follow.

Stalin defined Leninism in his work The Foundations of Leninism: "Leninism is Marxism in the era of imperialism and the proletarian revolution. To be more exact, Leninism is the theory and tactics of the proletarian revolution in general, the theory and tactics of the dictatorship of the proletariat in particular." Stalin explained that Leninism first began in 1903, and was identical to Bolshevism.

Stalin explained that a foundation of Marxist-Leninist theory was that a socialist revolution could only be accomplished by the Communist Party of a particular nation, the vanguard of the working class (its organizer and leader). After the socialist revolution had been affected, this vanguard would act as the sole representative of the working class.

While in some ways a direct product of Lenin's philosophy for Russia, Marxism-Leninism also took on new approaches. For example, though Lenin believed that socialism could only exist on an international scale, Marxism-Leninism supported Stalin's theory of 'Socialism in One Country'. Stalin enforced Marxism-Leninism as an international platform by explaining that its principles and practices applied to the whole world.

In this way Marxism-Leninism became the only true theory and practice of Marxism in the 20th-century, 'without adhering to Marxism-Leninism a socialist revolution could not be achieved'. This assertion was partly based on one of the foundations of dialectical materialist thinking: that practice is the criterion of truth. Stalin explained that Lenin had shown through his practice, a particular way to establish a socialist government in Russia; thus that practice substantiated Lenin's theory as true in Russia at the beginning of the 20th century. That particular however, was extracted from its historical context and converted into a universal. Hence the basis for why some considered the label Marxist-Leninist to be partially idealist , because it placed the conditions of practice particular to Russia at the beginning of the 20 century as true for all countries in the world.

Despite Stalin's creation and evolution of the Marxist Leninist philosophy, the term was later used by the Soviet government in support of 'De-Stalinification'. While Stalin had recognized the theory of the Communist vanguard as a creation of Lenin, the Soviet government headed by Khrushchev had explained that the Communist vanguard was in fact a part of the 'Marxist' aspect of Marxism-Leninism (an aspect which hitherto had been little addressed). The Leninist aspect, Khrushchev explained, began in the 'era of the proletarian revolution and socialist construction'.

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Khrushchev developed Marxism-Leninism to explain that a worldwide war between workers and capitalists was no longer necessary, but instead that the ideal of peaceful coexistence is inherent in the class struggle. The new Soviet government further explained that while Marxism-Leninism was created by the theory and practice of the dictatorship of the proletariat (which Lenin had explained as a short and transitionary form of government) Marxism-Leninism evolved into the theory of a 'state of the whole people' (This development was directly opposite of Marx, Engels, and Lenin's theory of the state, that the state always acts in the interests of a certain class, and when no classes existed, the state would cease to exist).

After Lenin's death, the creation, development and evolution of Marxism Leninism was the focus of crippling sectarian battles throughout the world over what Lenin 'had really meant'. Stalin explained that the practice and understanding of Trotsky was completely opposite of Leninism, while Trotsky criticized Stalin's Marxism-Leninism as a failure. Mao criticized Khrushchev's Marxism-Leninism as bourgeois revisionism, while Khrushchev and later the Chinese government itself declared Mao a renegade to Marxism-Leninism, etc, etc, etc.....

socialism
under construction...

trias politica
under construction...