← Back to context

Comment by oblio

5 hours ago

You should probably read the history of anarchism in Imperial Russia.

There were tons of assassination attempts against the tsars in the 1800s, and they even killed a tsar. Yet the empire fell due to an external war, roughly 100 years later.

Aristocracy became useless around 1600-1700, when gunpowder meant that peasant armies took over instead of knights, yet it took between 200 and 400 years for full legal equality to be introduced everywhere and some places still have nobility with special status, to this day, even in developed countries.

> Aristocracy became useless around 1600-1700, when gunpowder meant that peasant armies took over instead of knights

Does this view rest on the claim that the only use of the aristocracy is warfare?

  • That's the reason it arose, that was part of the "social contract".

    Clergy to protect from the gods, nobility to protect from other organized groups of humans, peasants to provide food and beasts of burden, artisans to build things.

    Of course, once a class that doesn't have to do backbreaking work is established, rooting them out is difficult. The clergy was also hard to reduce.