The Good Ruler in Historical Perspective
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nocratic class.”40 Nora and his colleagues had their own mirrors, a body of writings that came out of the Resistance whose principles they did their very best to live up to. They therefore illustrated an exception— inevitably a transient one as well, for the aristocratic sensibility that animated the grands corps de l’État, sure of their duty as the sole legiti mate custodians of the general interest,41 was incompatible over the long term with the advent of a self-consciously democ ratic society. Persons for whom politics is a vocation are, as I say, few and far be tween t oday. Weber would have been bitterly disappointed, though prob ably not surprised, to learn that almost a century later careerists in elec tive office and at the highest levels of the state remain the best-equipped battalions of the political class. Apart from technical reasons having to do with the functioning of parties and the electoral system, certain patterns in the distribution of elites help to explain why this should be so. In e very society t here are hierarchies among professions, positions, and activities, and corresponding to these are different ways of as signing social status, all of which shape individual ambitions. In Impe rial China the bureaucracy attracted the most brilliant minds, whereas science and technology held less appeal; and it was in just these domains, where previously it had been ahead of the West, that China ended up falling far behind. In Renaissance Europe, Jews and other religious mi norities, finding themselves barred from holding public office, concen trated their energies in commerce and finance. Intellectual life, for its part, has flourished whenever great intellects have had only a limited choice among c areers. In every historical period, the political, economic, military, intellectual, and artistic worlds have exerted varying powers of attraction. Today it is plain that politics holds l ittle interest for young people by comparison with the arts, business and finance, and the life of the mind. Polls confirm that the social prestige of public office has fallen to new lows. This is perhaps the most regrettable aspect of contemporary po litical life, for in an age of diminishing social cohesiveness, when crit ical choices need to be made with regard to the future of the planet, we are more than ever in need of vibrant democracies—a nd therefore of good rulers. It is not a problem that can be made to go away by waiting for the coming of a providential leader or a supreme savior, someone capable as if by magic of exorcizing the demons of impotence and medi ocrity that paralyze democracies today. We must take a more sober view
