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I recently read Michael Hudson's And Forgive Them Their Debts and it was essentially about how oligarchs vied with kings/emperors/whatever for power. And thinking about the prestige of the British political system among continental thinkers in the 18th Century ... it was nobles jerking off to the control the British aristocracy had over their monarch. Which they only won in the end by embracing the aims of the Commons TEMPORARILY during their campaigns against royal power.
French aristocrats might have thought they were playing a pretty cunning game.
The British aristocracy did kick ass in the 1700's. The copper sheathing of the Royal Navy in the Caribbean for instance. Nascent London aristocracy.
Much pearl-clutching against Stalinism is old-fashioned Edmund Burke/Voltaire/I Don't Know.
[Don't forget to add in LYNX later.]
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