The decline of the British aristocracy was inevitable.
Things like this cannot be determined in a rigidly iron way. That said, the fact remains that it was fairly likely that an aristocratic order based on deference, agriculture and a certain form of nondemocratic politics was not going to flourish in a world where deference is undermined, where agriculture is replaced by industry and where oligarchic politics are superseded by democratic politics. So while I do not want to say that it was inevitable, I think that from the 18th century onward, the going did get increasingly harder for the aristocracy. As a result, they are much less powerful now than they were 300 years ago.

Affluent Americans today are a nontraditional aristocracy.
There has never been an aristocracy in the United States in the sense that it existed in Europe. Most people in the United States today think of themselves as middle class. I have never met anybody in this country who described himself as upper class.

When the United States set itself up as an independent nation, it deliberately outlawed what were thought to be the underpinnings of aristocracy in Europe—titles and strict settlement, which were the means whereby estates in Europe were passed from one generation to another. But there did develop, in the course of the late 18th century, and throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, self-conscious elite groups on the East Coast in Philadelphia, Baltimore, New York and Boston, who were interested in notions of high social prestige and public duty across generations, in a European aristocratic mode. Quite a lot of them married into European aristocratic families.

Differing national economic, social and political structures preclude comparisons between the British aristocracy of the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, and the current holders of wealth and power in the United States.
It is not very easy to draw comparisons between the British aristocracy in its heyday of the late 19th and early 20th centuries and the elite of the United States, either then or now. Britain has had an aristocracy of a sort that America has never had. It is a quite tiny country with a centralized system of government and, indeed, of society until fairly recently. The United States is a huge country with different elite groups dispersed across different cities. Making comparisons of this sort is not very easy, and in some sense, not very instructive.

It is, however, a comparison that people make, and quite a suggestive one, that whereas in Britain the 20th and 21st centuries afforded no great dynasties of prime ministers, America seems to have dynastic political families, like the Bushes, the Clintons or the Gores. Dynastic political families of this kind do not exist in Britain anymore.

Inheritors of aristocratic privilege in 19th- and early 20th-century Britain did not have the discipline, brains or will to preserve their families’ fortunes.
This brings us back to the question of whether decline is inevitable. The aristocracy in Britain had, and has, a huge range of personality types of abilities—some seriously malfunctional personalities and some stupid people, and, on the other hand, some seriously high-minded individuals and some seriously clever people. One cannot simply say that they are all lacking in discipline or brains or will.

How far individual efforts were the key to survival is not altogether clear. A large part of it had to do with accidents: people died at the wrong time, and families got hit hard with death taxes. This has nothing to do with brains; it is just accident. The notion of personality shortcomings or merits, or of ability or lack of it, is a complicated one. It is not clear that the survival of a social group as a whole is dependent on collective efforts, even though the survival of particular families may depend on individual efforts. What is true is that members of the British aristocracy are not as politically active today, in part because many of them have to work hard to earn their livings. In the old days, members of the leisured classes did not have to earn a living. Today, many of them do, and that is a full-time job.

War and imperial overstretch contributed to the decline of Great Britain and its empire, and consequently, the decline of its ruling class.
There is a connection in the sense that they happened at the same time. If one takes the period from the 1880s to the end of the 20th century, that is the period in which Britain declines as a great power and its empire goes, and that is the same period in which its aristocracy ceases to be a coherent governing class.

During the period of the 1880s to the end of the Second World War, the empire becomes an area of aristocratic interest, as a place to invest, to settle, to go as part of the proconsular elite. They see the empire as an alternative area of activity from Britain itself. But of course when the empire goes, that alternative area of activity goes, and that does help to contribute to the decline of the public role the aristocracy created for itself. So yes, there is a connection.

Aristocracies, in the traditional sense, no longer exist in Western societies.
In many European countries there are still people with titles, and with a certain amount of residual prestige as a result of that. They certainly still know who they are, and in a certain sense, have a different view of the world from the rest of us. What they do not have is the sort of political power they once did. In that sense—a definable, functioning, governing class—they do not exist as they used to, and though some of them are individually wealthy, they are nowhere near as wealthy as Bill Gates or Warren Buffet. And they are no longer leisured, which is one of the prerequisites of aristocracy: they have to work.

Wealth in 19th-century Britain was defined by a feudal system of land ownership.
The wealth structure in Britain in the 19th-century is more complicated than in any other period. The industrial revolution in the empire generated wealth in unprecedented quantities for large numbers of people—people farther down the social scale than ever before.

That said, prior to the last quarter of the 19th century, the wealthiest people in Britain remained the traditional aristocracy: people like the Duke of Devonshire, the Duke of Bedford or the Duke of Westminster. The bedrock of that wealth remained broad acres. However, by the 19th century, the very richest aristocrats were very rich, not on account of their agricultural acres, but because of their involvement in a variety of ways in the new industrializing economy: real estate, railroads and a whole variety of industrial ventures. The super rich of the aristocracy in the late 19th century were all involved in the new world of industry and the cities, which augmented their traditional landed wealth.

British aristocrats of this era were philanthropic.
The idea of philanthropy did not exist in the 19th century in the way that it does now, so you have to redefine the question a bit. They certainly believed in a limited amount of charity, but it was pretty small scale. Their notion of charity was to support churches on their estates, and to give to local institutions that were on their estates, which they wanted to support: botanical gardens or literary societies or whatever it might be. They regarded it as a matter of duty to invest in local railroads that were on their estates. But that was normally about as far their giving went. The British aristocracy on the whole has never been renowned for broader philanthropy than that. The greatest philanthropists in Britain in the 20th century were, on the whole, middle-class people.

The British aristocracy maintained its power far longer than its counterparts in continental Europe.
It is difficult to make these comparisons across Europe, let alone across the Atlantic, but it is fair to say that the British aristocracy stayed intact as the wealth, status and power elite across more of the 20th century than most other aristocracies did. It is important to remember that the Russian one disappears completely after the Bolshevik revolution of 1917.

Aristocracies are pretty much, though not entirely, wiped out in Eastern Europe by a combination of Stalin and Hitler. In Western Europe they are gone by the middle of the 20th century. On the whole, it is true that they linger most successfully in Britain because Britain’s 20th-century history is a less convulsive one than the histories of almost any other European nation: there is no invasion, there is no defeat, there is no civil war, there is no scrapping of the constitution and starting all over again. Britain’s history is more gentle, and under this circumstance, aristocrats survived longer.

Evolving national economies—in 19th-century Britain, for example, the shift from agrarian to industrial—bring about a reordering of societies and classes.
While I am not an economic determinist—I do not think things are quite that simple—the fact is that changing modes of production, as Karl Marx put it, do bring about changes in social structure and changes in dominant social groups. One of the challenges for any family, be it a British aristocratic one, or an American rich one, is how to retain an elite position across long periods of time when the sources of wealth actually change.

There is no doubt that as economies evolve, modes of production and making money disappear, and they are replaced by new modes of production and new ways of making money. As a consequence of that, some elite groups that have benefited from those changes disappear as the economic structure that made them rich disappears, and new groups come into being.

Wealth, in any country, is essential to the acquisition and maintenance of political power.
The relationship between wealth and power is far more complicated than it used to be; certainly it is in Britain, though not necessarily [in the United States]. In the old days in Britain, to have a successful political career you had to be rich. That was certainly true of aristocrats who were by definition rich, and by virtue of their membership in the House of Lords, powerful. I suppose it was true of businessmen, though the number of really rich businessmen who have gone into politics in Britain is not all that great. But if one looks now at the current British political elite—that is to say the Labour cabinet and the front bench of the conservative opposition—very few of those people are rich. If you look at the overall membership of the House of Commons, very few are rich. In Britain, the trend is now that in order to succeed in politics, you do not have to be rich. By contrast, more American presidents have been wealthy than have British prime ministers.

The decline of the British aristocracy was due, in part, to random events and bad luck.
I think it is true that any social group’s long-term existence is going to be threatened by random events and bad luck. It is certainly the case that although Britain had an easier ride in the 20th century than most European countries—no civil war, defeat, invasion, etc.—there is no doubt that in the First and Second World Wars, large numbers of aristocrats died. Heavy death taxes were paid as the result of that, and that was financially damaging for many families. The whole notion of the family existing across generations was seriously undermined as not just one, but two or three people in a generation were killed in war. If one thinks of the First and Second World Wars as random events, they were very significant in weakening the capacity and the resolve of the British aristocracy to continue in existence as a ruling class.

Most societies, whether they will admit it or not, have aristocracies.
In the whole of human history, all societies have been unequal, and will no doubt continue to be so, notwithstanding the sentiments of the Declaration of Independence. The issue is: if all societies are unequal, what perception of the people at the top does any society have? Sometimes it is a perception of them as an aristocracy, as it developed in Europe. Sometimes it is an elite of party functionaries, as was the case in communist Russia. Sometimes it is something less clear than that, which I suppose is how it is in America.

It is certainly true that before 1789, Europe had aristocracies. The history of Europe since 1789 has been the survival and decay of those orders. It is also the case that the United States was set up as a nation consciously rebelling against the notion of an aristocratic social and political structure, although in the fullness of time, there may have evolved something that some people might consider an aristocracy. Another way of thinking about it might be to say that all societies are unequal. It may be good, and it may be bad, but it is incontrovertibly true.

The American middle and working classes today view wealth and affluence the same way their counterparts in 19th-century Britain did.
That is a difficult comparison to make. But certainly, American working-class and middle-class people like to believe that if they work hard, they can become the president or a millionaire. This is a society built around the dream of upward social mobility. Describing it in those terms, one could say that that same ethos existed in 19th-century Britain, when self-help was certainly the prevailing ideology of the middle class, and to some degree, of the working class. It is interesting that in the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher took up what she called “Victorian values,” by which she meant perseverance, thrift, hard work and ambition. Certainly as far as she was concerned, those virtues were much more on display in the United States at that time than they were in Britain.