“A regard for human excellence is the aristocratic ethos. To speak of aristocracy is perhaps a bit eccentric in our time, but consider the paradoxical truth that equality is an aristocratic ideal. It is the ideal of friendship – of those who stand apart from the collective and recognise one another as peers. As professionals, or fellow journeymen perhaps. By contrast, the bourgeois principle is not equality but equivalence – a positing of interchangeability that elides human differences of rank.”