But its probably how most aristocracies started. People become rich and powerful, marry and socialize with other rich and powerful people, and their offspring inherit the wealth, connections, and power that comes with this status. Eventually it crystallizes into a system that is hard for newcomers to break into while it is easy for pampered offspring who lack the skill and abilities of the founders to get by only on their name and connections.
There is a difference between a business elite and an aristocracy. A business elite is not the means by which a true aristocracy is made, especially since business elites are far more permeable. But it's also the nature of the wealth and the way that the members of the class see themselves. Aristocrats are the fighting and political elite. This has always been the case in Indo-European countries.
They are not the merchant class. Industrialisation makes these lines difficult to maintain. Indeed, one could almost say that industrialisation is the death of true nobility, since it makes it essentially impossible for a landed military and judicial class to keep an exclusive hand on the power that is their raison d'être.
That's an aristocracy.
The word aristocracy has a precise meaning that belies the custom of people in modern Anglophone countries to use the phrase in some broad sociological manner or as a stand-in for "small group of people that have power" or "people with prominent families." The business elite, the banking elite, the haute bourgeoisie -- these are not an aristocracy. By any account that would not make the word aristocracy synonymous with oligarchy (and thus trample on a rich store of usage and memory in political science that goes back millennia), no modern business elite can truly claim to be an aristocracy, much less a nobility.
The US republican system makes it unlikely this could ever evolve into a true nobility or royalty with legally defined political roles for the aristocracy however.
If the US system were more like the classical city-states, it is quite possible. Say the gentry in Virginia and the Carolinas do succeed in making a class of landgraves and caciques, as some intended, and then form their militiae according to ancient Greco-Roman models. A different American "Enlightenment" could be had accordingly.
The greater Carolinian success in establishing a hierarchy could be caused by slightly different migration patterns, say from a different outcome in the English Civil War or else if James II was more successful. Perhaps Catholic nobility could find refuge in the colonies, having much in common culturally with the cavaliers. Then they could import Irishmen and German peasants as serfs.
One would have to make the "Enlightenment" less democratic. Perhaps Newton could be butterflied away due to a more successful James II not taking a liking to him. Or he could die from illness, etc. The republicanism of the late-XVIIIth century, if it still occurs, could then be more classically inspired. One would also have to alter Montesquieu's writings, which, without Newton, might be relatively easy.
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