The term “renaissance” literally means “rebirth,” and it attempted to revive the social, cultural, and economic progress gained during the Axial Age and then lost when the Roman Empire fell to several waves of invasion by so-called “barbarians.” The Roman Catholic Christian Church, one of the central European institutions emerging from the Axial Age, replaced the actual Roman Empire as the dominant institution within European culture between the Axial Age and the Renaissance, meanwhile keeping at least some of the Greek and Latin classical literature alive during the so-called “Dark Ages” of the medieval period. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries after the founding of Christianity itself, geographic exploration opened up new channels of communication and trade between European civilization and the rest of the world. This movement culminated with the discovery, exploration, and domination of indigenous cultures in the so-called “New World” of the western hemisphere.

The cultural rebirth in Europe was also associated with the rise of “humanism,” which began to question the validity of religious authority, especially where it was exercised by leaders attempting to bolster their own political and economic power. Renaissance humanists sought to ground their understanding of reality in reason and logic. The artistic, political, and economic community in the Italian city of Florence played a key role in the rise of Renaissance humanism, as represented by the work of Leonardo DaVinci, Michelangelo, and others, much of which was supported by the wealthy and influential Medici family. Renaissance humanism also prepared for the rise of democratic forms of governance, wherein the political power of hereditary tyrants was constrained by the consent of the governed.

One of the most far-reaching and dramatic leadership acts of this period was in the founding of the Protestant movement within the Christian Church. In 1517, the German Catholic monk Martin Luther nailed a document listing “95 Theses” to the door of the church in Wittenberg, claiming that some of the practices and some of the leaders within the Catholic Church were immoral and corrupt. Luther called for widespread reforms based on widespread literacy within all church congregations. Luther’s call for a “priesthood of all believers” coincided with the ready availability of Bibles and other books produced by the newfangled technology of the printing press. The Gutenberg Bible was the world’s first best-selling book, and it not only capitalized on the literacy of millions of Christians, it also led to the rise of widespread secular education. As the Bible was translated into all the European languages, literate citizens were finally able to interpret the Bible for themselves rather than accepting the words of their priests, which were usually in unintelligible Latin. Ultimately, widespread literacy undermined the traditional authority of the church and of the inherited aristocracy in general.

As the European Renaissance gave way to the Enlightenment, apologists for aristocratic governance (most of whom owed their livelihoods to aristocratic systems) tried to prop up its theoretical foundations. Some argued that rulers at the top enjoyed the blessing of God on their rule; they called this notion the “divine right of kings,” and it supposedly justified the education of a king’s male heirs to take over when the king passed on. The notion goes way back to well before the Axial Age, but the notion of hereditary power still held the imaginations of those who actually held hereditary power and those who were beholden to those who held hereditary power. The last and most memorable expression of aristocratic leadership theory was actually called The Prince (a prince is always the son of a king), written by the Renaissance Florentine Niccolo Machiavelli and published in 1532. Machiavelli offered tips about how rulers could protect and advance their power by virtually any means necessary, including force and fraud. Thus we still use the term “Machiavellian” to describe leaders who coerce and manipulate others. It is instructive to note the close chronological proximity of Machiavelli’s Prince (1532) to Martin Luther’s “95 Theses” (1517).

The Age of Enlightenment and the rise of science. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe extended the transformations of the Renaissance, based primarily on empirical knowledge, geographic exploration, and scientific experimentation. The Enlightenment and the rise of democracy provided a foundation for rapid economic development and prepared the ground for even more widespread literacy and formal education. The roots of modern science stretch back to ancient Greece, but Enlightenment thinkers like Copernicus, Galileo, Bacon, Descartes, Voltaire, and Franklin encouraged skepticism about ancient superstitions, religious beliefs, and social patterns developed before and during the Axial Age. This period ushered in global commercial and military empires even larger than the ancient Roman Empire and contributed to the emergence of nationalism as a driving force within the human community. Nonetheless, in tandem with the rise of nationalism, the dream of one global human community governed by one global system of humane governance also emerged dimly during this period.

By the time of the so-called Enlightenment, the drawbacks and dysfunctions of aristocracies had eventually outweighed their functional contributions. The idea that normal, average human beings could govern themselves wisely on a large scale had never made much sense in the ancient world, especially to the dominant power holders; but it began to make more and more sense to more and more people as literacy and education spread and the behavior of aristocratic power holders seemed more and more deranged.

As human societies became more complex and more wealthy, as commerce and trade circled the globe, as scientific method provided reliable knowledge and undermined old myths and superstitions, and as the printing press and public education made knowledge commonplace, the old methods of organizing and exercising power became more and more suspect. Looking back objectively, the history of aristocracy began to look like a scary succession of brutal and ignorant kings and nutty emperors; eventually it became obvious that being the firstborn son of a king is no guarantee of wisdom, compassion, or leadership skill.