Thicker Than Water

National Review, August 11, 2003 by Paul Johnson

In Praise of Nepotism: A Natural History, by Adam Bellow (Doubleday, 576 pp., $30)

This is an entertaining but serious book on a slippery subject. The Latin word nepos, usually translated "nephew," can mean almost any younger male member of a family. In the 14th century, Romans coined the word nepotismo to describe the way relatives of the pope, often his illegitimate sons, scrambled into high places and got themselves cardinals' hats. There are celebrated portraits of Julius II and Leo X, each with two "nephews" lurking shiftily in the background.

More generally, nepotism can be described as the unfair preferment of relatives to other, better qualified candidates. It is a characteristic of all ages and societies, and all ideologies and political systems, at all levels. In his fulminations against the French Revolution, Burke correctly predicted that nepotism would triumphantly survive its turmoils, and in fact Bonaparte became one of the greatest nepotists of all time, making three of his brothers kings, and his sisters either queens or princesses. Adam Bellow calls Napoleon's era "the golden age of nepotism." And it perpetuated itself, since his nephew became Napoleon III, who in turn made Bonaparte's illegitimate son foreign minister and put his own illegitimate son in charge of culture. Communism, too, is a great promoter of nepotism. The nomenklatura was a network of family groups, their children's rise being facilitated by attending special schools, Soviet Grotons or Etons. In Romania, Ceausescu ran a family regime; in North Korea, Kim Il Sung made his hereditary.

In Asia, in our own times, nepotism has taken many forms. In both Kuomintang and Communist China, the sinister influence of a wife, a Madame Chiang or a Madame Mao, imperiled the regime. In India the nepotism of the Nehru family eventually degraded the great Congress party. In Libya, under the monarchy, so many of the ruling family were involved in politics and scandals that King Idris had to open a special concentration camp for his relatives. Saudi Arabia, Muscat and Oman, and all the Gulf States are family regimes. The shah's regime in Iran was destroyed by nepotism.

When such monarchies are overthrown, nepotism simply takes another form. The Syrian hereditary dictatorship is based upon a family and tribal pyramid. So was Saddam Hussein's in Iraq. A network of family relationships, indicating, as in Rome, the special enthusiasm among clerics for nepotism, lies at the heart of Iran's theocracy, as it did in the Afghan Taliban. Of the 50 or so states of Africa, more than 40 are ruled by particular tribes or family connections.

Bellow ranges through the whole gamut of nepotism, both historically and in the world today. As he points out, many forms of nepotism are legitimized by constitutional custom, or even statute. The present Queen of England occupies her throne by virtue of family descent as laid down by an act of parliament passed 300 years ago. Only now is the British government getting around to eliminating primogeniture and hereditary rights from the British Constitution by expelling hereditary peers from the upper house (still called the House of Lords). And even these are being replaced by prime-ministerial creations, a practice that lends itself to nepotism and its fellow abuse, cronyism. Even these so-called life peerages confer hereditary privileges, as the sons and daughters of such peers are officially designated "the Honourable," a title insisted on especially by socialist offspring.

Nepotism, then, in its countless different forms, is extraordinarily adhesive and persistent, as Bellow shows. But he also argues that it is often natural, wholesome, and socially useful. It is always a risky, and often a destructive, venture to try to act against the grain of human nature-that is precisely why collective economies fail and entrepreneurial market economies succeed. Bellow has no difficulty showing that anti-nepotism regulations-of which America has endless examples, public and private-are cumbersome, often unjust and cruel, and ineffective. No nation, he argues, has set its face more fiercely against nepotism than the United States. George Washington was brought up to regard "interest" (the 18th-century term for it) as a part of life, yet as commander-in-chief and president he did his noble best to resist its charms and advantages. John Adams was made deeply uncomfortable by the talents and rise of his son John Quincy Adams-to the point where he almost welcomed the disasters that befell his other sons. Yet the survival and claims to distinction of the Adams family offer an example of the way that hereditary gifts will display themselves even in a society that denies rank.

Most people would agree that many kinds of business flourish best in family hands. Thus the best hotel in Gstaad, perhaps the best even in all Switzerland, boasts-rightly-that it has been run by the same family since its foundation. Virtually all the best French restaurants are family-run. Since the arrival of mass Asian immigrants in Britain, they have taken over and improved small newsstand, dry cleaning, and grocery businesses all over the country, family-run without exception. Bellow examines such family survivals as the Rothschilds, who profited from a reputation for financial efficiency and integrity not just to proliferate but to improve the quality of their business. And after all, the Rothschilds were repeating the family success of the Medicis, first doctors, then bankers, then royals perpetuating themselves through hereditary skills in marriage alliances-a performance enacted on a larger scale by the Habsburgs.