The fullest description of what I take him to have in mind is given in, of all things, Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy, in which Mill's praise of liberty is contested and from which, I suppose, Veblen got his characterization of the leisure class as the Barbarians (distinguishing these from the middle and lower classes, which Arnold calls the Philistines and the Populace). Arnold also wishes to reconceive the idea of the aristocracy. He wishes to work out the rule of the best to mean the rule of the best self, something he understands as existing in each of us. It is of course common not to know of this possibility, but more natures are curious about their best self than one might imagine, and this curiosity Arnold calls the pursuit of perfection. "Natures with this bent," Arnold says, "emerge in all classes . . . and this bent tends to take them out of their class, and to make their distinguishing characteristic not their Barbarianism or their Philistinism, but their humanity.