Aristotle’s Politics has wisdoms and warnings for our age of tech utopias and inequality
- Written by: Matthew Sharpe, Associate Professor in Philosophy, Australian Catholic University
If Plato was the first Western political philosopher, Aristotle was the first political scientist in today’s sense. Plato’s Republic, for instance, envisages an unworldly political utopia. But in Politics, Aristotle investigates a comprehensive range of political forms and regimes, down to their unglamorous, operational details.
To research the book, Aristotle sent pupils at the Lyceum, his school in Athens, to many Greek city-states to record their constitutions, forming a kind of empirical data set. He also anticipated our social sciences by millennia, taking seriously issues such as the political effects of the unequal distribution of wealth.
Book one also contains the philosopher’s – by our standards deeply regrettable – claims about the “natural” slavery some people supposedly are born into, and the limited rational capacities of women.
(Aristotle has been more widely adopted in contemporary philosophy than his teacher, Plato. But gender politics is one area where the teacher, who proposes equality of the sexes, is far more sympathetic than his prodigious pupil.)
The more innovative and fruitful work in the Politics comes after these opening claims.
The limits of politics
Aristotle’s writings were compiled from lectures he gave at the Lyceum. They aren’t systematic treatises. Indeed, the eight “books” that make up Politics seem to start over at least three times. But there is, arguably, rhyme to Aristotle’s reasoning.
Book two gives a clue to the structuring vision of politics at play in the work. In it, Aristotle criticises the first philosopher who tried his hand at political subjects, Hippodamus. The latter tried to treat politics with mathematical precision, imagining a utopia with exactly 10,000 citizens, three classes, three kinds of laws, and so on.
A bust of Aristotle, Roman copy after a Greek bronze original by Lysippos from 330 BC.
Wikimedia Commons
According to Aristotle, it is one mark of an “educated person” that they won’t try to force technical precision onto practical subjects. Politics doesn’t work like that. If people try to impose grand schemes roughshod onto communities, the results tend to be disastrous, with politics giving way to violence and disorder (stasis).
Aristotle’s scepticism here resonates at a time when tech billionaires are advancing utopian visions of society involving rapid rollouts of super-intelligent computers and robotics, which they promise will render human labour redundant and solve all manner of problems. The political effects of such massive innovations are likely to involve great social distress.
In book three, Aristotle observes while it is reasonable to ask which system of government is the best or most just, the political issue par excellence is that it is very difficult to find a single, uncontroversial answer.
If we ask the rich, they will mostly say the best system is one where money grants people political power. But if we ask the (many more) people who have less wealth, they will tend to say the best political system involves democratic participation.
When “the judgement concerns themselves, […] most people are bad judges concerning their own things”, Aristotle wryly observes.
Wise governance will involve leaders being able to accommodate differing perspectives and competing interests within their societies.
The mixed regime
What, then, does Aristotle propose as the best possible regime, given the plurality of interest groups in even small city-states such as ancient Athens or Sparta, let alone modern nation-states with many millions of inhabitants?
Like Plato, Aristotle looks at democracies with an aristocratic caution readers today may find disconcerting. He worries, like Plato, that democracies too readily devolve into rule by rabble-rousing “demagogues” who promise everything to “the people,” then fleece them. This is a troubling, but surely legitimate, concern.
The best practicable political regime, Aristotle argues in the central parts of Politics, is one he calls “polity (politeia).” This is a curious term, since the Greek word here can be used to describe any political system. But that is Aristotle’s point.
Mixed regimes, he suggests, will integrate elements of all the good regimes. They will mimic monarchy, by having a head of state with executive powers, for instance, to deal with national emergencies.
But the executive’s power will be balanced by independent courts to decide legal cases, and deliberative assemblies, like parliaments, with the power to do things like levy taxes and distribute public moneys.
Some public offices in any such regime should be “aristocratic” – that is, elected or appointed on the basis of who is best qualified for the roles. Yet, some other positions should be “democratic,” chosen by lot from the eligible population, as jury duty is today.
It is no coincidence Australia’s parliamentary government and the presently straining US republican system both resemble Aristotle’s mixed regimes. Many of the founders of these political systems were familiar with Aristotle’s Politics, at least through such modern admirers as John Locke.
The need for a strong middle class
Still, a mixed regime, Aristotle argued, can only endure if it doesn’t let the disparity between rich and poor grow too large. A political community with extremes of wealth and poverty, he warns:
is a city not of free persons but of slaves and masters, the ones consumed by envy, the others by contempt. Nothing is further removed from brotherhood and from a political partnership.
Drawing on this idea today, modern Australia should ensure its middle classes remain robust. For only when most citizens have enough material security as to not fear poverty, but not so much wealth as “to become arrogant on a grand scale”, do they tend to remain invested in policies that serve the good of all.
Where there are no middle classes, Aristotle argues, populations become prey to injustices at the hands of the very rich, committed with impunity and out of scorn for the common people. The populace in turn, through fear and desperation, become ready recruits for demagogues promising salvation. In this scenario, mixed regimes such as representative democracies cannot long endure.
Authors: Matthew Sharpe, Associate Professor in Philosophy, Australian Catholic University
