Aristotle’s Politics has wisdoms and warnings for our age of tech utopias and inequality |
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.
In Politics, readers are asked to consider the effects of climate, population and location on states. They are asked to weigh why it matters politically how long rulers’ terms of office are; whether they are appointed or elected (by whom and how many); whether citizens should be paid to participate in public roles in democracies; and much more.
Politics, as it emerges in Aristotle’s great work (written around 330 BCE), is not a business of conceiving utopian ideals from a philosopher’s armchair. It is the art of the possible: of communities of people pursuing contested visions of the common good. It also involves managing the natural tendencies we have to disagree, even violently, about these visions.
The sheer level of nuance Aristotle brings to the study of different political systems makes Politics a continuing source of practical, as well as theoretical, insights.
His warnings about extremes of wealth and poverty – and how they can lead to disillusion with democratic systems – are especially prescient today, as the gap between rich and poor widens in countries such as the United States.
Probably the most famous (and infamous) ideas in Politics are in its opening pages. The human being, writes Aristotle, “is by nature a political animal”.........