Democracies and Oligarchies

Aristotle's Politics, Book 4

Today, we continue our reading of Aristotle’s Politics. We’ll read this book for the rest of October and end in early December. This will end our 2025 read-alongs, and then in 2026 we’ll move into the philosophy of technology reading group.

Here is the schedule for Aristotle’s Politics:

• October 13: Book 1

• October 20: Book 2

• October 27: Book 3

• November 1: Members-Only Zoom Call 3-4:30 PM Eastern (Recording Here)

• November 3: Book 4

• November 10: Book 5

• November 12: Members-Only Zoom Call 8-9:30 PM Eastern

• November 17: Book 6

• November 24: Book 7

• December 1: Book 8

• December 6: Members-Only Zoom Call 3-4:30 PM Eastern

As a reminder, Zoom calls are for paid subscribers. If you’d like to join those calls (and have access to the recordings afterward), considering purchasing a subscription. You’ll also be supporting my work on YouTube, where I strive to bring philosophically-informed content to a wide audience.

Aristotle is a kind of pluralist when it comes to politics. In our Zoom call on Saturday, Tom K. used the phrase ‘constitutional pluralist,’ and this is a fitting description.

When Plato imagines a political community in The Republic, he begins by articulating principles that must be met. For instance, he believes that each class of citizen (or inhabitants, as maybe they aren’t citizens, but we’ll say ‘citizens’ for convenience) should serve one and only one unique function. He criticizes the idea that the ordinary citizens would also serve in war on the basis of this principle. This leads to a highly regimented city. He also uses these principles to argue for a single best kind of a regime: an aristocracy with a philosopher-king and a guardian class. All other regimes are shown to be degenerations of this ideal.

This is not how Aristotle approaches politics. An expert in any domain needs to have an idea of what is best, yes, but he also must know how to serve each case given its circumstances. An instructor in gymnastics should not provide the same advice (except perhaps at a highly general, and mostly useless, level) to everyone interested in bodily health. ‘A political expert should be able to assist existing regimes,’ Aristotle says, and the laws that are required will depend on the sort of regime. It may be that the best is unobtainable by many cities, and so they will have to content themselves with some alternative; it may also be that there is no single best, and so the expert must provide assistance with each case.

We saw this last week, where Aristotle said that there are three sorts of permissible regimes: kingships, aristocracies, and polities. He also says that each of these has a corresponding deviant form: tyrannies, oligarchies, and democracies.¹ The political expert should have advice for all of these cases — and, indeed, for the sub-cases, because it is not the case that all oligarchies and democracies, e.g., are the same. This is because the constituent parts of each regime will differ: the concentration of virtue, the proportion of each working element, the material and economic conditions, and so on. Aristotle acknowledges that we can help ourselves to the useful fiction of calling them all either oligarchies or democracies, just as we call winds northern and southern or harmonies Dorian and Phrygian, but this is still a fiction. The world is complex; pluralism is baked-in; our analysis of politics must reflect this.

I think this reflects Aristotle’s generally grounded, bottom-up approach to political theory. He takes existing regimes as his basis and goes from there. This is why the canvassing of various ancient regimes is essential to his project. So while, say, Book 3 can be quite slow going, it should prove necessary for the rest of the Politics.

The fundamental distinction between an oligarchy and a democracy is found in Chapter 4:

It must be said, therefore, that rule of the people exists when free persons have authority, and oligarchy when the wealthy have it…Democracy exists when the free and poor, being a majority, have authority to rule; oligarchy, when the wealthy and better born have authority and are few.

But any city will have a number of parts, as we have said. Aristotle gives us a list:

1. Farmers, those concerned with sustenance.

2. The working element, which is concerned with the necessary arts.

3. The marketing element, which engages in commerce.

4. The laboring element (which Aristotle does not describe, but here I think he may have slaves in mind)

5. The warrior element, which engages in defense and presents the whole city from being enslaved.

6. The well off, which perform public service by means of its property.

7. The magisterial, which performs public service in offices.

You’ll notice something strange here: my list has seven elements, but Aristotle calls the well of the seventh and the magisterial the eighth. The text skips the sixth! But Lord includes this note in our edition:

The omission of a sixth element in the enumeration suggests a lacuna in the text; the parallel account in 7.8.7-9 points to the priesthood as the missing element. Another possibility is that the deliberative and judicial functions are implicitly considered a single element, as they seem to be in 4.17 (and in 7.8.7 and 9).

Within these elements there is also diversity (see 4.4.20-22).

Aristotle then provides an account of the varieties of democracies:

1. A democracy based on equality, where the poor are no more preeminent than the well off.

2. A democracy where offices are filled on the basis of assessments.²

3. A democracy where all citizens of unquestioned descent take part, but law rules.

4. A democracy where all have part in the offices provided only that they are citizens, but law rules.

5. A democracy where the multitude has authority and not the law.

At least in theory, the United States is something like (4). (5) may not even be a democracy, because in all cases the law should rule while offices judge particular cases. Thus, we can say that there are four kinds of real democracies.

For oligarches, we have:

1. An oligarchy where offices are filled on the basis of such a size that the poor do not share, though they are the majority.

2. An oligarchy where offices are filled on the basis of large assessments, and they themselves elect in filling vacancies.

3. An oligarchy where the son succeeds father.

4. An oligarchy where the officials rule rather than law.³

The fourth oligarchy is the counterpart of the fifth democracy.

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Aristotle’s critical contribution may be his insistence that polity is a distinct form of regime. This is commonly ignored because most people use ‘polity’ as a term common to all, and so they have overlooked that this names a fifth possibility, an alternative to monarchy, oligarchy, democracy, and aristocracy. For instance, polity is left out of Plato’s enumeration (though Plato includes timocracy, which seems to be what Aristotle calls ‘so-called aristocracy.’)

Polity is a ‘mixture of oligarchy and democracy,’ though it is ‘customary…to call polities those sorts that tend toward democracy.’ Aristotle has a high view of polity, where a mix of the wealthy and the poor rule.

But we still need to determine the best practicable regime. Aristotle asks:

What regime is best and what way of life is best for most cities and most human beings, judging with a view neither to virtue of the sort that is beyond private persons, nor to education, in respect to those things requiring [special advantages provided by] nature and an equipment dependent on chance, nor to the regime that one would pray for, but a way of life which it is possible for most to share in, and a regime of which most cities can partake? For those that are called aristocracies – the ones we were just speaking of – either fall outside [the range] of most cities, or border on so-called polity; hence we may speak of both as one.

Notice that here ‘best’ is being used explicitly to talk about the best of the real, live options — not an ideal created by a philosopher, but the sort of regime to which most cities can aspire. Here, Aristotle believes that it is best when there are many people who are moderately wealthy. They have ‘middling and sufficient property.’ This reduces factional conflict, prevents the rise of tyranny, and allows for mutual flourishing.

Here is how Fred Miller puts it in the Stanford Encyclopedia of philosophy:

If (as is the case with most existing city-states) the population lacks the capacities and resources for complete happiness, however, the lawgiver must be content with fashioning a suitable constitution (Politics IV.11). The second-best system typically takes the form of a polity (in which citizens possess an inferior, more common grade of virtue) or mixed constitution (combining features of democracy, oligarchy, and, where possible, aristocracy, so that no group of citizens is in a position to abuse its rights). Aristotle argues that for city-states that fall short of the ideal, the best constitution is one controlled by a numerous middle class which stands between the rich and the poor. For those who possess the goods of fortune in moderation find it “easiest to obey the rule of reason” (Politics IV.11.1295b4–6). They are accordingly less apt than the rich or poor to act unjustly toward their fellow citizens. A constitution based on the middle class is the mean between the extremes of oligarchy (rule by the rich) and democracy (rule by the poor). “That the middle [constitution] is best is evident, for it is the freest from faction: where the middle class is numerous, there least occur factions and divisions among citizens” (IV.11.1296a7–9). The middle constitution is therefore both more stable and more just than oligarchy and democracy.

The middling sort has another advantage: it is very difficult for the rich and the por to form an alliance against them, as ‘neither will want to be slaves of the other.’ This is Aristotle’s genius: he takes the factional nature of human politics as a given and, rather than trying to idealize away from it, endorses a system that is resilient against it.

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The final chapters of the book turn to certain institutions. There are three:

1. The deliberative, which has authority concerning war, peace, alliances, laws, choosing officials, and judicial cases with severe penalties (death, exile, confiscation). Aristotle also calls this ‘the deliberative and authoritative element of the regime.’

2. The officiative⁴, comprising the officials that do the business of the regime. This is where Aristotle mentions priests (one of the potential ‘missing elements’ from our earlier list), but he also mentions equippers and heralds. These offices have to deliberate and exercise judgment concerning certain matters. In others words, they each have some limited sphere of authority. In large cities, a single office handles a single task. In smaller cities, this may be infeasible.

3. The adjudicative, which we can think of as courts. And there are eight sort of courts, which handle:

   1. Audits

   2. Common crimes

   3. Cases bearing on the regime

   4. Disputes over fines

   5. Private transactions of a certain magnitude

   6. Homicide

   7. Aliens

   8. Small transactions

Within each of these institutions, we have modes of choosing who serves. These can be popular, oligarchic, or aristocratic/political.

In this book, something has become clear: the point of the Politics, or at least one of the major points, is to provide a robust taxonomy of all of the possible ways one might arrange a city so that a decision can be made as to how best to arrange any particular city. This is a more empirical and scientific work than, say, the Nicomachean Ethics.

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Here are some of my favorite comments from last week’s discussion.

First, from Daniel, on the clarity Aristotle provides us as modern readers:

While we may say we believe our modern democracies are ruled by all, I feel like Aristotle would point out that we very obviously live in much more nuanced regimes, with some countries having highly educated political classes that function more like Aristocracies, or even Oligarchies.

Even for a quick UK example, we say we’re a modern democracy, but we constantly vote in highly educated members of a political establishment (see how many PM’s went to the same school and are called “Old Etonians”).

I think Aristotle’s more precise use of language actually cuts through a lot of the ideology we have from birth about how pure and great and equal our democracies really are, and has me seeing politics in a much more nuanced way these days.

Skyler as well found something we could learn from Greek political arrangements:

I found the discussion of democracy in Solon (chapter 11) interesting. Particularly the idea that citizens could both elect leaders and demand an account from their leaders at the end of their time in office. While we may see a form of this ‘account’ when politicians run for a second term, it seems rare that past actions have a real effect on getting re-elected (at least in the US today).

And finally, from Ronald, on the citizens sharing in deliberative power within the regime:

Aristotle insisted that a genuine citizen must actively share in the deliberative and judicial power of the state. That definition provides a telling benchmark for modern politics. Today, the vast majority appear to be little more than passive subjects. People possessing citizenship merely by birthright with their political participation often restricted to the fleeting infrequency of casting a ballot. By Aristotle’s measure, the people aren’t truly ruling at all, they are simply the ruled.

I suspect this structural disconnect is at the very heart of contemporary alienation and disaffection. The average person must surrender all genuine and persistent power to a small, professional class of elected officials and unelected administrative experts. Consequently, what we normally call “democracy” appears to harbor a deep-seated oligarchic structure (a rule by the few professionals) despite the outward appearance of self-rule.

The recognition of this enormous gap, between the ideal of a self-governing people and the reality of a managed population, is interesting. To the modern voter, this profound inconsistency may feel as a betrayal of a promised role, and may well be the spring of the current populist rage. It’s not just that they feel unheard, it’s that the system demands they accept a largely passive role where the ancient definition required an active one.

1. Interestingly, Aristotle calls kingships the most divine regimes, as they are grounded in the superiority of the king. And as a consequence, tyrannies are the worst sort of deviant regimes. Oligarchies are in the middle. Democracies are the most moderate of the deviant regimes. This is a different ordering than what we saw in the Republic.

2. Aristotle calls this ‘low’, as anyone who does not possess the amount of money required cannot take part.

3. Aristotle adds the clause ‘when what was just spoken of occurs.’ This could mean (3) plus rule of the officials, but I think it means any of (1)-(3) where the officials rule instead of law.

4. When I wrote ‘officiative’ and wondered if it was a real word, I discovered that there is only one known use of the word. There are now two.