Given that our government to be is promising to more explicitly oligarchic than any time since The Gilded Age (Mark Twains’s novel by that name is well worth reading), it is instructive to look at what Aristotle has to say about governments that are run by the rich and what he believes is the best form of government. He is critical of his teacher Plato’s ideal city state because while it is based in part on observations of elements of the Spartan constitution, Aristotle finds many of the proposals in the Republic as too ideal, too much based on “Let us imagine” and not grounded on a realistic understanding of human nature and what is actually politically possible.
In contrast, Aristotle is said to have examined 158 actual existing city state constitutions and based his recipe for the best on which ones were the most stable and just and afforded a good life for the majority of citizens. Raphael’s painting of the two philosophers shows Plato pointing upwards to his realm of ideal Forms, and the empiricist Aristotle trying to dampen down to earth his teacher’s Utopian fantasies. In his Politics, Aristotle finds that “The best political community is formed by citizens of the middle class, and those states are likely to be well administered in which the middle class is large and stronger if possible than both the other classes… for the addition of the middle class turns the scale, and prevents either of the extremes from being dominant.” Moreover, “The middle (class) most easily obeys reason” whereas the wealthy “find it hard to follow reason, because they tend to be insolent and rather wicked in great things” and the poor are more often than not “extremely wretched and weak….have an exceeding lack of honor…and too much involved in petty wickedness.” “Poverty is the parent of revolution and crime.”
Aristotle also noted that the wealthy are possessed by “a love of ruling and desire to rule, both of which are harmful to cities…because of the luxury they live in, being ruled is not something they get used to, even at school.”
Absent a middle class…”a city of slaves and masters arises, not a city of the free, and the first are full of envy while the second are full of contempt”
Sound familiar? Here we go! Hang on and hang in there.