Aristotle Democracy Essay

Introduction Throughout this paper I plan to compare and contrast the ideas and philosophies of two of the greatest political thinkers of all time. Thucydides and Aristotle have separate opinions of the idea of democracy, originally created by Plato. However, these two have a positive assessment of this idea of majority rule of the people. My paper will provide each of their points of view. At the end I will determine, in my opinion, which of these two philosophers give a better case in favor of a democratic form of government, and give the reasons as to how I came to that conclusion.

Aristotle

Aristotle considers every form of government, and blatantly everything, in terms of telos. Telos defines a purpose, for existing, and how it exists.

For Aristotle, a virtuous government is one that’s rules is done aristocratically; meaning that merit plays the basis of governance. In a democracy, however, as Aristotle describes it, ruling should be done on the basis of numerical equality. This means that everybody partakes in the ruling of the city-state. Aristotle makes the conclusion that no one has additional rights than another, after he points out if everyone is equal in ruling then either none should rule another or where there must be common rule. This leads to a non-virtuous form of government, because if the choices are made by people who do not agree with, or believe the telos of the city-state, then the telos of the city-state will never be reached, therefore making the government non-virtuous. Aristotle adds that whenever large amounts of people get together to make decisions, it is foreseeable that personal bias will appear, and virtuous decisions cannot be made for the city-state. This cognitive analysis leads Aristotle to believe that a democracy’s notion of equality is a portion of the issue with a democracy being non-virtuous. Aristotle believes that, the poor are worried about obtaining more wealth, which means that they are placing their personal good above the common good whilst engaged in governance. For an individual to rule in a virtuous way, they must put the common good for the

But the good men did not remain good: they began to make money out of that which was the common property of all. And to some such development we may plausibly ascribe the origin of oligarchies, since men made wealth a thing of honour. The next change was to tyrannies, and from tyrannies to democracy. For the struggle to get rich at all costs tended to reduce numbers, and so increased the power of the multitude, who rose up and formed democracies. And now that there has been a further increase in the size of states, one might say that it is hard to avoid having a democratic constitution”

(Aristotle, Politics)

According to Aristotle, a democracy is a failure. It is a majority rule where the majority is poor and non-virtuous. This means that whomever is in office, and all have equal access to office because of democracy’s concept of equality, may not act in the best interests of the city-state. When the city-state fails to reach its telos, providing the good life for its citizens, then the government of the city-state is non-virtuous, as are the people in the government. Since the city-state fails to achieve its telos under a democracy, Aristotle believes democracy to be a failure.