The Theory of Democracy—Part IV The Principles of Justice: Constitutionality

THE THEORY OF DEMOCRACY PART IV THE PRINCIPLES OF JusTICE: CoNSTITUTIONALITY (Continued) IT HAS been our aim, in this Part of our work, to prove that Constitutional government is absolutely superior in justice to the Royal regime. Before undertaking that demonstration, we deemed it necessary to consider two special problems-the problem of the mediaeval regimen regale et politicum and the problem of the mixed regime-two problems which, by the way, have frequently been confused by writers in the Thomistic tradition. In Section 4, we dealt with the first of these problems. Now, in Section 5, we shall examine the theory of the mixed regime in all its ramifications. That done,. we can attain our objective in Section 6-the absolute consideration of regimes as less and more just. 5. The essential distinction between the Royal and the Political regime has been, so far, the controlling principle of our analysis of the forms of government. It has determined our interpretation of the anomalous regimen regale et politicum as an intermediate, rather than a mixed, regime-a defective embodiment of the principle of constitutionality. And now we must apply it to the " traditional " account of the pure and mixed regimes, which, as we shall show, is thoroughly un-Aristotelian because it fails to examine these subordinate distinctions in the light of the primary and controlling distinction between Royal and Political.462 We have previously said that all of these subordinate distinctions divide only accidental modes of the two essential forms of government.463 This implies ••• Vd. Part IV, Section 2, supra, in THE THOMIST, IV, 3, pp. 461-3. 463 Vd. ibid., and cf. esp. fn. 349 supra. A correct statement of these matters is made, however, in Part I. Vd. THE THOMIST, III, 3, p. 425. 4 49 50 M. J. ADLER AND WALTER FARRELL that there is no question of greater or less justice with regard to the subordinate modes of government, but only a question of greater or less expediency. But a careful study of Aristotle's theory of the mixed regime-and, for all practical purposes, there is only one-will show that this mixed regime is more just than the two pure regimes it unites. Our previous statement of the relation of the subordinate modes of government to the two basic forms has been too simple. To remedy its inadequacy we must now correct our own account of the traditionally named six types of government, as well as show the grave error in the traditional account of the mixed regime as resulting from a union of three of these six types. It will be helpful to begin with a brief statement of the so-called " traditional theory." This theory results from a reading of Chapters 7 and 8 in Book III of Aristotle's Politics, completely divorced from the basic distinction between Royal and Political developed in Book I, and totally unrelated to the elaborate discussion of democracy and· oligarchy which occupies the largest part of Books IV, V, and VI. If these other sections of the Politics contain fundamental truths relevant to the problem of the forms of government, then, we maintain, a solution of that problem in terms of the two chapters mentioned , read in isolation, must be regarded as an absurd travesty on the Aristotelian analysis. Yet it is such a travesty which has prevailed through the centuries, not only among Thomists and other disciples of Aristotle, but even among political theorists who have much less regard for his authority. The classification of the forms of government which Aristotle presents in Book III, Chapter 7, is not his own. He is there reporting, though not without some modifications, the analysis which Plato gives in The StateS'Tnan. In that dialogue, Plato distinguished seven forms of government. Of these seven, the one that Plato regarded as the ideal or perfect form he also admitted had no reality whatsoever in the actual world. It is the form of government which he describes in a myth about the life of man in the age of Kronos, when the god himself was shepherd of the human flock and performed the duties of an THE THEORY OF...