Aristotle's "Best Regime": Kingship, Democracy, and the Rule of Law

5. The Problem with Politeia As Polity in Politics

5 the problem with politeia as polity in politics In recent scholarship on Aristotle’s political thought there has been a growing tendency to treat “polity,” or the so-called “mixed regime,” as his central political teaching on the best regime. But this view—as well as the traditional view of “polity” as an alternative to the best regime—is not only a misinterpretation of Aristotle’s political teaching, but a misreading of the text. It ignores or overlooks the plausible argument for democracy—the rule of the many—being restrained by law as the best regime. I argue that the view of “polity,” which includes the “mixed regime” of Politics 4, is an anachronistic reading of the “mixed constitution” of the Middle Ages into Aristotle ’s political thought.1 One of the recent works on Aristotle’s Politics that embodies this trend of treating “polity” as the best regime, if only in practice, is Mary Nichols’s Citizens and Statesmen. Nichols sees the practical teaching of Aristotle’s Politics as the necessity of turning regimes into “polities,” which is the title of the middle chapter of her book (Nichols 1991, 85–123). She argues for “polity”—the “mixed regime”—which supports the existence of the middle class as a middle ground between two opposing views of Aristotle’s political teaching. The two sides2 she opposes are the aristocratic view, which has Aristotle advocating the rule of leisured gentlemen (as argued by Leo Strauss, Delba Winthrop , and Carnes Lord, to name a few), and the radical democratic view, which has Aristotle supporting radical participatory democracy so that 1. The most likely culprit—who began both the trend of seeing “polity” or the “mixed regime” of Politics 4 as the best regime and the trend of seeing Aristotle’s Politics 4 as the intellectual origin of the medieval institution of the “mixed constitution”—is Thomas Aquinas. For the best account currently available of the intellectual history of the “mixed constitution” in medieval political thought, see Blythe 1992. Von Fritz (1954) argues that it is Polybius who puts forth the idea of the “mixed constitution.” 2. There is another group of Aristotle scholars (i.e., Stephen Salkever and Judith Swanson) who claim that Aristotle is—or, more correctly, can be made into—a defender of liberal democracy. See Rasmussen and Den Uyl 1991, Salkever 1991, and Swanson 1992. the problem with politeia as polity 103 human beings can fulfill their political natures, as represented by William Sullivan, Hannah Arendt, and Ronald Beiner, among others (see Strauss 1978, 1953, 1989; Winthrop 1978a, 1978b; Lord 1982 and 1987, 118–54; Sullivan 1984; Arendt 1958; Beiner 1983). I think that it is ultimately Nichols’s Aristotelian desire for moderation that leads her to see “polity” as Aristotle’s best regime. In doing so, she is not alone. Nearly three decades before Nichols, William Bluhm also argued that “polity” is in fact Aristotle’s best regime (Bluhm 1962, 743–53). Bluhm argues that “polity” is the best regime because it fulfills the teleological nature of the city. In other words, “polity” is the regime that most fully achieves man’s political nature (Bluhm 1962, 745–6). However, Bluhm’s analysis does not offer an argument about “polity” as simply as it does about the rule of the many, which takes into account the correction to stabilize a regime presented in Politics 4. In effect, Bluhm argues that the rule of the many, supported by the stability fostered by the creation of a middling class, is Aristotle’s best regime. How can such a regime be called “polity”? Could it instead be understood as a qualified defense of democracy achieved through “political mixing”?3 Nichols’s position similarly cannot be defended. She criticizes Bluhm’s account of “polity” because it overstates the virtues of the middle class while understating the political necessity of statesmanship (Nichols 1991, 201–2 n. 9). Nichols defends “polity” because it provides a place for statesmanship. But would not a qualified account of democracy equally require statesmanship ? Nichols supports “polity” only because she does not fully account for Aristotle’s deceptive statements about the defective character of democracy in the Politics. Just because the regime typology of Politics 3.7 identifies democracy as a defective regime does not mean that this is Aristotle’s last word on the subject.4 The several arguments supporting the rule of the many in Politics 3—their superiority in both deliberating and...