Aristotle's Classification of State
When faced with the question on how humans should organize their polity, Aristotle took a surprising data-first approach. He sent out his students to see how others organize their polities, what are the consequences of each polity, and figure out the factors that make a polity prosperous.
He and his students conducted the first large scale comparative political studies by collecting and analyzing 158 constitutions and political systems covering both Greek and non-Greek cities. The study included information about their historical development, as well to figure out how they got there.
Based on this data, he created the following classification of states around two categories, who is ruling, and whether they rule for the common good.
There is rule by the one, rule by the few, and rule by the many. Rule by the one for the common good is Monarchy, but for personal benefit is Tyranny. Rule by the few for common good is Aristocracy, but for personal benefit is Oligarchy. Rule by the many for the common good is polity, but for personal benefit is democracy.
Obviously, three of these are good and three are bad. However, how does Aristotle rank them? Monarchy, Aristocracy, Polity, Democracy, Oligarchy, and lastly Tyranny.
Here is the reasoning; rule by the one is the most efficient system of organization according to Aristotle. The modern world disagrees with this where ruling by committee and institutions is favored as more minds are better able to deal with complex situations as compared to one. However, in a medieval setting, rule by one is the most efficient; hence, Monarchy takes the top spot. On the bad side, rule by the one has least accountability, safety, security for the people. If your one supreme ruler is corrupt, you are out of options and stuck under a steel boot. Thus, monarchy is at the top while tyranny is at the bottom of the list.
After rule by the one is rule by the few. These are the elite people of the community. Wise elders, landowners, people with political power and those in charge of resources. This elite class comes together in the form of city councils and make decisions by committee. This is less efficient than monarchy, but there is more accountability. On the other side, if all of these people become corrupt (as power undoubtedly corrupts) like the Russian and American oligarchies, then these few people make rules and policies that benefit them and prioritize their profits instead of looking for the people. Since the people do not have control over the ruling process, they cannot fix an oligarchy into an aristocracy. They are stuck. This makes Aristocracy the second best option but oligarchy the second worst option.
Lastly, we have rule by the many, which involves all the community in making decisions together. If people make decisions that are smart, we have a polity. It is making policies for the longer-term benefits, policies to take care of orphans and elder, policies to have better rights, and policies to promote virtues.
However, there is a chance that the collective decision-making is dumb, shortsighted, lacks virtuosity, etc. This is close to a mob rule, which Aristotle calls democracy. Polity is weakest option on the good side, and democracy is the weakest option on the bad side.
Based on this ranking where monarchy is the best, aristocracy a close second, and polity coming in third, what do you think Aristotle suggested? Being practical, Aristotle made the following argument, if one has to choose between monarchy and polity, monarchy is better only if there is some guarantee that monarchy will not turn into a tyranny. As no such guarantee can exist, you should choose a polity over a monarchy.
If you choose a polity and the worst case happens, you will only go from a polity to a democracy. Not only is democracy the least bad option, it is possible to convert a democracy back into a polity since people still have some power. However, if you choose monarchy and it turns into tyranny, you are stuck with generations of tyrannical dynasties where tyrannical sons terrorize populations after tyrannical fathers with no reasonable way out.
The virtue of this thought process exists in the West. The UK, even though it is a constitutional monarchy, is practically a polity. With changing parliaments, it goes from a polity to democracy and then back to polity for hundreds of years. This works whether you side with the labor party or the conservative, in both cases; you go from a polity to a democracy and switch back in the next election.
The US also goes through these cycles of good decision-making and bad decision-making as the two parties take turns in the Congress and the White House.
However, areas where there is no real polity, such as Russia’s oligarchy, China, Pakistan, half of Africa, Hungary, North Korea, these people are stuck where they are. It is rare to see these tyrannical or oligarchical governments to become a good form of government.
Conclusion
This completes all the time we are going to spend with Aristotle. So let us take the time to appreciate the man, we will not see his like in this course.
The only thing claimed by Aristotle that is not ideal in the modern world is his teleological approach. Reducing things to their functions, sheep to their wool, oxen to ploughing, and humans to Eudaimonia is not a perfect approach. It opens and allows exploitation that we see in mass consumerism, industrial cattle and poultry farms.
We cannot presume that if something does serve a purpose or function then it is a good thing. This is the exact rationale why most of traditionally unethical ideas prevailed for so long. Slavery served a unique purpose in society so it was correct and removing it would cause problems. Alcohol serves a purpose in the US and hence removing it would cause problems.
All industries have artifices that are responsible for significant profits but are completely unethical. Pharmaceutical companies exploit patents to hike drug prices and prevent competition. Big Tech exploits data without consent. Finance industry has setup debt instruments because they serve the function of allowing you to use credit cards and more. We take things like interest rates for granted just as we took slavery for granted around a century ago.
While Aristotle does not directly justify anything bad, looking at things for the purpose they serve instead of their inherent value creates more problems than it solves. We should not hold something tightly just because it serves some purpose right now; there might be a brighter future beyond it if we dropped these things, such as slavery and interest even if they serve a purpose today.
I think Aristotle would have been less teleological if he had access to the information we have right now. In the modern world, we have thousands of years of written history. A quick glance shows us that things that once were high and mighty in the universe do not exist anymore.
Aristotle had presupposed that everything is moving logically and in order around the Prime Mover. Then an asteroid hit the Earth and wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Mammoths once had the noble purpose of being sustenance for the humans and now they are extinct, and the world moves on. Slavery was an unpleasant fact for thousands of years of human history and now it is a memory. It served a purpose, it ended, and now the world moves on. Stars blow up, and galaxies collide, and the universe moves on.
If the world can move on after mammoths, slavery, feudal systems, city-states, then exalting things and differentiating them based on their purpose loses value. My personal belief is that if Aristotle had the same access to knowledge that we have, specifically seeing the dynamism of the world acknowledging that things go extinct and it does not really matter, then he would not have been this teleological.
On to Muslim Philosophers.