Tom expressed several of Aristotle's political points on tyranny in the comments to a recent post. Thoughtful people on both sides of the political aisle are thinking about Aristotle's account of tyranny; the above video was posted on Facebook by a left-leaning retired academic I know, and generated a discussion of how well Trump fits the model Aristotle described.
Imperfectly, actually, but there are some qualities that do apply. For example, Aristotle says that tyrants use 'the meanest group of people as leaders' to avoid challenges from within, and Trump historically has empowered some pretty low-class people like his former lawyer (the one who later confessed to perjury, but on whose sole testimony was Trump convicted of all those 'felonies'). He's also accepted leaders from within the group of his enemies, though, which was probably his single biggest mistake from his first term.
Perhaps he's learning on that score? Vance is a fairly strong choice with a genuine intellectual center (a point unrecognized by these left-leaning academics, for whom his intellectual influences are déclassé, a quality they confuse with stupidity). On the other hand, Trump outright rejected Heritage Foundation Project 2025's collection of cleared people who could work for his administration and had the right values and temperament. That could mean that he is rejecting qualified people in preference to ones he can control; or it could suggest he does not trust anyone in DC, even on the right. It will have to be seen if he is better on personnel choices than previously.
What is likely obvious to readers of this blog is how well Aristotle's account fits the establishment -- except that the establishment is definitely not a tyranny on Aristotle's terms, because there isn't a single ruler. It is an oligarchy, where even the President is now a figurehead (and that will certainly remain true if Ms. Harris should succeed to the office, as she has no accomplishments of her own: she will also be a puppet). Rule is being exercised extra-constitutionally by a group of people who were never elected to the relevant office.
I am going to put further reading, from the left side of the conversation, after the jump. In a second post I will later do an analysis of both positions and try to summarize where I think they are right and wrong.
Here is the beginning of some remarks from one of the left-leaning academics I like and respect. He is not a public person, so I will relate his comments anonymously.
Indeed, Aristotle notes the common empirical features of tyranny, but great political analyst that he was, he was also the founder of rigorous symbolic analysis in his studies of poetics and rhetorics and ethics. It is hard to think of any philosopher who was so comprehensive, so tireless, so acute in his observations. His problems are eternal existential questions.
When I encounter a mind such as his, I feel sometimes that there is something more than human to it, as if I had met some Titan from another realm who somehow became stranded on our world. I have like feelings about Plato, Shakespeare and Homer and there are others. They cannot be predicted or anticipated, but, once they make their presence felt, we can never again see the world through the same eyes.
He covered all aspects of our nature as dramatic animals. He deals with the inexpressibles of esthetics, with the rhetorical nature of all our speech forms, our undecidable ethical questions, the nature of our political associations, and his observations on the economic order can be inferred from the body of his works.
An economic example: Great wealth need not necessarily be deplored for it allows a rich person to be generous to his city. That challenges all ideologues of individual profit on every front and it asks of collectivist theorists why it seems so difficult for those who inhabit our human city to be willing to be generous to others.
-- More from him in response to a claim that contemporary Great Power Competition is creating an oligarchic power on each side of the divisions that is a form of slavery. --
Tyranny is an outcome and a condition itself--always transitory. The nature of tyranny helps create its own instability.
Classical slavery is not contemporary slavery or the slavery of recent history. Slavery was not considered problematic. Aristotle questioned it with the remark that "Some men are by nature slaves." It did not follow of course, that all those of slavish nature were in fact slaves and all those of an independent nature were free. I regret that he did not go further dealing with that problematic. And we, still, have not gone far enough.
Slavery is now basically discussed in terms of alienation, exploitation and repression. It is still with us, garbed in different robes. Hegel was resigned to it, persuaded that all collective life in the end could be understood under the terms "Masters" and "Slaves." It is the issue of class, the articulation of power in collective existence.
That's worth further inquiry, so I pressed him on the point in conversation. He said:
What I do expound on now and then is the relationship between the tyrant who will make all your choices his and the heretic determined to make his own choices truly his own. Prometheus is the great heretic in Greek myth. Zeus the tyrant of Olympus eventually reconciles with him and he with Zeus.
The others are something like the prophet and the blasphemer, the sophist and the critic, the savior angel and the martyr, and finally the hero and the hypocrite. That's in a table that is a cross between two perennial dilemmas, that between universal law evenly applied and individual inequality judged equitably, and, then, hegemony as opposed to justice. Hegemony declares what justice is and justice to prevail must acquire hegemony. It's Plato's paradox about the gods and justice and his other paradox of the guardians and the question of who shall guard them?
I recalled the nocturnal council that ends Plato's Laws:
Yes, I remember that Plato ends the Laws by calling for a secret nocturnal council to spy on society and punish wrongdoers. The paradox of trying to organize a society towards any ideal is that other members may want to do other things, and must be constrained and controlled. Thus, any idealist society is totalitarian and tyrannical; and to support the good of the people you must strip them of autonomy and dignity.
This explains my own turn towards anarchism; voluntaryist politics anyway. We may have to give up on the gifts of Zeus in order to maintain the autonomy that is the actual root of human dignity.
He agreed, but points out that the decay of good things like autonomy is built-in. Just as tyranny is unstable and will not last, so too the good systems.
Yes. I rest my case on individual autonomy, communal anarchy and institutional democracy. And every last one of them is threatened by the exercise of power by anyone. Autonomy turns to anomia and to heteronomy. Anarchy moves toward oligarchy and finally an order monarchy, democracy produces its timocrats and those produce its autocrats. It's the inevitability of hierarchy, the subordination of some sets of values, choices, and rules to others that then are established as superordinate. Those sum as some order of value literalized in "valuables" which to obtain some things are useful. The useful is that which is sufficient unto the day to deal at least with the necessary.
The Left one encounters in the public space is usually drawn from the power-seeking sort, for whom the threat of tyranny is not that power will be concentrated but that it will not be concentrated in their hands. These are the sort of people who seek power through positions in government, or failing that influence (a sort of power) in the media and culture. Since that is what is usually encountered, it may (via the availability bias) come to seem as if it is all there is.
Yet you can see here a very decent thinker whose concern is not dissimilar to ours: he wants to maintain individual autonomy, a free community of individuals making voluntary decisions ('anarchy') against a slide into oligarchy; democratic institutions against sliding into autocracy. Aristotle also has a lot to say about how the forms shift into one another in the Politics; it is a legitimate concern, trying to maintain the healthy form against its natural corruption. The happy obverse is that the corrupt forms are also inherently unstable, and invite the revolution that restores health as it creates heroes.
There is much more analysis to be given, but this will do for a first post. There's plenty to think about between these comments and Tom's quotations from the earlier post.
10 comments:
In Aristotle's terms, it seems that the left is worried about a tyrant while the right (or whatever it is we - loosely - are) is worried about an oligarchy. Maybe the left is also fearful of democracy, which they are calling populism.
A key issue is the basic division between healthy and corrupt governments. The distinction in all three classes of government (I.e. rule by one, by a few, by the many) depends on whether the government tends to work the benefit of all the members, or tends to work to collect the benefits for the rulers alone.
Thus, a king prospers if his land and people prospers (think of the movie Excalibur: “the king and the land are one!). A tyrant finds ways to keep the people poor to limit their ability to resist.
I think it’s plausible that Trump aspires to be something like a king. He’s clearly not a tyrant: he wants to pursue broad-based prosperity through unloosed economic growth, deregulation, energy independence, and so forth.
Whereas the oligarchy is talking about higher taxes, increased government regulation and spending in spite of deficits, controlling traditional liberties like freedom of speech with censorship and constant monitoring, etc.
But the non-oligarchs are worried about the same things that we are from a different perspective. They’re just planning to vote for the oligarchs, because Trump looks like the bigger threat to them.
What do you think the left's ideal form of government would be, in Aristotle's terms? With their love of centralized power, it seems like aristocracy to me, or maybe a mixed form where aristocrats have the majority of power but there are concessions to the polity.
(In the SEP, the correct form of rule by the many is called 'polity,' although in the past I'd seen it as 'republic'.)
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-politics/
"Polity" derives from the Greek polis; "republic" obviously from the Latin res publica, so I understand why SEP would choose that form. I've often seen it suggested that the healthy form of rule by the many was constitutional rather than democratic; and if you'll remember the Laws and the commentary I wrote on it, it begins with a discussion of many different sorts of constitutions. The point is that rather than letting "the many" do whatever they want, there are rules about what they can and can't do, what powers are legitimate and out of bounds.
So, one of the temptations that the left is more likely to give into is to prefer Plato's approach to Aristotle's. Mostly they're thinking of the Republic rather than the Laws, which isn't widely read. The basic argument of the Republic remains highly appealing to intellectuals, and I think especially to left-leaning ones: that the mind should rule the body, and thus by extension that the more rational and wise members of society should order things for everyone else.
That particular extension has a name, by the way: it is properly called the "fallacy of composition."
As I was saying in the post here, any idealist society like that is going to necessarily be destructive of individual autonomy, and at least inclined to a totalitarian approach. After all, every aspect of society is subject to the criticism that it would be better ordered by the rational part (of society, not the self), and thus everything should be subject to the intellectual class.
Essentially all of your Marxists are really political Platonists.
For those who are wise enough to consider Aristotle's approach to politics superior, aristocracy is clearly the preferred form (as it was, indeed, for Aristotle). This is rule by the few, whose stature to rule is determined not by birth but by virtue. (It is distinct from 'timocracy,' where the only virtues considered are the military ones: that is generally disdained by the intellectual class, as indeed it was by Aristotle, who nevertheless set up the greatest one ever by training Alexander the Great).
It is rule, however, for the good of the whole by the few. In that way it is still quite close to the Platonic ideal, but it accepts limits on Plato's vision that Aristotle also identifies.
Aristotle also endorses the idea that what he calls 'the middle class' is the safest class to invest with power; he doesn't mean by that term quite what we do, but he does mean those who have property but not great wealth. As such, they have to tend to their own business and find tending to the public business a distraction from providing for their families. Thus, proto-Jeffersonian, they tend to govern best because they govern least: and they govern least because they need to get it knocked out so they can get back to minding the farm or the ranch.
That idea isn't as popular as the idea that aristocracy is best, but it is recognized as valid among academics.
I think the British Empire is a good example of a working aristocratic government but also that it is very dependent on having an aristocracy old enough that nobody thinks they got there by merit. (The White Man's Burden wasn't just administering the colonies properly.) The problem we face today is one that IIRC David Foster likes to bring up at Chicago Boyz. We've adopted the French model of regularly credentialing a freshly minted aristocracy but persist in claiming that we're doing it based on merit which gives the new aristocrats an unrealistic view of their abilities. As Glenn Reynolds says from time to time, we've got the worst ruling class in our history (and I'd even include Civil War 1.0 generation in that)
"a working aristocratic government but also that it is very dependent on having an aristocracy old enough that nobody thinks they got there by merit.... [We] persist in claiming that we're doing it based on merit which gives the new aristocrats an unrealistic view of their abilities."
That's an interesting remark. So you think aristocracy works better with people who don't expect much of themselves, because they know they've never really earned anything?
I'm very curious how virtue was known and how new aristocrats were selected. Just the practicalities of it seem interesting. Monarchs, too, for that matter.
Another interesting etymological note is that in ancient Greece, demagogue just meant a leader of the people. The two definitions from the Free Dictionary:
1. (Government, Politics & Diplomacy) a political agitator who appeals with crude oratory to the prejudice and passions of the mob
2. (Government, Politics & Diplomacy) (esp in the ancient world) any popular political leader or orator
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