Explain the Aristotelian view of politics. To what extent do you think it has contributed – to the development of modern-day constitutional democracies? (2021, 20 Marks)
Aristotle’s Politics, built on a comparative study credited with 158 constitutions, treats politics as the master science that orders all others towards the human good. It earned him the title of father of political science by asking what the state is, what it is for, and which arrangements of rule are just and durable. Modern constitutional democracy owes him much of its architecture, but little of its membership.
The Aristotelian View of Politics
- Natural and ethical. Man is by nature a political animal, possessing speech about the just and unjust. The state arises for life and exists for the sake of a good life. Ethics and politics are one inquiry: a constitution is judged by the citizens it forms.
- Practical, not utopian. Politics is a practical science, true “for the most part”. Against Plato’s ideal city he seeks the best practicable constitution.
- Citizenship as activity. A citizen shares in the administration of justice, and in offices, ruling and being ruled in turn.
- The common-interest test. Kingship, aristocracy and polity serve the common good; tyranny, oligarchy and democracy serve the rulers.
- Polity and the middle class. Polity fuses oligarchic and democratic elements. Its stability rests on a large middle class, the mean between rich and poor.
- Rule of law. The law is reason unaffected by desire; whoever bids man rule adds an element of the beast. Equity corrects law where its generality fails.
Where He Contributed
- Constitutionalism. His anatomy of tyranny as the worst constitution made unchecked personal power the standing enemy. Government bound by general, antecedent law passed through Thomas Aquinas and John Locke into the liberal tradition. India’s basic-structure doctrine (Kesavananda Bharati, 1973) and Indira Nehru Gandhi v. Raj Narain (1975) deny any organ unlimited power.
- Mixed and balanced government. Polybius and Marcus Tullius Cicero extended his mixture into a balance of monarchic, aristocratic and popular elements. Through them it reached Montesquieu (Charles-Louis de Secondat) and the American founders as checks, balances and bicameralism. His three elements of every constitution, the deliberative, the magistracies and judicial power (Book IV), foreshadow the separation of functions.
- Legitimacy. Rule for the ruled, not the rulers, remains the basic test of government.
- Social foundations. Seymour Martin Lipset (Political Man, 1960) revived the middle-class argument. Recent work by Eli G. Rau and Susan Stokes finds inequality among the strongest predictors of democratic erosion.
- Civic virtue and deliberation. Education in the spirit of the constitution, citizenship as duty (Article 51A) and the collective wisdom of the many inform civic republicanism and deliberative democracy. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar warned on 25 November 1949 that hero-worship leads to dictatorship, the rule-of-law argument in an Indian voice.
Where He Did Not
- Democracy was a perversion for him, and his citizen body excluded slaves, women, aliens and, in the best state, manual workers. Universal adult franchise (Article 326) reverses his membership rules.
- No individual rights. The whole is prior to the part. Fundamental rights enforceable against the state descend from natural-rights and contract theory, not from him.
- No representation, parties or federalism in a small face-to-face polis.
- Contested legacy. Karl Popper (The Open Society and Its Enemies, 1945) faulted his essentialism and his acceptance of Plato’s natural hierarchy. Hannah Arendt, by contrast, drew on his public realm of speech and action.
Conclusion
Aristotle’s contribution is substantial but selective. Modern constitutional democracy is Aristotelian in its architecture: limited government, balance, legitimacy and civic virtue. In membership and rights it is modern and unrecognisable to him. His lasting gift is the question every constitution must answer: in whose interest is power exercised?