Series: Zeitgeist Zero Hour

Can we preserve democracy?

Chapter 2: Aristotle's Wisdom
Part 1: 'Paradox of Equality' and 'Aristotelean Paradox Management'

Originally published: June 24, 2019
Last edited: July 3, 2019

By Michio Suginoo
Aristotle saw paradox in democracy. According to him, the paradox emerges from the general notion of equality, one of the primary principles of democracy. He illuminated how two distinct principles of equality--numerical equality and proportional equality—confront each other and destabilise democracy. In his view, a destabilising cause of democracy is embedded in the very architecture of democracy. He further articulated that the paradox can be managed to preserve democracy.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the world of paradox that we live in.
In Chapter 1, Socrates [1] diagnosed an enigmatic terminal symptom of democracy—democracy is destined to degenerate into tyranny. And the majority ruling, one of the operating principles of democracy, plays a fatal role in giving rise to demagogues to facilitate the ominous transition.
How did Aristotle see Socrates’ fatalistic diagnosis of the terminal symptom of democracy? Is the cataclysmic change in constitutional order (political regime) ‘'a grandeur of ‘historical necessity’’ [2] ? Against fatalism, can we preserve democracy? If possible, how?

Aristotle, in contrast to Socrates, embraced a non-deterministic view. [Click the link for the Contrast between Socrates and Aristotle] He perceived that any constitutional order can be better than a state of chaos such as anarchy and explored possibilities to preserve any given operating constitution, including democracy in antiquity. Can we apply Aristotle’s wisdoms in preserving our contemporary democratic reality? What different approaches would our democracy demand?

The question, “Can we preserve democracy?”, is examined by two chapters. Chapter 2, divided into two parts,  seek inspirations from the ancient wisdom of Aristotle in addressing constitutional breakdown. And Chapter 3 contemplates our contemporary democratic reality:
Part 1 of Chapter 2 intends to sketch distinctive characteristics of Aristotle’s arguments and is divided into the following two sections:
  • Section 1 to identify Aristotle’s primary concern behind his arguments
  • Section 2 to illustrate his approach of managing paradoxes, call it “Aristotelean Paradox Management,” with an example of his formulation of resolving the paradox of equality, inherent flaws embedded in two confronting principles of equality—numerical equality and proportional equality.
 
Then, Part 2 of Chapter 2 outlines Aristotle’s general principles and guidelines for the preservation of constitutions and his view on how to preserve democracy of his time.

Chapter 3 shifts our focus to our contemporary liberal representative democracy and reflect two intellects of our time, Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), a Holocaust survivor and Jewish German American thinker, and Angie Hobbes the Professor of the Public Understanding of Philosophy at University of Sheffield.

Section 1:
Aristotle’s Primary Concern and
Typical Pathology of Constitutional Breakdown

Aristotle’s Primary Concern

How can we avoid political chaos—such as civil wars, revolutions, and anarchy—which could ultimately provoke a constitutional change was his primary concern. Aristotle’s mind was preoccupied with addressing the issue, in other words how to engineer political order and maintain its stability. Simply put, in his mind, chaos is the villain; and any political order that prevents chaos was deemed a saviour (from chaos), if neither the best nor even a desirable one. In this respect, Aristotle’s mind intensively focused on ‘the prevention of the worst case scenario’. As a result, his primary concern shaped his pluralistic view about a good government: any form of constitutional order is far much better than a state of chaos.

In this light, he formulated his guidelines on how to preserve any sort of constitutional order—be it kingship, aristocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and even tyranny—and prevent it from degenerating into chaos.

To stress this notion, here is a remark made by Paul Cartledge, Emeritus A.G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture at Clare College, Cambridge University.

“If there is one thing that Aristotle was peculiarly sensitive to in the lived actuality—as opposed to the ideal conception—of many if not most of the Greek poleis of his own day and earlier, it was their unfortunate propensity to degenerate into civil strife, including all too often and easily outright civil war. […] he devoted a whole book out of the eight-book Politics to identifying causes of civil strife and war and suggesting both preventative and curative solutions to the disease.” (Cartledge, 2016, p. 19)

In summary, his pluralistic political discourse is a flip side product of the notion that chaos, or a state of anarchy, is an absolute villain and should be avoided at all cost.

A Typical Pathology of Constitutional Breakdown

Aristotle conducted his historical survey of 158 constitutions and examined empirical cases of constitutional breakdown and analysed their mechanisms—their causes, developments, and consequences. He diagnosed historical variations in the pathology of constitutional breakdown over four constitutions: monarchy, oligarchy, democracy, and tyranny.

And, he formulated a typical, if not the only or universal, underlying mechanism of constitutional breakdown. Its origin starts from “discontent at the absence of equality and justice, in whatever sense these terms are understood by the person feeling the discontent.” (Saunders, 1992, p. 299) And the discontent triggers a chain reaction that is conducive to constitutional breakdown. In a nutshell, as it intensifies, it provokes enmity and creates factions among social classes.

“At all events, whatever the aim of sedition [faction] may be, it stems in every case from inequality, though there is no inequality if unequals are treated in proportion to their mutual inequality.
The desire for equality, therefore, is the mainspring of sedition [faction].”
(Aristotle, 1961, pp. 134-135: Book V: 1301b)

The ensuing social strifes among factions, he further argues, could lead to chaos—revolutions, civil wars, and anarchy—and ultimately subvert the existing constitutional order into another form.


Precautionary Remark on ‘Class Analysis’

Before proceeding further, here I would like to make an important precautionary remark. Aristotle, like Socrates, used ‘class-based analysis,’ or ‘class analysis,’ in his discourse: he divided a society into several social classes—the wealthy, the poor, and the middle class, for example. To our contemporary mind, ‘class analysis’ has a strong attachment to Marxist doctrine. Nevertheless, as a historical fact, it was not Karl Marx who started ‘class analysis’. In this context, Aristotle should be deemed dissociated from Communism, simply because Aristotle did not particularly endorse it; he rather promoted individual’s active participation in political activities.

Section 2:
Paradox of Equality and
Aristotelean Paradox Management

'Equality in a general sense' is a paradoxical notion. To begin with, we are born differently in gender, dispositions, and ability, thus, we are not a standardized commodity. Nevertheless, we often demonstrate our tendency to thrive for equality.

Aristotle attributed constitutional breakdown to the paradox of equality. In his view, two distinctive principles of equality—‘numerical equality’ and ‘proportional equality’—confront each other and divide the society into ‘two diametrically opposite’ [3] ends of social, political and economic self-interests, the few rich and the multitude poor. As a consequence, the ensuing factions play significant acting roles in intensifying civil strifes among them often to lead to a state of chaos—e.g. civil wars, revolutions, and anarchy. (Aristotle, the Politics, Book V)

As a matter of fact, Socrates also mentioned the paradox of equality. While he described democracy as the most attractive of all political regimes because of “liberty and freedom of speech in plenty,” and “the diversity of its characters”  (Plato, the Republic, 2007, pp. 292-293: Book VIII: 557b-c), he also criticised it as “an agreeable anarchic form of society, with plenty of variety, which treats all men equal, whether they are equal or not.”  (Plato, the Republic, 2007, p. 294: Book VIII: 558c)

How would Aristotle manage the paradox?


Two Confronting Principles of Equality

To begin with, what are these two mutually confronting principles of equality—‘numerical equality’ and ‘proportional equality’? How do they differ from each other?

In a way, their difference resembles to that of ‘equality of opportunity’ and ‘equality of outcome’ in our contemporary norm.

Simply put, ‘numerical equality’ demands an equal treatment in terms of quantity. In this institution, every single citizen receives an equal amount of social benefits as others do, regardless of a broad difference in the quality/qualification among the recipients. As an illustrative example ‘numerical equality’—as our contemporary equivalence,  ‘equality of outcome’ would do—may discourage highly productive recipients in a sense that they may feel that they should deserve benefits commensurate with their excellence in productivity; and they are not getting the whole of benefit that they should deserve. To them, the institution of ‘numerical equality’ appears an unfair institution that transfers some of their benefits to those unproductive recipients. To those unproductive ones, the institution might appear a free ride system.

On the other hand, ‘proportional equality’ would produce inequality at the end. Rights is distributed among individuals proportional to each individual’s qualification for the criteria of excellence—be it birth, wealth, or virtues (e.g. productivity). ‘Proportional equality’ advantages those who have excellence in meeting the criteria for the rights and disadvantages the rest. As an example, the power elite occupying the office could set the criteria for the rights in favour of themselves and their constituent interest groupsIs the cataclysmic change in constitutional order (political regime) ‘'a grandeur of ‘historical necessity’’? Against fatalism, can we preserve democracy? If possible, how?


The Paradox of Equality

These two distinct principles of equality could cause a contentious situation where the society is divided into two factions. While ‘the rich,’ or ‘the elite,’ favour ‘proportional equality,’ ‘the poor,’ would favour ‘numerical equality’.

‘The rich,’ or ‘the elite,’ would demand superior treatments through ‘proportional equality’—which is relative equality or de-facto inequality—to maximise their superior rights, or privilege. The opposite end of the social spectrum, ‘the poor,’ would demand an absolute equality called ‘numerical equality’ to gain accesses to equal rights. In this sense, Aristotle characterises ‘proportional equality’ as an operating principle of oligarchy and ‘numerical equality’ as that of democracy.

An extreme form of either democracy or oligarchy, according to Aristotle, suffers from its own paradox of equality. In democracy, he goes, those who believe that they are equal in any single respect would believe that they are equal in all respects. In oligarchy, those who claim to be superior in one respect would demand superior treatments in everything. Thus, Aristotle argues, either case—pure democracy or pure oligarchy—would provoke a sense of inequality and trigger factions, thus would be doomed to vanish on the horizon. (Aristotle, the Politics, book V: 1301b-1302a)

For your reference, as a matter of fact, Socrates also mentions the same principle:

Democracy is “an agreeable anarchic form of society, with plenty of variety, which treats all men equal, whether they are equal or not.” (Plato, the Republic, 2007, p. 294: Book VIII: 558c)

 “Extreme freedom can’t be expected to lead to anything but a change to extreme slavery, […]. Then I don’t suppose that tyranny evolves from any constitution other than democracy—the most severe and cruel slavery from the utmost freedom.” (Plato, The Republic, 1997, p 1174: Book VIII: 564a)

“In fact, excessive action in one direction usually sets up a reaction in the opposite direction. This happens in seasons, in plants, in bodies, and, last but not least, in constitution. ”  (Plato, The Republic, 1997, p. 1174: Book VIII: 563e)

Aristotelean ‘Paradox Management’: how to resolve the ‘Paradox of Equality’

As Socrates in the Plato’s ‘The Republic’ articulated, democracy subsumes oligarchic faction within. In a way, democracy is a sort of a crossover multi-verse regime, in which democracy and oligarchy co-exist and competing against each other in principle. (for more details, please visit Terminal Symptom of Democracy in Ancient World) In other words, democracy is apt to civil strifes between the rich and the rest due to the paradox of equality. Now, against such an excessive demand for equality (‘numerical equality’) by the ordinary on one hand and an equally excessive demand for inequality (‘proportional equality’) by the rich on the other, a relevant question would be how Aristotle would resolve the paradox.

Aristotle’s solution is quite simple: to strike a balance between them by mixing these diametrically opposite principles. Rather than resolving each individual flaw within each framework or selecting one principle by discarding the other, he prescribed a policy mix to blend these two confronting principles under one constitutional framework to tame discontents from both sides. In addition, he further emphasised the significance of maintaining the middle class as an effective balancing anchor to stabilise the system. (Aristotle, the Politics, 1302a)

Overall, shaping a balance, or the golden mean, is a key solution for Aristotle. He denounced any extreme pure form of constitution as destabilising, be it democracy or oligarchy, since an extreme constitution (political regime) contained self-defeating paradox within its own architecture. In other words, he shaped a unique discipline of ‘Paradox Management’ to seek a balancing point to prevent any extreme pure form of constitution from dominating the others, by institutionally managing, or neutralising, the paradox, rather than removing it.

Trevor Saunders, a translator of Aristotle’s ‘the Politics,’ suggests that Aristotle had already conceived the concept of ‘separation of power’ about 19 centuries prior to Montesquieu: In his view, Aristotle engineered ‘inter-class check and balance’ system, in which all classes of society—the rich, the middle, and the poor—participate in deliberative and judicial processes, except executive function, and counterbalance one another.

“We should eware of supporting that Aristotle’s three-fold division of powers corresponds more than very roughly to the fairly sharp modern ‘separation of powers’ as between legislature, executive and judiciary: he evidently envisages considerable overlapping of functions.” (Saunders, 1992, pp. 276-277)
 
In contrast to Aristotle’s proactive approach, Socrates casted a fatalistic disposition by portraying the paradox as an imperative destabilising cause that inevitably drove his deterministic constitutional (political regime) cycle (for more details, please visit: Intrinsic values and limitations of Socrates Cycle and Thus spoke Socrates). Above all, his ‘paradox management’ distinguishes Aristotle from Socrates and Plato.

This is just one small aspect of Aristotle’s discourse on the pathology of constitutional breakdown. Now, Part 2 of Chapter 2, Aristotelean Preservation of Constitutions, outlines Aristotle’s general principles and guidelines for the preservation of constitutions and further seeks inspirations from his ancient wisdom for the preservation of democracy.
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Notes

Note 1: Throughout the reading, Socrates refers to Plato’s fictional Socrates in his masterpiece, the Republic.
Note 2: I borrow this phrase from Hannah Arendt: “To yield to the mere process of disintegration has become a grandeur of ‘historical necessity’, but also because everything outside it has begun to appear lifeless, bloodless, meaningless, and unreal.” (Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1994, p. x)
Note 3: The expression is borrowed from Paul Cartledge’s descriptive phrase: “the golden mean in all things—the city most likely to succeed pragmatically was the one in which the middling citizens held the political balance between the extremes of rich and poor with their diametrically opposed self-interests, although even such a city would still be operating at a level well below the optimal Aristotelian philosophical ideal.” (Cartledge, 2016, pp. 19-20)


References

  • Aristotle. (1961). Politics. In Aristotle, Politics and Athenian Constitution (J. Warrington, Trans.). London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd.
  • Aristotle. (1992). The politics. (T. A. Sinclair, & T. J. Saunders, Trans.) London: Penguin Group.
  • Aristotle. (2009). The Nicomachean Ethics. (D. Ross, & L. Brown, Trans.) New York: Oxford University Press Inc.
  • Cartledge, P. (2016). Democracy, a life. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Lee, D. (2007). the Republic (Opening Notes on Chapters). In Plato, Plato, the Republic. London: Penguin Books, Ltd.
  • Plato. (1997). The Republic. In J. M. Cooper, Plato Complete Works (G. Grube, & C. Reeve, Trans., pp. 971-1123). Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.
  • Plato. (2007). the Republic. (D. Lee, & M. Lane, Trans.) London: Penguin Books, Ltd.
  • Saunders, T. J. (1992). Chapter Preface. In Aristotle, The politics. London: Penguin Group.
​Copyright © 2019 by Michio Suginoo. All rights reserved.