Book-bot.com - read famous books online for free

Politics: A Treatise on Government by Aristotle
page 6 of 332 (01%)
described must have occurred frequently in actual life. The Greeks
thought administration should be democratic and law-making the work of
experts. We think more naturally of law-making as the special right of
the people and administration as necessarily confined to experts.

Aristotle's Politics, then, is a handbook for the legislator, the
expert who is to be called in when a state wants help. We have called
him a state doctor. It is one of the most marked characteristics of
Greek political theory that Plato and Aristotle think of the statesman
as one who has knowledge of what ought to be done, and can help those
who call him in to prescribe for them, rather than one who has power
to control the forces of society. The desire of society for the
statesman's advice is taken for granted, Plato in the Republic says
that a good constitution is only possible when the ruler does not want
to rule; where men contend for power, where they have not learnt to
distinguish between the art of getting hold of the helm of state and
the art of steering, which alone is statesmanship, true politics is
impossible.

With this position much that Aristotle has to say about government is
in agreement. He assumes the characteristic Platonic view that all men
seek the good, and go wrong through ignorance, not through evil will,
and so he naturally regards the state as a community which exists for
the sake of the good life. It is in the state that that common seeking
after the good which is the profoundest truth about men and nature
becomes explicit and knows itself. The state is for Aristotle prior to
the family and the village, although it succeeds them in time, for
only when the state with its conscious organisation is reached can man
understand the secret of his past struggles after something he knew
not what. If primitive society is understood in the light of the
DigitalOcean Referral Badge