What did the founders learn from Aristotle?
About this video
A scholar explains what the American founders learned from Aristotle. Aristotle said humans are political animals who live their best life together in political communities, and that the best government mixes monarchical, aristocratic and popular elements, because each pure form can degenerate. These ideas reached the founders through interpreters such as Montesquieu.
You'll be able to
- explain what Aristotle meant by calling humans political animals.
- explain why Aristotle favored a mixed government.
- describe how each pure form of government can degenerate.
Key words
- zoon politikon
- Greek for 'political animal': Aristotle's idea that humans flourish by living together in communities.
- telos
- Greek for purpose or best end; the goal a thing is meant to reach.
- mixed government
- A government that combines rule by one, by a few and by the many to stay stable.
- tyranny
- Rule by one person in their own interest; the degenerate form of monarchy.
- oligarchy
- Rule by a few in their own interest; the degenerate form of aristocracy.
Transcript
Aristotle is so important because he is one of the first philosophers in the ancient world to think about the politics, and he has his book The Politics. There he says that a man is zoon politikon; a man is a political animal, and that we live our best life. We say that a lot today, but they meant it in a ancient Greek way. But living our best life with Aristotle, that we lived our best life together in polities, and that the human alone was isolated, atomized, sad, and unfulfilled. What he called our telos, our best end in the world was best realized within human governments. We had to think very, very hard about how to create these wonderful societies. So he decides that the best governments are those that are mixed,
that you mix the monarchical element, the aristocratic element, and the popular element, and that mixing created a nice, stable government. But that all of those modes of government, those three modes of government, had the capacity to degenerate. Monarchy could degenerate into tyranny, aristocracy into oligarchy, and democracy into mob autocracy. He hands this complex of ideas through the ages to the American founders, and it gets picked up through various translations, three interpreters, like Montesquieu for example. [MUSIC]
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