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A Latter-Day Tyranny in the Light of Aristotelian Prognosis
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 September 2013
Extract
The world as Aristotle and his contemporaries saw it was already a spent world. Its original creativeness had flowered during the sixth and fifth centuries in an outburst of discovery and invention in political and social as well as in literary fields. By the middle of the fourth century, it was the turn of the philosopher to take the results of the discoveries, and synthesize and publicize them in such a way that all the Greek communities should be enabled to work out the combination of forms of society and government best suited to their needs. The study made by Aristotle of the states of his own day maintained its authority across empire and into nationalism, through antiquity and the Middle Ages, up to the threshold of our own modern capitalistic civilization. From that time, however, a new era of inventions seems to have erected an insurmountable barrier between the old and the new, and the relevance of earlier thought for modern problems is called in question.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © American Political Science Association 1934
References
1 Politics, 1301b. “Efficiency and wealth in one's ancestors give title to nobility.”
2 Ibid., 1301a–1302b.
3 Newman, W. L., The Politics of Aristotle, Vol. I, p. 535Google Scholar.
4 Politics, 1302b.
5 Ibid., 1303a.
6 Op. cit., p. 38.
7 Ibid., 37.
8 Politics, 1303b.
9 Ibid., 1304b.
10 Ibid., 1306a.
11 Hoover, op. cit., p. 78.
12 Politics, 1315b.
13 Ibid., 1310b.
14 Hitler, Adolf, Mein Kampf (1933), Vol. I, p. 3Google Scholar.
15 Quoted in Mowrer, Edgar A., Germany Puts the Clock Back, p. 257Google Scholar.
16 Politics, 1311a.
17 Hitler, Whence and Whither, p. 59.
18 Hitler, op. cit., Vol. I, p. 20.
19 It is, of course, well known that the Greeks had their racial problem, which was met in different ways. Sparta's exclusion of the helots, coupled with systematic pogroms, is the extreme on one side; Athens' leniency to foreigners, or “barbarians,” metics and slaves, coupled with the opportunity for citizenship at least down to Pericles' time, balances on the other side. The prevailing notion of the definite inferiority of barbarian to Greek is echoed in Aristotle's attitude toward natural slavery. It is interesting to note that in the period of the Thirty Tyrants, the tyrants sought the property (and frequently the lives) of the rich Athenian metics.
20 Ibid., p. 96.
21 Newman, op. cit., Vol. I, p. 526.
22 Op. cit., p. 70.
23 Quoted in Mowrer, op. cit., p. 273.
24 Ibid., p. 274.
25 Politics, 1308a.
26 Ibid., 1311a.
27 Ibid., 1311a.
28 New Statesman and Nation, Jan., 1934, p. 73Google Scholar.
29 Politics, 1313a,b.
30 Ibid., 1313b.
31 Ibid., 1314a.
32 Op. cit., p. 279.
33 Op. cit., p. 181.
34 Politics, 1312b.
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