A Treatise on Government | Page 2

he admits in the
Laws, for gods or the children of gods, not for men as they are.
Aristotle has none of the high enthusiasm or poetic imagination of Plato. He is even
unduly impatient of Plato's idealism, as is shown by the criticisms in the second book.

But he has a power to see the possibilities of good in things that are imperfect, and the
patience of the true politician who has learned that if he would make men what they
ought to be, he must take them as he finds them. His ideal is constructed not of pure
reason or poetry, but from careful and sympathetic study of a wide range of facts. His
criticism of Plato in the light of history, in Book II. chap, v., though as a criticism it is
curiously inept, reveals his own attitude admirably: "Let us remember that we should not
disregard the experience of ages; in the multitude of years, these things, if they were good,
would certainly not have been unknown; for almost everything has been found out,
although sometimes they are not put together; in other cases men do not use the
knowledge which they have." Aristotle in his Constitutions had made a study of one
hundred and fifty-eight constitutions of the states of his day, and the fruits of that study
are seen in the continual reference to concrete political experience, which makes the
Politics in some respects a critical history of the workings of the institutions of the Greek
city state. In Books IV., V., and VI. the ideal state seems far away, and we find a
dispassionate survey of imperfect states, the best ways of preserving them, and an
analysis of the causes of their instability. It is as though Aristotle were saying: "I have
shown you the proper and normal type of constitution, but if you will not have it and
insist on living under a perverted form, you may as well know how to make the best of
it." In this way the Politics, though it defines the state in the light of its ideal, discusses
states and institutions as they are. Ostensibly it is merely a continuation of the Ethics, but
it comes to treat political questions from a purely political standpoint.
This combination of idealism and respect for the teachings of experience constitutes in
some ways the strength and value of the Politics, but it also makes it harder to follow.
The large nation states to which we are accustomed make it difficult for us to think that
the state could be constructed and modelled to express the good life. We can appreciate
Aristotle's critical analysis of constitutions, but find it hard to take seriously his advice to
the legislator. Moreover, the idealism and the empiricism of the Politics are never really
reconciled by Aristotle himself.
It may help to an understanding of the Politics if something is said on those two points.
We are accustomed since the growth of the historical method to the belief that states are
"not made but grow," and are apt to be impatient with the belief which Aristotle and Plato
show in the powers of the lawgiver. But however true the maxim may be of the modern
nation state, it was not true of the much smaller and more self-conscious Greek city.
When Aristotle talks of the legislator, he is not talking in the air. Students of the
Academy had been actually called on to give new constitutions to Greek states. For the
Greeks the constitution was not merely as it is so often with us, a matter of political
machinery. It was regarded as a way of life. Further, the constitution within the
framework of which the ordinary process of administration and passing of decrees went
on, was always regarded as the work of a special man or body of men, the lawgivers. If
we study Greek history, we find that the position of the legislator corresponds to that
assigned to him by Plato and Aristotle. All Greek states, except those perversions which
Aristotle criticises as being "above law," worked under rigid constitutions, and the
constitution was only changed when the whole people gave a commission to a lawgiver
to draw up a new one. Such was the position of the AEsumnetes, whom Aristotle
describes in Book III. chap, xiv., in earlier times, and of the pupils of the Academy in the
fourth century. The lawgiver was not an ordinary politician. He was a state doctor, called

in to prescribe for an ailing constitution. So Herodotus recounts that when the people of
Cyrene asked the oracle of Delphi to help them in their dissensions, the oracle told them
to go to Mantinea, and the Mantineans lent them Demonax, who acted as a "setter
straight" and drew up