A Treatise on Government | Page 5

and cannot be treated merely as means to the
end of the legislator. The sense of the value of "ruling and being ruled in turn" is derived
from the experience that the ruler may use his power to subordinate the lives of the
citizens of the state not to the common good but to his own private purposes. In modern
terms, it is a simple, rough-and-ready attempt to solve that constant problem of politics,
how efficient government is to be combined with popular control. This problem arises
from the imperfection of human nature, apparent in rulers as well as in ruled, and if the
principle which attempts to solve it be admitted as a principle of importance in the
formation of the best constitution, then the starting-point of politics will be man's actual
imperfection, not his ideal nature. Instead, then, of beginning with a state which would
express man's ideal nature, and adapting it as well as may be to man's actual
shortcomings from that ideal, we must recognise that the state and all political machinery
are as much the expression of man's weakness as of his ideal possibilities. The state is
possible only because men have common aspirations, but government, and political
power, the existence of officials who are given authority to act in the name of the whole
state, are necessary because men's community is imperfect, because man's social nature
expresses itself in conflicting ways, in the clash of interests, the rivalry of parties, and the
struggle of classes, instead of in the united seeking after a common good. Plato and
Aristotle were familiar with the legislator who was called in by the whole people, and
they tended therefore to take the general will or common consent of the people for
granted. Most political questions are concerned with the construction and expression of
the general will, and with attempts to ensure that the political machinery made to express
the general will shall not be exploited for private or sectional ends.
Aristotle's mixed constitution springs from a recognition of sectional interests in the state.
For the proper relation between the claims of "virtue," wealth, and numbers is to be based
not upon their relative importance in the good life, but upon the strength of the parties
which they represent. The mixed constitution is practicable in a state where the middle

class is strong, as only the middle class can mediate between the rich and the poor. The
mixed constitution will be stable if it represents the actual balance of power between
different classes in the state. When we come to Aristotle's analysis of existing
constitutions, we find that while he regards them as imperfect approximations to the ideal,
he also thinks of them as the result of the struggle between classes. Democracy, he
explains, is the government not of the many but of the poor; oligarchy a government not
of the few but of the rich. And each class is thought of, not as trying to express an ideal,
but as struggling to acquire power or maintain its position. If ever the class existed in
unredeemed nakedness, it was in the Greek cities of the fourth century, and its existence
is abundantly recognised by Aristotle. His account of the causes of revolutions in Book V.
shows how far were the existing states of Greece from the ideal with which he starts. His
analysis of the facts forces him to look upon them as the scene of struggling factions. The
causes of revolutions are not described as primarily changes in the conception of the
common good, but changes in the military or economic power of the several classes in
the state. The aim which he sets before oligarchs or democracies is not the good life, but
simple stability or permanence of the existing constitution.
With this spirit of realism which pervades Books IV., V., and VI. the idealism of Books I.,
II., VII., and VIII. is never reconciled. Aristotle is content to call existing constitutions
perversions of the true form. But we cannot read the Politics without recognising and
profiting from the insight into the nature of the state which is revealed throughout.
Aristotle's failure does not lie in this, that he is both idealist and realist, but that he keeps
these two tendencies too far apart. He thinks too much of his ideal state, as something to
be reached once for all by knowledge, as a fixed type to which actual states approximate
or from which they are perversions. But if we are to think of actual politics as intelligible
in the light of the ideal, we must think of that ideal as progressively revealed in history,
not as something to be discovered by turning our back on experience and having recourse
to abstract reasoning. If we stretch forward from