Aristotle Said the Best Republic Rests on a Large Middle Class

A question for the dinner table: which political system does the most to keep a country free? Pick any answer you like, a bill of rights, a strong president, an independent court, a free press. All reasonable. Now consider the possibility that a philosopher who died in 322 BC, in a world of city-states, slave labor and bronze-age warfare, gave an answer that beats them all in one sentence. The best-governed community is the one with a large body of citizens in the middle: not rich enough to rule by contempt, not poor enough to be ruled by need.

That is the thesis of Book IV of Aristotle's Politics, and it is the oldest and most durable argument for the thing Americans take for granted, the property-owning middle class, as the foundation of a republic. The Founders knew the argument and acted on it. The modern left sometimes treats the middle class as an economic statistic. The right sometimes treats it as an afterthought. Aristotle treated it as the constitutional keystone. Let me explain why, and then say where he was wrong.

The man and his work

Aristotle was born in 384 BC in Stagira, a Greek town on the northern Aegean coast, the son of a physician at the Macedonian court. At seventeen or so he went to Athens and joined Plato's Academy, where he stayed for roughly twenty years. When Plato died in 347 he left, and in about 343 King Philip of Macedon asked him to tutor his teenage son, the future Alexander the Great. He returned to Athens in 335 and founded his own school, the Lyceum. When anti-Macedonian feeling erupted after Alexander's death in 323, Aristotle left the city and died the next year at Chalcis on the island of Euboea.

His surviving works run across logic, physics, biology, ethics, rhetoric and politics. The Politics is largely a set of lecture notes, assembled from his teaching and from a study he supervised of the constitutions of 158 Greek city-states, only one of which, the Constitution of the Athenians, survives complete. That detail is worth pausing on. Aristotle did not build his theory from the armchair. He sent his students out to collect and compare the governments of the Greek world, which makes the Politics an early work of comparative empirical political science.

First claim: man is a political animal

The Politics begins with a definition that conservatives should recognize, because it is the opposite of the social-contract story that makes the individual prior to society. In Book I, Aristotle argues that the polis, the political community, exists by nature, and that "man is by nature a political animal." We are made for life with others. Our capacity for speech, which lets us argue about what is just and unjust, shows it. A creature who could live outside any community, Aristotle says, would be either a beast or a god.

He traces the growth of society from the bottom up: the household first, then the village made of households, then the city made of villages. The family is not a creation of the state. The state grows out of the family. This is a view of society as an organism rooted in natural ties, and Burke and the later conservative tradition built on it. See Every Totalitarian Regime Went After the Family First, and Not by Accident for the modern cost of ignoring it.

He also says that the citizen is the person who shares in judging and in holding office, who rules and is ruled in turn. A free community is one in which the governed are also, at least some of the time, the governors. That is a fair description of a jury, a town meeting and a legislature.

Second claim: six forms of government

In Book III, Aristotle classifies constitutions by two questions: how many rule, and for whose benefit. A single ruler, a few, or the many can each govern in the interest of the whole community or in the interest of the rulers themselves. That gives six forms.

1. Monarchy: rule by one for the common good. Its corrupt form is tyranny: rule by one for his own benefit.
2. Aristocracy: rule by the few best for the common good. Its corrupt form is oligarchy: rule by the few, usually the wealthy, for themselves.
3. Polity: rule by the many for the common good. Its corrupt form is democracy: rule by the many, usually the poor, for themselves.

Notice the odd vocabulary. By "democracy" Aristotle means what we would call mob rule or class rule by the majority, and he considers it a deviation. The good rule of the many he calls "polity," the word that gives us politics. The distinction that matters is not the number of rulers, but whether they rule for the common good or for their own interest. That is a standard any American can use: a majority that taxes a minority to enrich itself is, in Aristotle's terms, a democracy in the bad sense.

Third claim: the middle class is the keystone

Now the central argument. In Book IV, chapter 11, Aristotle asks what the best constitution is for most communities in practice, as opposed to the perfect one. His answer is the one this post is named for. In every city, he observes, there are three parts: the very rich, the very poor and the middle. The rich tend to become arrogant and the poor tend to become envious and base. The former do not know how to obey, and the latter do not know how to rule. The result, when either dominates, is a city of slaves and masters rather than free men, one party full of contempt, the other of envy.

The middle sit apart from both extremes. Citizens of moderate means are the most willing to listen to reason, the least likely to plot against their neighbors, and the least likely to be plotted against. They do not covet what others have, and others do not covet what they have. They can do the thing that free government demands: rule and be ruled in turn. So a city with a large middle class is more stable, and more likely to have a government of laws.

Aristotle says that where the middle class is large, there are fewer factions and fewer revolutions. Where it is small, the extremes face off, and whichever wins sets up a tyranny or an oligarchy. He draws the conclusion that the best political community is the one governed by the middle, and that the lawgiver should always try to include the middle in his constitution.

He pairs the argument with a practical recipe for the mixed constitution: combine features of oligarchy and democracy so that neither the rich nor the poor can dominate. Pay the poor for serving in the courts and fine the rich if they do not serve; let offices go to those with a property qualification but open the courts to all. A constitution that works draws strength from both ends, and the middle keeps them in balance.

Fourth claim: against Plato's community of property

In Book II, Aristotle criticizes the Republic of his own teacher, and the critique is one of the sharpest in the history of political thought. Plato had proposed that the guardians of his ideal city should own no private property and hold wives and children in common. Aristotle's reply is practical. What is common to the greatest number, he says, gets the least care: each person thinks mostly of his own and only a little of the common interest. Common property breeds quarrels, since those who work hard get no more than those who do not, and the sharing of goods produces more disputes among partners than property that belongs to one.

His alternative is private ownership with generous common use. Property should be private, he says, but friends should share. The citizens of a decently run city give freely to friends and strangers out of what is their own, and that giving is a virtue. If everything is held in common, there is no property from which to give, so liberality disappears. Aristotle also notes that there is pleasure in thinking of something as one's own, and that this is not selfishness but a natural love, as natural as love of self.

The experience of the Plymouth colony, which began with land held in common and in 1623 assigned each family its own land, is a famous illustration; see plymouth tried common property in 1621 and nearly starved before 1623. And the argument for widespread ownership as a source of citizenship has a modern chapter in Levittown Built a Nation of Homeowners, and Ownership Built Citizens.

The Founders and the mixed constitution

How did all this reach America? Through two channels. The first is the classical education every Founder received. The second is a long tradition that took Aristotle's idea of a mixed regime and developed it. The Greek historian Polybius, writing in the second century BC, argued that Rome's strength came from combining monarchy (the consuls), aristocracy (the Senate) and democracy (the assemblies) in one constitution that checked itself. Cicero repeated it. Montesquieu, writing in the eighteenth century, adapted it to modern England. And the Founders, in turn, took from all of them. See Montesquieu Warned That Liberty Dies Where One Hand Makes and Enforces Law.

John Adams was the most committed student of the mixed constitution among the Founders. In his Thoughts on Government of 1776 he outlined the structure of a republic with a two-house legislature and an independent judiciary, and in his massive Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America (1787-88) he reviewed the history of republics, ancient and modern, to prove that balanced government is the only kind that lasts. He held that a single assembly, uncontrolled, would devour the rights of a minority, and he did not trust any one order of men with unchecked power. He drafted the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, the oldest written constitution still in force; see John Adams Wrote the Oldest Working Written Constitution in the World.

The Constitution of 1787 is not an Aristotelian mixed regime in the strict sense, since it has no hereditary orders. But its logic is similar. The President, the Senate and the House each draw on a different constituency and a different term, and each can check the others. And as Madison argued in Federalist 10, the large republic, with a multiplicity of interests and classes, makes it hard for any single faction to dominate. The Founders also understood Aristotle's point about property and independence. Jefferson's vision of a republic of yeoman farmers, whatever its limits, rested on the thought that men who own their own land are less dependent on others and so freer in their votes. Land ownership was, in many states, a qualification for voting, a practice we rightly abandoned for its exclusions, but one that reflected a real insight about independence.

The man's great error

An honest account of Aristotle must include the part that does not wear well. In Book I of the Politics he defended slavery, arguing that some people are "slaves by nature," fit to be ruled by others. He held that women were by nature subordinate in the household. And his citizens were a restricted class of free men; most of the adult population of Athens could not vote.

These positions were wrong. They were also contested in his own day, since he himself notes that some argued slavery was contrary to nature. They show that the best minds of an age can make terrible errors when their society's institutions seem natural. The Founders knew the problem; some of them lived inside it. The right lesson is neither to cancel Aristotle nor to pretend he did not say these things, but to separate the argument from the error. The case for the middle class as the keystone of a free community does not depend on slavery. It depends on the psychology of envy and arrogance, which has not changed.

The strongest objection, answered

The objection runs like this: Aristotle's ideal rests on a particular economy of small farmers and artisans. In a world of corporations, global trade and technology, the middle class is shrinking or at least changing, and a theory built on property in land does not help.

Four replies.

1. The principle is independence, not acres. A person who owns a home, a business, a skill or savings is less at the mercy of a patron, a boss or a government. That holds whether his property is a farm in 340 BC or a house in a suburb now.
2. The danger Aristotle named, that when the middle weakens the extremes fight, is not a relic. Polarization between a wealthy elite and a dependent class is the pattern he warned about. A policy that makes it easier to own a home, start a business or save for retirement supports the middle, and a policy that makes the middle depend on government supports the extremes.
3. Aristotle's goal was a stable government of laws, not equality of wealth. He did not propose to level the rich; he proposed to enlarge the middle. That is a more conservative objective than any redistribution plan, and a more achievable one.
4. The conclusion does not require a government program. The institutions that build a middle class, families, churches, local businesses, banks and good schools, are mostly private. See Self-Government Starts With Governing Yourself, the Founders Insisted.

The verdict: the objection changes the examples and leaves the argument standing.

The case in brief

1. Aristotle's Politics holds that man is by nature a political animal and that the political community grows from the household, which makes the family prior to the state.
2. He sorted governments into three good forms and three corrupt ones by whether the rulers serve the common good or themselves.
3. His central claim is that the most stable regime rests on a large body of citizens of moderate property, who neither envy nor despise, and who can rule and be ruled in turn.
4. He defended private property with common use against Plato's community of goods, and the Founders, especially Adams, absorbed the mixed-government tradition he began.
5. His defense of slavery was wrong, but the argument for the middle class survives without it, because it rests on independence and on human nature.

What you can do: look up your own state's constitution and find the clauses that divide power between branches, then ask at the next town meeting or school board session what the local government is doing to make it easier for families in your community to own a home or start a business.