The People Then and Now

Before taking up Aristotle's account of democracy, and particularly its tendencies toward different forms of class conflict, it is necessary to identify the ways that our understanding of democracy differs from his, above all when it comes to the concepts of representation and popular sovereignty. For both of these make particular—if not always explicit—warrants about the people in a democracy. If populism after all is about the people, then who exactly is the people?

I contend that the prevailing understanding of modern democracy is premised upon ideas of popular sovereignty that confuse attempts to examine certain kinds of political conflict within a democracy. Cas Mudde has noted that populism is at once “a set of ideas that not only depicts society as divided between ‘the pure people’ versus ‘the corrupt elite,’ but also claims that politics is about respecting popular sovereignty at any cost.”Footnote ¹² In other words, populism posits an essential form of social conflict, while at the same time insisting on a foundational concept—popular sovereignty—that disallows such conflict. Because the concept of popular sovereignty is premised upon the unity and homogeneity of the people, it seems to rule out the possibility of genuine class conflict. After all, against whom can the people mobilize if everyone is the people? In order for populism to take hold, then, “the people must be extracted from within the people,” as Claude Lefort put it.Footnote ¹³

The people, as we understand it today, is at once popular and national: we are all members of the people, and we are distinct from other peoples.

For in the modern sense, the people formally constitutes the entirety of the citizenry of a given state.Footnote ¹⁵ Indeed, under the contractual model of statehood, they are the state's raison d’être. Under this theory, the state exists to safeguard the rights and interests of an imagined prepolitical community—the people—that generates it, and this in turn is the source of its legitimacy. This conceptual relationship between the people and its government, otherwise known as popular sovereignty, today characterizes much of political life as we know it, even in nondemocracies.Footnote ¹⁶

As Daniel Lee puts it:

This is to say that we place the people at the origins of modern government: a given people establishes the state and authorizes its mechanisms to operate on their behalf. And, of course, this “people” contains all the people (and not just the poor). And not for nothing does populism get much of its charge from the claim to represent this authentic and original people who are the true legitimizing body for state authority.

By contrast, Aristotle's account of the evolution of the polis is teleological. For Aristotle, the polis is preceded by any number of prepolitical communities or groups which come together for largely pragmatic, and in fact common, reasons—principally to gain increased security and prosperity (1252b5–7).Footnote ¹⁸ The existence of these prepolitical communities is easily recognizable, but also somewhat arbitrary. That is to say, the prepolitical community one's forebears adhered to prior to the consolidation of the existing polis is not the source of political legitimacy for the polis. As Aristotle famously puts it, “while coming into being for the sake of living, it exists for the sake of living well” (1252b8; see also 1278b3). This does not mean that nonpolitical distinctions had no significance—Ionians, for example, distinguished themselves from Dorians—only that these distinctions were not coextensive with the political community as such.Footnote ¹⁹

Of course, for reasons that are not difficult to grasp, the ancient polis—and to some degree the larger sphere of the Hellenic world of poleis—is often imagined as either a forerunner to the modern state or an approximate ideal to which we might liken ourselves.Footnote ²⁰ It was, after all, an autonomous community of citizens capable of governing themselves at home and wielding and executing organized violence abroad. Moreover, it was defined by its regimes or constitutions, the different types of which remain very much in usage in our own political discourse today, as the typology of regimes (politeiai) presented in the classic works of political thought has been transposed from the context of the polis to that of the modern state. But the classical regime—that is, constitution—was literally constitutive of the polis.Footnote ²¹ As Aristotle puts it, when the regime changes, the polis itself changes (1276a40–b3). By contrast, today we imagine the state as an enduring entity that can undergo, as it is commonly called, “regime change” while remaining fundamentally itself. Spain, for example, could transition from a Francoist dictatorship to a monarchy under Juan Carlos to a parliamentary monarchy all in the span of a few years, without anyone supposing it had become another country altogether. In this sense, the rulers of an oligarchy were loyal not to the enduring body of the state as such (for such a thing hardly existed in ancient Greece), but to their particular oligarchic regime, and they derived their status not through impersonal offices, but in their capacity as rulers of their particular polis.Footnote ²² The same went, mutatis mutandis, for democrats.

Indeed, it is above all the concept of democracy, so central to the development of modern states, that creates a false sense of continuity with the ancient polis.Footnote ²³ For democracy today no longer refers to the rule of the political community by the popular faction, but to the constitutive basis for legitimate government in any state. Most contemporary authoritarian states, after all, do acknowledge the entirety of the people as the legitimate basis for state authority, even if they do not enjoy participation in ruling. And where the people do so participate, in democratic states, rule of the people is said to be in their entirety, not just in their capacity of dominant party.

By contrast, the Greek poleis featured built-in political divisions that rendered ambiguous just who constituted the “people.” “Ancient democracies never turned the idea of the people (demos) into a representation of the community as a whole, as opposed to its less wealthy majority.”Footnote ²⁴ Having since turned that idea of the people into a representation of the community as a whole—and, moreover, having established impersonal offices and institutions to represent that community—we today have difficulty theorizing about the kinds of political divisions that were a constitutive feature of ancient democracies.

One way to think about the problem of modern populism is that it represents a dilemma in Hobbesian liberalism.Footnote ²⁵ Hobbes stabilizes the idea of the people while denying its members access to the deliberative and disputatious practices of political life (which threaten to destabilize it). But while the Hobbesian covenant is intended to bypass political controversy, it is in retrospect unsurprising that the composition of the people who form that covenant might itself become a subject of controversy; hence, populism. In sum, populism is necessarily a modern concept, because it derives from the modern idea of democratic popular sovereignty. And yet, class conflict in its various forms was a recurring feature of ancient democracies, and in practice it displays substantial overlap with the dynamics of modern populism in ways that merit attention.

The discussion thus far hardly exhausts the differences between ancient and modern democracies,Footnote ²⁶ but it may risk overstating the practical differences in the role the people actually play in both historical contexts. For much of the difference turns upon the abstract concepts, such as representation and popular sovereignty, that modern political philosophy has introduced to political life. One of the distinct advantages of Aristotle's method is that he is able to more directly and empirically observe the disputes that arise between the few and the many.Footnote ²⁷ Having said this, Aristotle does not deny the possibility of seeing the people as comprising the whole of the political community—but he does not assume or insist upon it either. In this, his treatment is in keeping with the language itself. As Josiah Ober points out, the term democracy (dēmokratia) is etymologically distinct from the other two standard Greek regimes: oligarchy (oligarchia) and monarchy (monarcheia).Footnote ²⁸ The former describes the “rule of the few,” and the latter “the rule of the one.” But democracy does not correspondingly mean “rule of the many,” despite being generally so understood. It rather means the “capacity” or “power” of the demos. In other words, the full scope of the people is left ambiguous, in a way that it is not for oligarchy or monarchy.

In this respect, classical democracies betray some of the same tension over the ultimate definition of the people as do modern ones. Leo Strauss describes that tension here as follows:

This fundamental problem—the tension between democracy as the apparent rule of all and democracy as the rule of a part—is reproduced by modern populism within the context of popular sovereignty. For, strictly speaking, populism would seem to be a tautological concept: it is a political expression of the will of the people, who notionally constitute the entirety of the modern political community which is itself an expression of their will. Populism must, without denying the basic legitimacy of popular sovereignty, insist that some people are in fact the true people. Further, it must posit that there are certain individuals—elites—who are, despite their nominal membership in the constitutive body of the people, somehow apart from it as a political matter. They have arrogated to themselves an authority—be it political, economic, or cultural (or often some combination of those)—over and beyond that of their fellow citizens. And thus they are, for rhetorical purposes at least, to be deprived of their status as members of the people; they are in fact the ones against whom the people must combine and organize. The few have a curious dual character in this account; they are surely domestic agents, and yet they are treated partly as being foreign to the civic body.

This tension, in other words—between the people as the whole of the political community and the people as a faction of it—is not unique to either modern or classical milieus; it is rather a point of commonality between modern and ancient democracies. And that connection provides a useful starting point for reflecting on how Aristotle's treatment of democratic politics bears on what we now call populism.

Class Conflict in the Democratic Regime

What then is the problem with democracy, at least as far as contemporary populism is concerned? When we talk about populism today as a kind of problem, our greatest—if not always articulated—concern is that of factional conflict or what Aristotle calls stasis.Footnote ³⁰ Sometimes this cashes out as a fear of stasis simply for its own sake; other times as a fear of stasis that results in the erosion of our constitutional democracy and its replacement by despotic control.

Any discussion of how Aristotle treats expressions of “populism” as a democratic phenomenon needs to begin with his treatment of democracy proper. And here it must be noted that Aristotle does not consider democracies to be especially conflict prone. While Aristotle has acquired a reputation as an antidemocratic thinker, this hardly does justice to what he actually writes.Footnote ³¹ In fact, his statements about democracy, while frequently qualified, give credit to its solid virtues in surprising ways. These virtues are necessarily comparative (insofar as his discussions of democracy always take place within a kind of dialectic with other regimes), but they are best described in terms of a moderation that derives from aggregating the best parts of the city.

Then there is his remarkable claim: “Many of those who want to set up aristocratic regimes as well [as polities] thoroughly err not only by the fact that they distribute more to the well off, but also by deceiving the people. For in time from things falsely good there must result a true evil, and the aggrandizements of the wealthy are more ruinous to the polity than those of the people” (4.12 1297a6).Footnote ³³ As a general rule, the depredations of the few are a greater threat than the many to the city.Footnote ³⁴

Further, Aristotle does not equate democracy with “mob rule”; he certainly does not use such a term in any formal sense.Footnote ³⁵ He does allow for, and describes at length, the many ways that democracy can become degraded or deformed, becoming the vehicle for the tyrannical exercise of power by the majority faction. But he does not employ a discrete terminology for the phenomenon of “bad” democracy. Ironically, this is not because he is an unequivocal supporter of democracy, but is rather due to his understanding that democracy is a fundamentally flawed regime (1279b5). Contrary to modern critics,Footnote ³⁶ this does not indicate an antidemocratic prejudice per se—after all, Aristotle makes the same claim for oligarchy. Indeed, among the deviant regimes, oligarchy is generally worse than a comparatively moderate democracy (1298b2). In fact, he allows that the multitude can govern in superior ways, though in doing so it may lose its democratic designation—for Aristotle reserves the term politeia for such regimes (1279a3). And not for nothing is this superior form of “democracy” called politeia, which is to say it is the regime as such (1289b1). Though politeia is described as a mixture of oligarchy and democracy (1294a3), it merits its essential association with democracy for its potential to more fully represent the entirety of the city and not just one or more factions of it. It is—not unlike our modern claims for democracy—the truest version of a political regime. In other words, of the most common ancient regimes, democracy comes closest to representing the totality of the citizenry, as we presume it does today. But lacking a doctrine of popular sovereignty, ancient democracies did not share the presumption against the possibility of politicized class conflict.

As Bernard Yack argues:

In other words, the irruption of populism in modern democracies, insofar as it places the division between rich and poor at the center of social conflicts, constitutes a repoliticization of democratic communities. In contrast to both Weberian bureaucratic administration and the expansion of judicial rights, populism is a form of more or less direct political conflict.

Possibly owing to our experience of the ideological and ethnic civil wars of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, we may tend to think of the participants in factional conflict as having revolutionary goals of overturning the established regime and replacing it with something different.Footnote ³⁸ While Aristotle allows that this can indeed be the case, it is not a necessary condition for stasis. “Sometimes [factional conflict] is not with a view to the established regime, and they intend that the system remain the same, but want to have it in their own hands . . . or where there is a democracy, to make it more democratically run or less, and similarly in the case of the remaining regimes, either to tighten or to loosen them” (1301b8–9). He does not then require a distinct terminology (as we seem to do) to describe the phenomenon of nonrevolutionary agonistic politics within the context of democratic regimes. Politics can be disputatious by nature, and these disputes can take many forms.

As for the causes of our political disputes, Aristotle describes the phenomenon of stasis as being the result of inequality (1301b26). As he notes:

Importantly, however, he does not reduce political divisions to a matter of material causes alone. They derive their particular intensity not simply from disagreements over the proper allocations of the resources of the city, but from the problem of justice as it relates to those disagreements. As Aristotle notes, both democratic and oligarchic regimes (or factions) have a partial claim to justice—that is to say, their particular arrangement reflects a particular understanding of justice, albeit one that is also expedient. Hence its conception is never wholly just. Consequently, for Aristotle, stasis does not arise from the mere clash of interests, which are inherent in political life. Stasis instead arises when a certain group does not share in the regime's prevailing conception of justice (1301a38)—and further when their contributions to the good of the city are neglected or derided by the ruling part of the regime. Aristotle specifically makes the following claim about the demos:

Class conflict breaks out as a result of the backlash of citizens who have made themselves enemies of the prevailing regime owing to a combination of material deprivation and a lack of access to political offices. Perhaps for this reason, one of the few hard rules he proposes for warding off domestic conflict across all regimes is to avoid disproportionately or unduly elevating certain citizens to positions of esteem (1308b12).Footnote ³⁹

In light of Aristotle's account of the causes of nonrevolutionary factional conflict in a democracy, it is necessary to examine just how he evaluatively views such conflict. The following passage is most salient and worth reproducing in full:

Aristotle actually goes so far as to suggest that under such conditions, the city can no longer be characterized as democratic, insofar as even a deviant regime such as democracy must still adhere to some form of lawful order, if it is to be considered a regime (1292a30–31). As the will of the multitude supplants the rule of law in this case, there is no longer sufficient order to describe this situation in constitutional terms (as democracy remains a kind of constitution of the city). This is the closest Aristotle comes to treating democratic defects as something qualitatively distinct from democracy itself, though again he does not attempt to label this phenomenon. And it is also the closest Aristotle comes to a classical treatment of how contemporary theorists like Mudde and Canovan describe populism: as a rule of the many acting against their chosen domestic enemies in a manner unconstrained by institutions or law.

It must be noted here, however, that the hazards of this defective version of democracy are not due to the possibility that it might decay into authoritarianism, as it frequently is for contemporary observers.Footnote ⁴⁰ The tyrannical qualities of lawless democracy—that is, democracy at its worst, as Aristotle depicts it—are fully manifested in the rule of the demos itself. And while he acknowledges that the people will, under these conditions, generate popular leaders (i.e., demagogues), these leaders ultimately play the role of flatters and courtiers; it is the people “combining into one” that plays the role of the tyrant. While he notes that demagogues can be a cause of conflict in democratic regimes (1304b20), the danger is less that demagogic leaders will prove to be tyrants-in-waiting than that they will egg on the most tyrannical impulses of the demos.Footnote ⁴¹ Aristotle likens such demagogues not to tyrants themselves but to the flatterers and sycophants who proliferate around tyrants, finding expedient possibilities in a tyrannical regime (1292a28). Thus, he neither lets even the most degraded democracies off the hook (by attributing their worst vices to ambitious demagogues) nor writes them off entirely (being still prepared to offer counsel by which they might better themselves).

Indeed, in his customary way, Aristotle will later acknowledge that this is the type of democracy “which is now most particularly held to be democracy” (1298b12). That is to say, while he advances his own doubts that such a regime merits the name “democracy,” he allows that this is what his contemporaries largely consider a democracy. As such, it not only merits discussion in its own right, but (just as he will do for tyranny), he offers modest counsel for how such a regime might be improved and induce its citizens to rule more justly—namely, by utilizing a scheme of payments and other incentives to ensure that the widest possible distribution of citizens, both wealthy and poor, participates in the practices of ruling.

We may view populism as an imperfect form of democracy, yet for Aristotle democracy is already an imperfect regime, which tends to prioritize the good of the ruling demotic class over that of the political community itself—precisely the thing that populists are accused of. Aristotle does allow that there are essentially tyrannical forms of democracy (just as there can be essentially tyrannical forms of oligarchy), which represent a further degradation of that regime (1292a15, 1292b8), but these are presented more as a continuum rather than discrete entities.

While part of the danger of factional conflict is that it produces injustices, it is not sufficient to attribute populist or other malformations of democracy either to a lack of political commitment or to a lack of concern with questions of justice. Thus, we cannot simply say that the solution to the problems of democracy is even greater democracy—in the sense of greater civic engagement or more passionate concern for seeing justice done. For the problem of factional conflict is simply built into the structure of political community. If citizens are expected to engage in the practices of political life—not just voting, but also debating measures, setting policies, determining standards of material distribution—while at the same time reflecting on conceptions of justice that inform those practices, their disputes will inevitably take on a political form.Footnote ⁴² Factional conflict, or stasis, is very nearly a feature as much as a bug of political life. And populism is a kind of democratic factional conflict that is likely to remain a feature of our own political life.

Nonetheless, in light of Aristotle's analysis, our contemporary use of the term suggests a certain reticence about facing the limits or defects of democracy itself. “Populism” in this sense becomes a safe way to talk about those defects without risking the appearance of being undemocratic. Machiavelli tells of how the Roman writers would praise Caesar but blame Catiline as a safe way of criticizing the despotic tendencies of both figures;Footnote ⁴³ something like this is at work among those today who praise democracy but blame populism. Viewed in this light, our use of the concept of populism becomes a way of scapegoating those elements of democracy that we recognize as flawed, while at the same time lacking the language that would allow us to discuss these flaws in democratic terms. And we require an alternate vocabulary in order to directly discuss the defects or limitations of democracy because of the ways that theorists today associate justice and political morality with democracy as such.Footnote ⁴⁴

This is not to say that resolving civil strife in a democracy requires abandoning claims of justice (as if that were possible). Rather, the Aristotelian account of democratic politics accepts that, in practice, the people will in most cases be a partial quantity, arrayed against the few. Moreover, while their particular claims may veer into injustice, that they make demotic and partial claims in the first place is not illegitimate, but is the logical extension of how appeals to justice are made in a democratic polity. Aristotle, after all, considers politics and the controversies politics generates to be wholly natural—indeed a fulfilment of our nature. Thus, the people's claim to rule—then or now—is, too, natural, even if it does not enjoy an exhaustive claim on justice. Indeed, to return to the central point, Aristotle's disinterested view of democracy allows him to evaluate its excessive tendencies without treating them as necessarily external to “true” democracy.

Applying Aristotle's evaluative method in a nonreductive manner today would require us to come to a more precise understanding of our own regime. Though populist movements have been identified in countries as disparate as today's United States, Canada, France, the Philippines, Brazil, and Hungary (among others), these are of course widely different countries with different polities. We continue to use the language of “regimes,” as Aristotle and his contemporaries spoke of politeiai, but our typologies are comparatively constricted, primarily involving democratic and autocratic (or, more loosely, authoritarian) regimes.Footnote ⁴⁵ By contrast, Aristotle provides us with a larger and more diverse menagerie of political regimes—not just the standard sixfold typology of regimes announced at the outset of book 3, but, as one follows the movement of this argument throughout the third and fourth books of the Politics, ever more granular descriptions of regime subtypes. We find democracies that are more lawful, and those that are less lawful; democracies that incline more toward polity in their particular moderation (1297a8); mixed regimes that favor wealth, as Carthage does, and those that favor virtue, as Sparta does (1293b4); those that are more martial and include the citizenry in defense (1279b4); those that deliberate in separate groups (as in the regime of Telecles of Miletus) and those that deliberate altogether (1298a4–5); and, of course, there is his elaborate discussion of the “mixed regime” in book 4 (esp. 1295b34–1296a21).Footnote ⁴⁶ In sum, the closer one gets to the real practice of politics, the more dizzyingly diverse real political life—including democratic political life—turns out to be.

Reading Aristotle in this way, we are encouraged to reflect more precisely upon the nature of our own regimes. At the same time, we are moved to seek to improve our (broadly democratic) political community in light of this understanding. If there is a takeaway here, it is that we should seek to ameliorate populist tendencies (as well as the oligarchic tendencies that operate in dialectic with them) with an eye to the specific character of our regime. Thus, we might ask ourselves: What kind of democracy are we? And how does a given populist movement improve or deform the character of that democracy?

All this said, Aristotle does not supply us with a simple formula or rule of thumb for determining which populist developments should in fact be characterized as reflecting democratic excesses, and which developments are simply called populist owing to latent oligarchic prejudices. As always, these must be evaluated on a case-by-case basis according to prudential judgment (1253a16, 1286a7). What Aristotle does supply us with, however, is a fuller understanding of the nature of democratic regimes that might be used to hone those same judgments when it comes to such cases.