The Carthaginian constitution deviates from aristocracy and inclines to oligarchy, chiefly on a point where popular opinion is on their side. For men in general think that magistrates should be chosen not only for their merit, but for their wealth: a man, they say, who is poor cannot rule well- he has not the leisure. If, then, election of magistrates for their wealth be characteristic of oligarchy, and election for merit of aristocracy, there will be a third form under which the constitution of Carthage is comprehended; for the Carthaginians choose their magistrates, and particularly the highest of them- their kings and generals- with an eye both to merit and to wealth.
The distribution of offices according to merit is a special characteristic of aristocracy, for the principle of an aristocracy is virtue, as wealth is of an oligarchy, and freedom of a democracy. In all of them there of course exists the right of the majority, and whatever seems good to the majority of those who share in the government has authority. Now in most states the form called polity exists, for the fusion goes no further than the attempt to unite the freedom of the poor and the wealth of the rich, who commonly take the place of the noble. But as there are three grounds on which men claim an equal share in the government, freedom, wealth, and virtue (for the fourth or good birth is the result of the two last, being only ancient wealth and virtue), it is clear that the admixture of the two elements, that is to say, of the rich and poor, is to be called a polity or constitutional government; and the union of the three is to be called aristocracy or the government of the best, and more than any other form of government, except the true and ideal, has a right to this name.
i hinted earlier itt of an American evasion of democracy, to brutalize West. this story wrt the founding generation’s matriculation in english ‘mixed constitution’ thought and on again off again relationship with the actual term ‘democracy’ is well known by now. what Wood brings up is the other dimension, namely, the eclipse of the classical understanding of political power. above are two passages from aristotle’s politics. the ‘classical understanding’ is the analysis of institutions based on the bloc of the body politic from which it’s constituted.
not representative of. power, for aristotle, isn’t delegated. it can’t be divested or held on reserve elsewhere, it’s either in a subject or it isn’t, and a subject either has institutions that empower them in the public sphere or they don’t. there’s a triad of paradigmatic blocs, distinguished by what proportion of the body politic they constitute: minimalist, minoritarian, and majoritarian. where it gets p interesting is when he outlines how each ‘form’ -monarchy, aristocracy, democracy- has its own organizing or bedrock principle, and this is something that basically the whole ‘classical understanding’ tradition shares down to the 18th century. merit, or virtue, just is what’s characteristic of aristocracy -literally rule of the best. it doesn’t matter, at least in the final analysis, what deliberative procedure you employ to detect merit or virtue. if a given institution is designed to invest with power those with merit or virtue, this is an aristocratic institution. this is what makes Congress effectively an aristocratic body. not simply because they’re a group of 535 people with significant sovereignty over a population of 330 million, though this fact’s non-trivial too. but because the electorate’s power to shape and deliberate over its legislation is forfeited to other people
because of these people’s supposed superior deliberative ability. according to american federalist thought, the people nominate one of their own to represent them (either transparently conducting the people’s interests or Burkeanly making the people’s choices for them). according to the classical understanding, the democratic element creates a makeshift aristocratic order to rule them.
im gonna paper over the executive and judiciary’s implications here because these are even worse offenders and i think my initial point’s been made. what brought me to carepost was 1) shosta cryposting about how much he hates it and 2) the thinkpiece eulogy-cum-diagnoses for the bernie campaign from both the anti-anti-anti-idpol left and the law and liberty east coast Straussians that keep sending me newsletters because i can never remember to ask to be taken off the mailing list (
). what seems common to both is that they claim the american left’s failure to gain electoral traction is due to its being both too exclusionary and too promiscuous. too exclusionary to entertain, let’s be real, reaction of various stripes and too promiscuous specifically with the language of New Left idpol. part of the jeremiad is that left thought was once coherent, and coherently marxist in particular. but the marriage of class struggle and diversity was (is) an unhappy one, and we see this playing out in practice now (one of the law and liberty types said that the treatment of the modern subject as protean, and the emphasis on self-creation/imagining/fashioning is an irreducibly bourgeois one and thus fundamentally incompatible with proletarian eschatology, which struck me as just inutterably stupid).
so, i think the implications of this reading of 2019-2020 are disgusting in what they say about bernie’s attempt to expand the public sphere/electorate and farcical in how much relevance they give to something like rose emoji twitter (fwiw, top-down intellectual reshaping of politics has always been the purview of the right, not the left). But they are illustrative of something important: not even the opposition can think of an extra-marxist radleft. even the liberty fund types are nostalgic for 20th century marxism
(i get that this is obv just rhetorical posturing). what i mean to point out here is, the avenue’s wide open and we have a toolkit to construct a moral language for left politics that isn’t explicitly poli
econ. i think something like this reemphasis on democracy -what it means and how we’ve been failed by the people who’ve claimed it- can easily be wedded to certain persuasions; if you’re really in love with your histmat or your post-keynsianism or whatever this isn’t gonna kill you. but for the purposes of evangelization i think it’s important to have something in the arsenal that doesn’t require minnesota fed papers to explain (not that that’s unequivocally
bad), and you even get to cite everyone’s favorite 4th century slaveowning gay-hating misogynist while you do it!
