Is Aristotle relevant today?
Greek democracy was, at most, limited to a small portion of the population of Athens: free adult men. Women, adolescents, slaves and foreigners had no political rights, nor could they aspire to have them.
Democracy among the Greeks was direct and exercised through attendance at open-air Agoras where meetings were held and deliberations were made. Among us, democracy is indirect and in most countries elected politicians have no obligations towards their voters and they only lose their mandates in some cases.
Aristotle feared the uncontrolled power of the majority for a very specific reason: shortly before and during the Peloponnesian War, in Athens the city's politics and economy gravitated around the political alliance between the poor and those who built cargo ships and triremes and those who explored the sea routes (which connected Athens and the cities that were part of the Athenian empire) and the strategoi (elected to command the military fleet, whose growing power aroused fear in the Spartans, leading to war). Aristotle was silent on this subject because in his time the wounds left by war and the defeat of Athens were still very fresh.
Today, however, this problem does not exist. Countries with huge commercial and military naval fleets do not provide satisfaction to their citizens, and the business surrounding them is not even discussed during elections. Our indirect democracies have completely emptied politics: citizens do not decide when and where to wage war, even though they could be exterminated in a nuclear war that they do not want to start.
What we call democracy is something very different from the regime described, analyzed and criticized by Aristotle in his book Politics. In fact, we live in oligarchic regimes with a twist that proclaims itself democratic.
Yes, Aristotle’s observations on the oligarchy and how this regime emerges, expands and gains control of society, as well as the problems it causes and ultimately leads to its destruction, remain theoretically relevant. But it must be said that Aristotle’s work contains a large gap. He focused only on the internal conflicts of politically organized society, its economic dynamics and institutional consequences.
The philosopher unfortunately was not able to reflect deeply on how external military conflicts can help perpetuate a political and economic system that preserves and increases the power and wealth of the rich while condemning the poor to forget that they suffer the hardships of poverty because they illusorily feel great and powerful when they see their country attacking and defeating real or imaginary enemies, artificially created or not, abroad. However, we can forgive Aristotle because despite being endemic, rivalries and wars between Greek city-states can hardly be compared to modern mechanized wars.
Greek hoplites fought for glory, power and wealth using weapons that citizens could manufacture themselves or that they had to order and pay for. But they rarely waged war because private manufacturers of weapons, as in modern times, had to continue manufacturing their products and making a profit by selling them to the State.
In addition to committing their own resources, each Greek hoplite was obliged to make a consideration that rulers today do not make. Hoplites had to ask themselves and their peers what would happen if they went to war? Could this cause some kind of slave rebellion on their estates and in their city?
Today, rulers of the most powerful countries decide to start a war taking into account both the possibility of preserving or increasing the profitability of weapons manufacturers, as well as the need to divert the attention of their impoverished and oppressed population from the country's internal problems to a subject dominated by feelings of irrational hatred against an unknown, distant enemy, as well as by the supposed pride and belonging to the system that will crush them.
In short, in addition to Aristotle not paying attention to the problems of external wars in his time, among us, precisely because of the economic characteristics of mechanized warfare, oligarchic regimes are much more stable than they could ever be among the Greeks. But this does not mean that his work has become obsolete and should be disregarded. On the contrary, Politics should be read and reread, but with due care, always taking into account the historical differences between the past and the present.
Finally, we cannot fail to mention here the distortions that algorithms from internet platforms and bots are causing in what we call democracy. These products of IT engineering only have life in the virtual world, but they help to create, inflate, consolidate and radicalize opinion bubbles that explode with violence in the streets. They are non-human political actors with no political rights who paradoxically and emotionally program citizens who act as if they were free despite their freedom having been hijacked. In our context, we should not fear occasional uncontrolled majorities less than the technology that creates them.
Yes, this phenomenon can be considered a new type of tyranny. No, Aristotle's reflections on tyranny do not help us much in understanding and combating what is happening.