Plato was the master, Aristotle the student who history recognizes as the heir to Plato’s Philosopher King throne. Plato’s Republic , strives to construct an ideal city state where-as Aristotle’s work is more grounded in reality. Comprised of lectures and notes put together by Aristotle’s students The Politics first critiques Plato and then goes on to discuss the application of politics, types of constitutions, social organizations, and applications of different types of government among other topics). The following essay will attempt to describe the contrasting ideas of these two great works, and hopefully some middle ground of ideology.
Perhaps the first difference that a reader will notice, is that The Politics is constructed very differently than The Republic, which is a unified text, while The Politics is held together very loosely by theme. The Republic, in a very organized manner describes this ideal society using the Socratic method. By comparison, the Politics simply holds Aristotle’s voices, but the text is not organized with an end in mind.
However, The Republic is organized with four major topics in mind; comments on justice, society and politics, education, and philosophy which sort of guide the text. In fact, Plato spends a lot of time talking about justice, an ideal that sort of pervades the text. He say’s ” its [justice’s] real concern is not with external actions, but with a man’s inward self, his true concern and interest” (Plato 161). Plato goes on to describe a just man in terms of his ability to balance three mutually constituting qualities: courage, self-discipline, and wisdom.
By contrast, Aristotle does not really spend much time talking about Justice. When he does talk about it he says, “The virtue of justice is a feature of a state; for justice is the arrangement of the political association, an a sense of justice decides what is just.”(Aristotle 61). As you can see he is very vague and seems to imply that justice is subjective to the government that is in control. While Plato on the other hand so justice as absolute, or a concept that changed in relationship to the type of governing body.
Aristotle’s treatment of justice is a reflection of his practicality versus Plato’s idealism. He see’s justice only as a product of its government. Aristotle’s practicality is also reflected in his analysis of slavery, a concept that Plato hardly even alludes to. According to Aristotle, slavery was a naturally occurring institution that was comprised of individuals whose physics were more able to perform hard labor. Unlike their master counterparts whose bodies were more inclined towards pursuits of intellect.
Plato doesn’t talk about slavery at all in his republic, probably because it poses a problem to his ideal. Which is to say that slaves were property, and if only the workers were allowed to own property, than would that mean that only the workers could have slaves? Of course it should be mentioned that on this topic we do see some similarities between Plato and Aristotle. Plato believed that each individual was anointed with specific skills that put them in a class system of worker, auxiliary, or guardian. (This is very much like how Aristotle as previously discussed, describes the naturally occurring power relationship between master and slave.
Another similarity between the two texts is that both philosophers discuss democracy as a bad form of government. Plato describes democracy as “mob rule” that puts a mass amount of uneducated individuals in charge of making decisions that require an intelligent educated philosopher king Aristotle agrees with Plato providing a similar definition of democracy saying “a democracy exists whenever those that are free and not well-off, being in the majority, are in the sovereign control of government” (Aristotle 245). Aristotle goes on to further say that a democracy is a deviated constitution.
However, where-as The Republic completely disregards the elements of a democracy, The Politics argues that the ideal government is a combination of the best traits of a democracy and an oligarchy.
