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Article Excerpt
IF NOW, IN THE LIGHT OF MONTESQUIEU'S INSIGHTS, WE RECONSIDER THE TRADITION not from its end but from its beginning and ask ourselves what role the experience of rule played, in what realm of life it was chiefly located, we should remember that the traditional forms of government--enumerated as rule by one, or few, or a multitude, which follow consistently from the division between rulers and subjects, as do their perversions--were always accompanied by an altogether different taxonomy. In the stead of monarchy, we hear of kingship (basileia), and monarchy, in this context, is used interchangeably with tyranny, so that one-man rule, monarchy or tyranny, sometimes is called the perversion of kingship. Oligarchy, the rule of the few is still the perversion of aristocracy, the rule of the best, but instead of the term democracy, majority-rule, we find polity which originally designated the polls or city-state and later became the republic, the Roman res publica. Democracy now is seen as the perversion of this polity, an ochlocracy where the mob rules supreme.
Kingship, aristocracy, and polity are praised as the best forms of government or, also very early and later specifically insisted upon by Cicero, a mixture of the three is recommended. But such "mixed government," supposedly embodying the best traits of each form of government, is impossible under the assumption that these governments are essentially distinguished by the rule of one, or the few, or the multitude, because those forms are clearly mutually exclusive. Tyranny, moreover, denounced in this context even more strongly than in the traditional definitions, is not so much condemned for its arbitrary lawlessness as the worst but still a possible form of living-together, or as the least desirable but still a comprehensible human attitude towards one's fellow-men. The tyrant is rather ruled out of human society altogether; he is considered to be a beast in the shape of a man, unfit for human intercourse and beyond the pale of mankind. In other words, kingship, aristocracy, and polity seem not simply to be the "good forms" of government of which monarchy, oligarchy, and democracy are perversions: the former cannot even be defined within the same framework of categories as the latter.
The descriptions of kingship, aristocracy, and polity rather indicate actual political experiences that crystallized in different forms of people's living together and are embodied in them, experiences that are prior to and not necessarily identical with those that gave rise to the concepts of rule in accordance with law and power. Whether these experiences, which still loom large in the traditional definitions and descriptions of governments, had been conceptualized earlier is a different question. The fact that Thucydides already mentions what was later called a "mixed government" (Book VIII, 97) and that Aristotle alludes to similar theories in his Politics (1265b33), seems to indicate that an earlier track of political thought was superseded, absorbed, and partly eliminated with the rise of our tradition. The point is that neither the division between rulers and subjects nor the standards of law and power make much sense when they are applied to the "good forms," which on the contrary change immediately into their "perverted forms" if we try to define them according to that division and those standards.
If kingship were the rule by one man, it clearly would be the same as monarchy, a constitutional monarchy, as we would say today, if in accordance with the laws and a tyranny if against them. The fact however is that a king (basileus) did not have the absolute power of the monarch, that his was not a hereditary office but that he was elected and very clearly never was permitted to be more than primus inter pares (first among equals). The moment he is defined in terms of rule as the holder of all power, he has already changed into a tyrant. If aristocracy is the rule of the few, who are the best, then the question invariably arises who the best are and how they can be found out--certainly not through self-election--and whether one can make sure that during their rule the best remain the best. The moment the few are identified in accordance with objective standards, they can only be the rich or the hereditary nobility, whose rule Aristotle defined as oligarchy, a perverted aristocracy. Or, if the few are the wisest, then they are according to Plato those who cannot persuade the multitude and must rule over unwilling subjects through violence, which again would be tyranny. Least of all was it possible to define polity or republic in these terms of ruling and being ruled. Aristotle, after having stated axiomatically that "each polis-community is composed of rulers and ruled" goes on immediately to say that in this form of government "it is necessary...
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