It follows that the state belongs to the class of objects which exists by nature, and that man is by nature a political animal.....

Name	Aristotle
Life	384 - 322 BC
Country	Greece
Category	Realism
Wikipedia	>>

Aristotle was a wise philosopher, as close as any to power. He was the teacher of Alexander the Great, the first world conqueror. But no philosopher could restrain the appetite of this imperialist who, at one occasion, sold 30,000 survivors into slavery and crucified 2,000 men of military age. Too much for Alexander's patience, they had defended their home city, Tyre. This, possibly, can be taken as an ideal example of the real influence of philosophers and professors on serious politics. Aristotle, however, was a much more realistic man than Plato. He didn't speculate about any ideal world. He tried to gain knowledge by looking at the world as it is, by so-called "empirical knowledge". He collected all the constitutions he could from neighboring states around Athens and Macedonia. From such materials he tried to draw some conclusions. What he found was that, unlike what we love to think about our Western democracy, there was never one ideal constitution, eternally valid for all civilizations. On the contrary, he found some kind of eternal circulation between different forms of political ruling systems. Why? Essentially because all of them tended to go to extremes. "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely," said a wise Englishman, Lord Acton, who surely had read Aristotle's Politics. He added: "Great men are almost always bad men." Monarchy tends towards tyranny,

which, going too far, stimulates a democratic revolution from below, ending in mob rule or in plutocracy. The rule of aristocracy, "aristos" meaning "the best", would be best, said "Aristo"-tle, because those who are born rich and of noble families are less tempted by corruption. Wise as he was, he realized, however, that the power struggle would not permit such a good solution for long. Circulation would come back and bring something else and worse. Why is it so? Why has society, for 2,300 years after Aristotle, continued this struggle for power and this circulation of various forms of more or less good or evil governments? Aristotle gave us, in the quote chosen, the answer. Man is not God-like, not a creator with free will, as the oriental priests told us. Because we, too, are animals, politics is as it is. Because we, too, like horses or ants, have a biologically highly determined nature, giving us a highly pre-set social behavior. Because we, too, are bound by the laws of evolution, forced to struggle for our survival at the margin, when each generation wants to feed more children than the past ones. Evidently, in our animal nature, struggle for power is laid down, leading us to an eternal circulation of governments. Can we, today, really be sure that our Western democracies are stable? May they not, once more, slowly turn into oligarchies or plutocracies or, even, into tyrannies? Are we quite sure that we are not, by exaggerating our freedom, on the slippery slope towards something less comfortable?