The main burden of this subtle and difficult chapter is to present polity as a mixture of oligarchy and democracy, and to combat the common tendency to call ‘aristocracies’ such of those mixtures as lean towards oligarchy. Since in the latter case the influence of wealth makes it confusingly easy to regard the mixture as an aristocracy (see note 3), Aristotle evidently wishes to restrict the use of ‘polity’ to those mixtures which do not produce the features characteristic of aristocracy (e.g. education, good government, virtue), or at any rate do not count them as qualifications for ‘honours’. This thesis requires Aristotle to distinguish rather carefully not only between aristocracy and polity, but also between aristocracy and oligarchy.
The description of ‘mixture of oligarchy and democracy’ is not as it stands particularly illuminating, and in the next chapter Aristotle seeks to explain it in more detail.
1293b22 We have still to discuss what we call polity (and also tyranny). We have placed it here because it is not a deviation, and neither are the above-mentioned aristocracies. In strict truth they have all deviated from the most correct constitution, and so are counted among the deviations which we spoke of originally, and which are themselves deviations from them.1 It is reasonable to defer mention of tyranny till the end because in comparison with the rest it is least of all a constitution, which is what our inquiry is about. Having explained why this arrangement has been adopted, I must proceed to discuss polity; for now that oligarchy and democracy have been explained, the function of polity becomes clearer, since, to put it in a word, polity is a mixture of oligarchy and democracy.
1293b34 But it is those mixtures which lean more towards democracy which are generally called polities, and those which lean towards oligarchy are called aristocracies, because education and good birth belong more to the better off. Moreover the well-to-do appear to have those things for the sake of which malefactors commit crimes; hence the rich are called ‘people of quality’ and ‘notables’. Since therefore aristocracy aims at distributing the highest positions to the best of the citizens, it is said that oligarchies also are composed on the whole of ‘people of quality’. But one thing I think is quite impossible: that a state which is controlled not by the best but by the worst2 should be governed by good laws, and likewise that a state without such government should be ruled by the best. It is not government by good laws where the laws enacted are good but not obeyed. ‘Government by good laws’ should therefore be understood in two senses: obedience to the laws laid down, and well-enacted laws laid down by which people abide (it is quite possible to be obedient to badly enacted laws). And a further distinction is possible: obedience may be given either to the best laws available to them in the circumstances, or to the absolutely best.
1294a9 It is the especial mark of aristocracy that the distribution of honours should have been made in accordance with the virtue of the recipients. Virtue is the definitive principle of aristocracy, as wealth is of oligarchy, and freedom of democracy. The principle of majority-decision belongs to all three: in oligarchies and in aristocracies and in democracies, whatever has been decided by the larger part of those who participate in the constitution is sovereign. For most states, the form ‘polity’ is a misnomer, because the aim of the mixture is merely to have regard to the interests of both well-to-do and poor, both wealth and freedom, whereas almost everywhere the well-to-do and the people of quality are coextensive.3 But since there are the three grounds for claiming equality in a constitution, freedom, wealth and virtue (a fourth claim, called ‘good birth’, arises out of the two last of these three, for good birth is wealth plus virtue going back to one’s forbears), it is clear that the term polity should be applied to the dual mixture of well-to-do and poor, and the term aristocracy kept for the triple mixture. This is the most genuine of aristocracies after the true and primary.4
1294a29 I have now shown that there are other types of constitution besides monarchy, democracy, and oligarchy, and what their characters are. It is clear too how one aristocracy differs from another, and how polities differ from aristocracy; and that the two are closely related.