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Politics : View from the Center and Left
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To: Lane3 who wrote (92639)10/31/2008 10:07:17 AM
From: Sam  Read Replies (1) of 541795
 

Did Aristotle offer a road map to achieving "moderate and sufficient property for everyone?

You love to ask unanswerable questions. Books 7 and 8 of the Politics are devoted to how to make a good state (although we are missing chunks of each book). But it clearly wouldn't offer a roadmap for today--conditions were far far too different. And as David Hume later said with the obvious benefit of hindsight, no one person could ever do that anyway, not even Aristotle.

What Aristotle offered, though (and still offers), are some general guidelines and goals that decent governments can aim for. And perhaps the most important goal that he articulated was the one that Wonk mentioned--a strong middle class, that is, a society consisting largely of people with "enough" and not "too much" (Buffett is an Aristotelian in that way). That is what the official laws and unofficial rules of society ought to be aiming for. Not something like "maximizing freedom," as some people like to say. Aristotle said somewhere in the Politics that is an absurd goal--what we really want is the "good," not maximum freedom. Too much freedom can be bad for people as well as for communities. But, as he also said, "hitting the mark" is not easy, for individuals or for communities.
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