The only fairly well-know fact about Aristotle’s (384-322BCE) personal life that pertains to the field of practical politics is the fact that he had been the tutor of the adolescent  Alexander (the future Alexander the Great) for several adolescent years before the prince ascended to the throne of Macedon and set off on a 13- or 14-year military and political conquest of everything and everyone east of Greece right on through the Persian Imperial rule over both Asia west of the India Subcontinent and also the invaluable granary of Egypt in northeast Africa.  As they used to teach in regular American high school, the next 2 or 3 centuries were known as the “Hellenistic Age” – until Roman conquests and Roman Law became the Rule of Law in its stead.   There’s always a Rule of Law even if it’s “informal” among violent criminals (unrestrained by a legitimate government of recognized legal jurisdiction).

Plato, on the other hand, is rarely thought of as a man who personally involved himself in politics.  He’s the great “artistic” founder of Philosophy and its abstract pursuit of Idealistic Justice.  “Philosophy” teaches all college students their moral duty to cooperate with the quest for “progress.”  There really is a Utopia.  (It is not a myth!)  It is just hard to identify, describe, and be made to work perfectly.  Today’s philosophically-rooted faithful beliefs that inform and motivate “educated” people is the Social Justice Ideal that mandates that we must never give up the MORALLY NOBLE PURSUIT of the Social Justice Ideal in the political world.  Plato never did!

Plato (narcissistic as he no doubt was) actually “participated” in the “political process” far more personally than merely “educating” innumerable wealthy (and especially noble-born) adolescents and young men from the Social Oligarchies from not just Athens but all around the Hellenic world.  (The father of Aristotle was the well-paid physician of the Royal House of Macedon and, therefore, could afford to send his son to Plato’s Academy in 367BCE.)

There were two “sabbaticals” Plato took from the passive residency he enjoyed enabling him to eternally polish his “legacy” – namely, the 47 Dialogues that constitutes (metaphorically speaking) the Book of Genesis in the Holy Text of (Platonic) Western Philosophy.

It was a lengthy, time-consuming and dangerous round trip from Athens to Syracusa in the SE corner of Sicily.  Not once but twice, Plato’s unrestrained “vanity” (perpetually unrecognized in the Philosophy Departments of Higher Education for almost 24 centuries now) which motivated him to “help” as a “consultant” a tyrannical former student “make a better world.”  Twice he came.  And twice they failed to make a better world.  He went back to his Academy to work on his 47 Dialogues!  (There are no textbooks around today that I am aware of from Plato’s prestigious Academy.  Just 47 Dialogues.)

The Social Justice Idealist always believes he personally (being so superior) can circumvent the limits of individual human Free Will with a better organized “system.”  [You need “force” (and propaganda too) to enforce the new Social Protocols of human life (the “new laws”), by the way!]

(Social Oligarchy and Social Protocols of human life, indeed!)

Before I drone on pedantically, I have to clarify some of my nomenclature (or “rhetoric”) that seems much more suitable to the Classical Era of Socrates and Plato and Aristotle than to a contemporary world of Clintons and Bushes and Obamas and now Trump and Sanders too.

To begin with, today just about everyone in the educated classes uses the term “ELITES” the way I use the old-fashioned classical term SOCIAL OLIGARCHY.  I don’t like the term “ELITE” when the “elite” keeps making stupid mistakes and just keeps on imposing them on the majority through the ENFORCED Rule of Law and the social pressures of PC Public (no longer First Amendment free) Speech.

If the “elites” really were intellectually (therefore rationally) ELITE, then they would really know what the f*** they were doing and, if the ELITES really knew what they are doing, then we would NOT have had the procession of economic “blow-ups” and perpetual stagnation screwing up the economy so regularly for so long.

(Maybe people with cash savings could be paid a “normal” interest rate instead of subsidizing the profligate, the greedy and the willfully corrupt, for all eternity.)

Clearly, the ELITES (i.e., Social Oligarchies) are filled with (prestigious) Fools and Liars because rational judgment is not what they practice when our Social Oligarchies impose the Social Protocols that govern our ever-changing human life.

In America today, we don’t really vote on very much these days when it comes to the Social Protocols that govern human life (i.e., the Rule of Law AS ACTUALLY IMPOSED REGULARLY, and the Speech and Behavior codes that institutions mandate of their employees, students, etc.).  We have reached a Social Protocol wherein an unconstitutional imposition by the Social Oligarchy can actually negate the very idea of majority rule of the rules and regulations of elementary social behavior.  (Think of public bathroom facilities!)

For decades the Social Oligarchy of the Lawyer Industry (i.e., cartel of Judges and prestigious Lawyers and Law Schools) have overturned State Plebiscites on bullshit excuses of recently discovered constitutional “catastrophic” violations (which the feckless majority disagree with) that had gone unnoticed as “catastrophic” constitutional violations for generations, even centuries.  Bullshit like that never stops in the Social Oligarchy – not just at the Apex of the Lawyer Industry.  It is everywhere else – schools, universities, professions, and, of course, media!

In every socialized human world, there is always a Social Oligarchy in charge.  And it is always, at least in part, kept obscure.  For example, in the history of the institutionalized USSR, there always existed a ruling committee at the top.  At times it was called Politburo; at other times Presidium.  (They even reorganized the Totalitarian State Security a half-dozen times, from CHEKA to KGB.)  Sometimes one man like the last 2/3 of Stalin’s 35 year dominance; at other times it involved shifting factions that dominated the vote that mattered on the committee.  But it is the vote on the top level of the Social Oligarchy that ALWAYS decides – not the preferences of the far more numerous common citizens down below.

Before I bring this Introduction of “Politics and Philosophy – Plato vs. Aristotle” to an end, Aristotle needs a slightly better introduction as a real man and a real philosopher – not just a famous  name in textbooks.  This will take just a little explaining.

First the context, the chronology of years:

• Socrates (469 – 399BCE)
• Plato (430 or 427 – 347BCE)
• Aristotle (384 – 322BCE)
• Plato’s Academy (School) (385?BCE – 525CE) when closed by Byzantine Emperor Justinian.
• Aristotle’s Lyceum (School and Research Center) (335BCE – 525CE) when also closed by Byzantine Emperor Justinian.

28 years after Socrates’ execution, in the year 371BCE, Sparta, in losing the battle of Leuctra, also lost control of Spartan-subjugated and terrorized Messenia which they had controlled and ruled for several centuries.

Furthermore, Aristotle was 17 in 367BCE when he entered Plato’s Academy as a student, and stayed on for 20 years as a senior scholar.  (His nickname was “The Reader” because he read everything.)  In 347 when Plato died, Aristotle also left school – to be an itinerant teacher, ultimately becoming the tutor, for several years, to the future Alexander the Great of Macedon.  In 336, Alexander became king.  In 335, Aristotle returned to Athens and opened his Lyceum.  Within just a few short years, he instituted a research project in the field of Politics.

In a wonderful Introduction to my copy of Aristotle’s The Athenian Constitution (#25 on my list of 27 Sources of Information at the bottom of the About the Book page on this website), the scholar P. J. Rhodes notes on page 10 of the Penguin Classic © 1984:

“The corpus of Aristotle’s works transmitted to us by medieval and renaissance scribes does not include a collection of constitutions, but there are lists of Aristotle’s works made in antiquity, which mention far more than the surviving corpus, and which do include a collection of 158 constitutions….”

In Bertrand Russel’s History of Western Philosophy (#11 on my list of 27 Source of Information on this website), the single most enlightening book I have ever enjoyed reading (and re-reading and re-re-reading) at the bottom of page 100 in a transitional chapter called “The Influence of Sparta,” Bertrand Russel (the single most famous 20th century philosopher) wrote the following words.  (He was 73 years old at the height of his wisdom and health in 1945 when this Nobel Prize for Literature winning book was published.)

“Aristotle wrote when Sparta was decadent, but on some points he expressly says that the evil he is mentioning has existed from early times.  His tone is so dry and realistic that it is difficult to disbelieve him, and it is in line with all modern experience of the results of excessive severity in the laws.  But it was not Aristotle’s Sparta that persisted in men’s imaginations; it was the mythical Sparta of Plutarch and the philosophic idealization of Sparta in Plato’s ‘Republic.’  Century after century, young men read these works, and were fired with the ambition to become Lycurguses or philosopher-kings.  The resulting union of idealism and love of power has led men astray over and over again, and is still doing so in the present day.”

T O   B E   C O N T I N U E D

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