So one of the reasons I had decided to re-read Aristotle's Politics was because I knew the Rottenhouse and Ahmaud Arbery trials were approaching. (As a side-note: I don't care how juvenile or more accurately Juvenal it is, but Kyle and his family shall never be referred to by me as anything except Rottenhouse. Assume it a typo if you like but Rottenhouse they are, in the most Shakespearean "something is rotten in the state of this house" sense I can mean that, so Rottenhouse they shall ever more be to me.)  I hadn't re-read this particular Aristotle since I was like 23 or 24 and decided to re-read all the Aristotle I own for fun. Legitimately for fun. Including selections from his "scientific" works and like, there's much that remains wise in Aristotle across all these centuries but regarding Aristotle's grasp of the scientific method Diogenes wasn't wrong about running into Aristotle's lecture with a plucked chicken yelling, "Behold a man!" Which reminds me not to get into the fact that we only know Aristotle's "philosophy" from lecture notes from one of his students and Socrates' "philosophy" from the fictional caricature version in Plato's dialogues and we only know Plato's "philosophy" from reading the dialogues he wrote of celebrities of his time at made up parties that never existed -- we don't actually know a damn thing about true Aristotilean, Socratic, or Platonic philosophies themselves, only lecture notes and fictional dialogues of caricaturized celebrities of the day. so calling those as emblematic of the beliefs/philosophies of those philosophers is misleading..

Anyway, Aristotle is NOT my favorite historical political philosopher -- Machiavelli is and if you haven't actually read The Prince you should. (Machiavelli is actually where Jefferson got the idea that after 260 years every type of government falls into something corrupt and/or a revolution must happen -- Americans think it was Jefferson's own idea but if you read jefferson's papers where he talks about it, he cites Machiavelli directly. And Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy was one of Jefferson's favorite books. Problematic as much of Jeffersonian double standards were/are, most of his ideals came directly from Renaissance and Enlightenment authors/philosophers. Machiavelli goes into very specific detail as to how and why each type of government falls apart over time and the forces at play. I can't recall off the top of my head which book in The Prince, but I remember it's there.)  Aristotle also discusses the idea of governments falling into corrupt tyrannical forms, but it's not as cogent an analysis as Macchiavelli.But that wasn't the reason for my re-read.

My re-read was prompted by Aristotle spending several books on what he sees as the greatest divide causing political strife -- oligarchical rich versus democratic poor (and his solution is to expand and keep happy the middle class as the balance point mean between the two.)   And one of the things that stuck in my brain about Politics is that he talks about how policies in oligarchies are based on a rule of unequals and democracies are based on a rule of equals. The distinction is that in all forms of oligarchy, the people with wealth see themselves as above the law while seeing those in lower social strata as below them. Aristotle doesn't get into racial politics because those didn't exist in the ancient world in the way it does in the modern world -- the closest is rights/responsibilities of citizens versus non-citizen resident aliens which was based on birth genealogy within the city-state itself  (and at certain times in history only one parent had to be a citizen for the child to have full citizenry, and after wars depleted the citizenry there were times that even illegitimate children were made into citizens) and Xenophon was negative about all foreign customs by the non-Greek speaking barabaros, thus he gave us the term xenophobic. But in the ancient world distinctions about personal worth or beauty or customs or moral value as a thinking/feeling human being was never about racialized physical traits such as skintone. (That was created by the Catholic church following the Crusades where race and religion made skin tone a measure of the saved versus damned -- the racial issues of the modern world can literally all be laid at the doorstep of post-Roman Christianity and the Crusades.) But while Aristotle doesn't get into the racialized concepts of equality versus different rules for those in power/wealth and those without because it didn't exist that way in the ancient world, his analysis of how oligarchs view laws for themselves versus different laws for everyone "beneath them" is specifically applicable to issues of racial inequalities in America. 

I would also say that Aristotle's analyses of how oligarchies fall into tyrannies and lead to revolutions is also really insightful -- especially when he talks about the times that the "oligarchs" start eating their own. (Such as acquitting Rottenhouse for murdering innocent unarmed white men who happened to be at a BLM protest.)  And we are definitely reaching the point that white supremacy is eating its own (like all oligarchies) to try to preserve the inequalities of law/justice that they believe are "appropriate" and "right" since they are "above" the law applied to those "beneath" them. Which the signs of hat's coming can be read without going back to re-reading Aristotle, but his analyses are still sound about the mentality of people in power who think themselves "above" the laws applied to others.

So it was something I wished to re-read with the knife edge that America's soul and political moral code is currently at. People who haven't lived through descents into tyrannies/fascism/demagoguery in this life or past lives aren't worrying enough about this tinderbox we're all in. Those who can remember it (or who can at least learn from studying history) are rightly concerned and have been giving warning signs for years. Or in my case, I've been watching the volatility of things moving toward tyranny/fascism along racialized divides since the time when I was 17 and wanted to write a book on "The Rise and Fall of the American Empire" based on a point by point analysis of the close parallels of Gibbons and subsequent analyses of what led to the fall of the Roman Empire -- but it was after 9/11 and after I laid out all the parallels to my AP Macro Econ teacher and he turned pale as a ghost, sat down heavily, and said, "You're not wrong but you can't write that book and you can't even talk about it! You don't have the degrees to be taken seriously so your book would be ridiculed as a failure AND you'd spend the rest of your life on investigative lists from governmental agencies that it could ruin your entire future based on the laws that are moving forward right now. Promise me you will never write or publish that book -- nobody will listen to your warnings in time to stop what's unfolding."

Aristotle also has some important/interesting analysis on the importance of good constitutions/legal codes and the importance of updating old constitutions/codes to deal with current issues and also warning  how undermining legal codes by enforcing them unequally and/or making exceptions ALWAYS leads toward tyrannies. He's not wrong.

(My copies of Aristotle are all at home and I'm currently at work taking care of my thirsty plants. So i can't give proper citations/quotations but definitely check out books IV and V in Politics for the class notes we have on Aristotle's lectures regarding these subjects.)