Democracy (Arendt, Aristotle)

Abstract

Aristotle’s recognition of an irreducible plurality in politics is pursued initially in the context of his effaced recognition of the issue of sexual difference, as ambiguously retrieved for political thinking in Hannah Arendt. More generally, the complexities of Aristotle’s account of democracy as the least bad of “deviant” regimes is shown to lead to a more affirmative view of democracy once it is established that all political regimes are in a certain sense “deviant.” Aristotle’s own attempt to master the potential excess of democracy by appealing to the notion of the “mean” is shown to be incoherent, and his account of an extreme form of democracy as collapsing into anarchy is retrieved as an insight into the potentially catastrophic effects of trying to think democracy in teleological terms.