A large part of the Republic then addresses how the educational system should be set up to produce philosopher kings. According to him, sailing and health are not things that everyone is qualified to practice by nature. Plato describes "philosopher kings" as "those who love the sight of truth" ( Republic 475c) and supports the idea with the analogy of a captain and his ship or a doctor and his medicine. The concept of aristocracy according to Plato has an ideal state ruled by the philosopher king. Modern depictions of aristocracy tend to regard it not as the ancient Greek concept of rule by the best, but more as an oligarchy or plutocracy-rule by the few or the wealthy. It is a system in which only a small part of the population represents the government "certain men distinguished from the rest". In his 1651 book Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes describes an aristocracy as a commonwealth in which the representative of the citizens is an assembly by part only. The Greeks did not like the concept of monarchy, and as their democratic system fell, aristocracy was upheld. That was contrasted with representative democracy in which a council of citizens was appointed as the "senate" of a city state or other political unit. The concept evolved in ancient Greece in which a council of leading citizens was commonly empowered.
In modern times, aristocracy was usually seen as rule by a privileged group, the aristocratic class, and has since been contrasted with democracy.
In practice, aristocracy often leads to hereditary government, after which the hereditary monarch appoints officers as they see fit. Later Polybius in his analysis of the Roman Constitution used the concept of aristocracy to describe his conception of a republic as a mixed form of government, along with democracy and monarchy in their conception from then, as a system of checks and balances, where each element checks the excesses of the other. This belief was rooted in the assumption that the masses could only produce average policy, while the best of men could produce the best policy, if they were indeed the best of men. Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Xenophon, and the Spartans considered aristocracy (the ideal form of rule by the few) to be inherently better than the ideal form of rule by the many ( democracy), but they also considered the corrupted form of aristocracy (oligarchy) to be worse than the corrupted form of democracy ( mob rule). Hereditary rule in this understanding is more related to oligarchy, a corrupted form of aristocracy where there is rule by a few, but not by the best. The term was first used by such ancient Greeks as Aristotle and Plato, who used it to describe a system where only the best of the citizens, chosen through a careful process of selection, would become rulers, and hereditary rule would actually have been forbidden, unless the rulers' children performed best and were better endowed with the attributes that make a person fit to rule compared with every other citizen in the polity. Īt the time of the word's origins in ancient Greece, the Greeks conceived it as rule by the best-qualified citizens-and often contrasted it favorably with monarchy, rule by an individual. The term derives from the Greek: αριστοκρατία ( aristokratíā), meaning 'rule of the best'. Aristocracy (from Ancient Greek ἀριστοκρατίᾱ (aristokratíā), from ἄριστος ( áristos) 'best', and κράτος (krátos) 'power, strength') is a form of government that places strength in the hands of a small, privileged ruling class, the aristocrats.
0 kommentar(er)
