Talk:Politeia

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I love Wikipedia.

Here on this ariticle it states: "A constitution which mixes oligarchy and democracy (terms which, as used by Aristotle, refer to vicious kinds of constitutions). "

Then right below it, it says this: "For instance, later Aristotle refers to the ideal politeia as one using a mixed government. But it is uncertain whether he is referring to governments in general or to a specific form."

Can someone explain this to me---a constitution which mixed oligarchy and democracy is "VICIOUS" but below it says mixed government is the Ideal. Which is it? Mixed with what? You know Aristotle contrasts Politeia with democracy! Democracy is the bad form of Politeia! Where and who said "mixed with oligarchy and democracy is viscious?!!!???

Here is Aristotle's Schema of governmental forms. In his description of Politiea---ARISTOTLE USES REAL LIFE EXAMPLES. Who had real politieas? Crete, Sparta, Carthage and Solonic Athens. They all were a mixture of oligarchy and democracy and monarchy, aristocracy, democracy! I mean this article is so full of propaganda---its ludicrous! This is the state of MODERN Scholarship! Modern Scholarship suffers from reading comprehension.WHEELER 03:00, 8 July 2007 (UTC)

Translating (or not) as "repubilic"

Current text states: Republic is an inadequate translation for the basic fact that people of the public are not also citizens of a city / state. A person that was ostracized from the active matrix of the city was an example of such. Another example was people that lived in the city but not being active citizens that had a say in the political processes of the community. Women, slaves and other people that were deemed unworthy for some reason were not in the active matrix of the political formations of that city state, making them not-citizens, so not part of "politeia". This seems to me to be a rather dubious argument. "Republic" is the English version of the Latin translation of "politeia". Modern definitions of "repuplic" don't normally make it dependent on all members of "the public" being citizens (non-naturalised immigrants don't usually get the vote, for example). The Roman Republic also shared a lot of features with the Greek politeia that modern republics usually lack. That suggests to me that to be consistent, either we shouldn't call the Roman Republic a republic either, or accept "republic" as a translation for politeia. Also, that section contains a lot of text with few citations (one of which gives a "server does not have a DNS entry" and the other is blocked at my workplace, so I can't check what either actualyl says) and looks somewhat essay-like to me. Iapetus (talk) 15:53, 22 July 2015 (UTC)

Maybe 'the Regime' is a better translation of Plato's Politeia, just as Allan Bloom says in his version of the book, but surely 'the Republic' has been widely accepted in such a long period, it also seems not suitable to make such a change directly.--Radium7556 (talk) 16:53, 2 June 2019 (UTC)

Monarchy, aristocracy, politeia

In January, anonymous editor 192.76.177.124 (talk · contribs) added the following dispute to the article:

[This thought is disputed: While monarchy is the rule by one who is most excellent and virtuous, and aristocracy is the rule of the best, who are generally few, politeia is the quality or condition of a city or state ruled by the decent citizens, who are generally many.]

This came after the following modifications (by that editor) to the preceding sentence were rolled back:

While monarchy is the rule by one, and aristocracy by the few (few) best, politeia is rule by the many citizenry.

As placing a dispute about content directly in the article is inappropriate, I am moving this here on that editor's behalf. I do not agree with them, however. I think that "one"/"few"/"many" is perfectly sufficient in the context, and it is not necessary to add in Aristotle's value judgements of "most excellent"/"overall best"/"pretty decent". The context is, after all, a brief summary of one of the ways Aristotle uses "politeia". -- Perey (talk) 13:01, 15 May 2018 (UTC)