this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2025
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[โ€“] dessalines@lemmy.ml 28 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (11 children)

Both plato and aristotle, but aristotle thought that any election-based state turned out in practice, to be an oligarchy or aristocracy, not a democracy (which he define as rule by the poor, with random selection by lot).

Aristotle's politics books 4-6 talk a lot about this:

http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/politics.4.four.html

In other words, what today we call "representative democracy", the ancient greeks correctly identified as oligarchy.

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