Aristotle's Classification of Governments

Every government you can name — a monarchy, a one-party state, a democracy, even a small society run by its wealthiest members — fits somewhere on a grid Aristotle drew up almost 2,400 years ago, and he built that grid not by imagining an ideal state, the way his teacher Plato did, but by actually reading the constitutions of over a hundred and fifty real Greek city-states. This is political science's first real fieldwork, and it is why Aristotle's classification is still the one every later scheme gets compared to.

In two minutes

Aristotle classifies every government along two axes at once — the number of rulers (one, few or many) and the quality of rule (for the common good, or for self-interest) — giving six categories in total: three genuine forms and their three corrupted twins.

The rest of this chapter

The full explanation, the cheat sheet, every previous-year question at every mark weight, the quiz and the answer skeletons are part of Political Science – I: Political Theory and Political Organisation on LexBlox Semester. Sign in to unlock the subject, or read Module 1 of Legal Language and Writing free.