TIL: Polity VS Democracy

Rebecca SE Tan

6 October 2022

I went for a lecture on political theory today, and I just thought I'd share some of my thoughts! While the class touched on Aristotle's six basic forms of governments, I wanted to delve deeper into the difference between a polity and a democracy, which linked to many other concepts I had previously learned/ thought about. So here goes -

First, a brief introduction of Aristotle's six typologies is depicted in this table:

​Number of Rulers	For the Common Interest	For the Interest of the Rulers
One	Monarchy	Tyranny
Few	Aristocracy	Oligarchy
Many	Polity	Democracy

To elucidate the difference between a polity and a democracy, I rationalised it through a simple analogy:

Say we are choosing desserts for a party. Person A really likes cakes, while Person B really likes jellies. In a democracy, where the people rule, the course of action would be to ensure that there are BOTH cakes and jellies available for everyone. Hence, this benefits the rulers (the people themselves) - simply going with what everyone wants. This, I suppose, is similar to Rousseau's Will of All concept, which refers to the "sum of particular views" (172).

What then would a polity look like? For Aristotle, the common interest is not necessarily what people want, but rather what is good for them. Hence, the course of action in a polity may be to offer salads instead, because it is a healthier option.

However, this brings in the concept of "positive liberty", the idea that there exists some internal constraints that made person A and B choose cake and jellies, rather than salads, which is their "real" desire. In other words, had there not been some obstruction to Person A & B's "autonomous" thinking, they would also have chosen the salad - justifying the decision to give salads to all. This distinction between our "higher" and "lower" desires is fiercely critiqued by Isaiah Berlin, due to how subjective this can be applied. He says, "enough manipulation of the definition of man, and freedom can be made to mean whatever the manipulator wishes" (181). His work, "Two Concepts of Liberty", was also in reference to how the Soviet Union emphasised a liberation of self through working and sacrificing oneself to defend the communist ideal.

Welp, this was fun! Do let me know if I have misinterpreted any of these political theorists! Also, I think I'll start a TIL (today I learnt) series for these kinds of random thoughts and reflections :)