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According to Aristotle, society is divided into 3 parts: “the very wealthy, the extremely poor, and those in the middle-the class that stabilizes society. The rich plutocracy and the proletariat are essentially social deviations with many disadvantages. The aristocracy was an idle class, often not engaged in useful work, but involved in intrigues, intrigues and power struggles. On the social bottom, the existing funds were located at the expense of state aid and deductions. The middle class, on the other hand, consisted of artisans, merchants, and farmers who were able to improve productivity and product quality at least a little, as well as attentive to any innovations (whether domestic or foreign).
Aristotle generally liked the principle that the middle is good and the extreme is bad. When applied to politics, the arguments were as follows.
The polis exists for a common good life, its citizens must be able to negotiate, must be bound, as they would say now, by solidarity (Aristotle spoke of “friendship”, philia). All this is difficult to achieve when there is a large gap in wealth and nobility.
Citizens in general affairs should be guided by reason, not by passion, and strong inequality causes strong feelings: envy among the lower, arrogance and fear among the higher. For average citizens, these feelings, envy of the rich and fear of the poor, are balanced, so they follow reason rather than these feelings. As a partial but important proof for Aristotle: famous successful legislators like Solon and Lycurgus also came from the middle classes.
Aristotle also believed that a good polis system should also be “average”, so that the elements of individual government, oligarchy and democracy are combined and balanced each other. For such a system to be possible, many “average” citizens are needed, otherwise there will be a constant struggle between a few “strong” and many “weak”, frequent coups will be inevitable, transitions from one unfair form to another: from extreme oligarchy to extreme democracy (or to tyranny, which can grow out of both democracy and oligarchy).
This is the fourth book of “Politics”, it is generally simple, without tricky quirks.