The Cave and the Light: Plato Versus Aristotle, and the Struggle for the Soul of Western Civilization

by Arthur Herman

There is no Philosopher Ruler or king standing in the image of God’s plenitude of power. He is sent packing to the realm of the perfect Forms—and out of the realm of reality. What rules instead are concrete constitutional arrangements based on real-life experience, distilled into a code of laws. Politics is above all a real-time partnership, requiring people’s participation more than obedience, one in which the good life is found in living the process, not necessarily in the final result. It was this view of constitutional “mixed” government that the Founding Fathers inherited from their Florentine and British forebears.4 Achieving that classic balance between the One, the Few, and the Many, however, had always implied the goal of stability. If the mixture was allowed to change in any way, then Polybius’s and Machiavelli’s cycle of decay and doom would kick in—and change was the one thing Western man could not avoid. Even in the age of Enlightenment, men like John Adams sensed that liberty, no matter how desirable, was still fated not to last.5