Aristotle and the Judgment of the Many: Equality, Not Collective Quality

Abstract

Aristotle’s “doctrine of the wisdom of the multitude” (DWM) has become a canonical reference for political theorists, particularly supporters of epistemic approaches to democracy. Yet the excessive focus on the collective capacity of the many has obscured a more promising defense of democracy within Aristotle’s work. Despite Aristotle’s infamous arguments defending unequal merit and hierarchical relationships, his account of citizenship is strikingly egalitarian: he argues that citizenship, properly distributed, reflects an equal capacity for judgment. On this basis, an Aristotelian justification of democracy emerges, one quite distinct from the DWM-inflected defense of collective judgments.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 44 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.