Wealth & Money Quote by Aristotle

Democracy, Aristotle warns, is arithmetic disguised as virtue: headcount trumps pedigree. The line isn’t a celebration of popular power so much as a cool-eyed diagnosis of how rule-by-the-many actually behaves once it’s unshackled from property, rank, or “merit.” He’s pointing to a structural fact: if votes are equal, the numerically larger class can steer the state toward its own interests, and the wealthy can’t simply buy back political gravity through sheer status.

The subtext is more anxious than it first appears. For Aristotle, regimes are always at risk of sliding into their corrupted forms, and “democracy” in his taxonomy often means a version of popular rule that can become punitive toward elites, redistributive in ways he distrusts, or captive to demagogues who flatter the many. “Supreme” lands like a warning label: majority will is decisive not because it’s wiser, but because it’s enforceable. Legitimacy becomes procedural; justice becomes contested.

Context matters: he’s writing in the shadow of Athenian democracy’s turbulence, oligarchic coups, and the civic trauma that followed war and faction. His Politics is less a hymn to participation than an engineer’s manual for stability. The line also reveals a lasting tension modern democracies still negotiate: equality at the ballot box versus inequality in resources outside it. Aristotle is essentially arguing that democracy’s moral claim and its class dynamics are inseparable, and that any system pretending otherwise is selling comfort, not clarity.