1
Introduction
In today’s intellectual climate, talk of universal natural foundations for politics
independent of particular historical contexts is considered almost unthinkable, or at least
inherently suspect. Yet the alternative to natural foundations is historicism, and history may
be an equally shaky ground for democracy. Historicist defenses of democracy are contingent
on history moving in democratic directions, but in the growing disconnect between citizens
and the public realm, problems of social inequality, and worrisome trends in civic
engagement, history seems radically anti-democratic.
1
Indeed, as Robert Kaplan argues,
American politics today is closer to Aristotle’s description of oligarchy than it is to
democracy in any strong sense.
2
As a result, rather than a critical tool for progressive
Foucaultian leftists, history has increasingly been used as a conservative or “pragmatic” limit
on democracy. It is on historicist grounds, for example, that Richard Rorty writes, “Even
someone like myself, whose admiration for John Dewey is almost unlimited, cannot take
seriously his defense of participatory democracy against Walter Lippman’s insistence on the
need for expertise.”
3
Given the questionable status of democracy in our particular historical
moment, it is increasingly important to look for a trans-historical and universal foundation
for democratic politics. In this paper I argue that Aristotle’s theories of politics and poetry
provide such a foundation for a political ethos that is both practical and genuinely democratic.
1
For empirical evidence on the decline of American democracy, see Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone:
The Collapse and Revival of American Community (Simon & Schuster, 2000).
2
Robert D. Kaplan, “Was Democracy Just a Moment?,” The Atlantic Monthly (December 1997), 55-
80.
3
Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country (Harvard, 1998), 104. Other important historicist conservatives
and pragmatists include Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (Avon Books, 1992);
and Alisdair MacIntyre, whom I discuss below.
Convention