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

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.