So yeah. During this 84 hour DOS "attack" on my re-education programming, I went back to squinting at The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World. It is a spiteful, elitist tome of biblical proportion as could only be devised by an Oxbridge polymath -- 504pp, 9pt type on 10pt leading, Latin and Greek alphabets, plus 228pp back matter. Dude adores your boy Aristotle, but the peoples hardly know to whom they owe the honor of "western civilization". One plot, different "narrative" every. day. Cracks me up. Ain't nobody --not even celebrated pubic intellectuals of this "era" -- got time to read Politics.

It is of the greatest interest, and entirely consistent with Aristotle's fundamental principles of sociological classification, that he was able to discriminate between different types of democracy according to the role played in production in each individual case by the majority of the lower classes (the demos), whether as farmers, artisans or wage-laborers, or as some mixture of these elements (see Pol. VI.I. 1317^a24-9 and other passages),²⁵ whereas he can draw distinctions only on technical, constitutional grounds in three different passages discussing forms of oligarchy,²⁶ all of which would of course be ruled (as he takes for granted) by landowners (cf, III.iii below).

[Ste. Croix:77, emphasis in original]

Cue Krugman: we accept a system with considerable inequality because ...

archived
ius civile

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.