What Would Aristotle Make of Modern Political Leadership?
- Kathy Postelle Rixon
- 1 day ago
- 7 min read
I've been sitting with a question lately that I can't quite let go of.
If Aristotle, who thought more carefully about political leadership than almost anyone in the history of Western philosophy, were somehow dropped into our current political landscape, what would he make of it?
My honest answer: I think he'd be appalled. But not for the reasons you might expect.
He wouldn't be appalled by the technology, the scale, or the complexity. He'd be appalled by something much more fundamental. He'd be appalled by what we've stopped asking.
Let me explain.
Aristotle's Starting Point
Aristotle believed that politics was, at its core, an ethical enterprise. Not a power game. Not an administrative function. An ethical enterprise.
For Aristotle, the entire point of political life was to help human beings flourish, to create the conditions in which people could live well, develop their capacities fully, and participate meaningfully in a community oriented toward the good. He called this eudaimonia, often translated as flourishing or happiness, though neither word quite captures it.
The leader's job, in this framework, was not to win. Not to stay in power. Not even to keep people safe, though that matters too. The leader's job was to be oriented, genuinely and practically oriented, toward the flourishing of the people they serve.
And here's the key thing: Aristotle didn't think this was separate from character. He thought it was character. The Greek word is phronesis, or practical wisdom. The capacity to discern, in concrete real-world situations, what the genuinely good action is. Not just to know ethical principles in the abstract, but to be the kind of person who perceives rightly, feels appropriately, and acts well.
You cannot fake phronesis. You either have it or you don't.
What He Would See in Modern Political Life
Here is where I think it gets uncomfortable.
Look at the conditions under which modern political leadership thrives today. Not the conditions we aspire to. The actual ones.
What gets you elected:
The ability to generate emotional arousal in large numbers of people
A talent for simplified narratives over complex truths
Willingness to say whatever the moment requires
Physical presence and confident performance
A thick skin, or better, an absence of genuine vulnerability
What political survival requires:
Constant fundraising from powerful interests
Sensitivity to polling data over moral conviction
The ability to maintain coalition loyalty even at the cost of truth
An appetite for conflict that many genuinely wise people simply don't have
Aristotle would look at this system and say: you have designed a machine for filtering out phronesis. You have created structures that actively disadvantage the very qualities leadership most requires.
He would find that extraordinary. And not in a good way.
The Character Question
One of Aristotle's most persistent concerns was the character of those who seek power.
He was deeply suspicious of people who desire power for its own sake. For Aristotle, the person most suited to lead was often the person most reluctant to do so: someone who would serve not because they craved the position, but because they understood what was needed and were willing to do it.
This is almost the precise inverse of what modern electoral politics produces.
In modern politics, you have to want it desperately to get it. The path to leadership requires years of relentless self-promotion, an extraordinary tolerance for public criticism and humiliation, and a willingness to subordinate almost everything else in your life to the pursuit of the role. These are not the character traits of the philosophically wise. They are the character traits of the driven, the ambitious, and often - this is uncomfortable but worth saying - the narcissistic.
I'm not saying all modern leaders are narcissists. But I am saying that the system creates conditions in which narcissistic traits are adaptive rather than disqualifying. And Aristotle would spot that immediately.
He would say: you have forgotten that character is not just a personal matter. Character is cultivated or corroded by the environments we inhabit. If the environment of political life rewards dishonesty, performative aggression, and the subordination of truth to advantage, then it will gradually produce people shaped by those rewards.
And it does.
The Tyranny Problem
Aristotle was particularly interested in how democracies tip into tyranny.
His analysis, written over two thousand years ago, is uncomfortably precise.
He observed that democracies tend to produce demagogues: leaders who gain power not through genuine wisdom or virtue, but through their ability to inflame popular passions, to tell people what they want to hear, to position themselves as champions of the common person against corrupt elites, and then to use the resulting popular enthusiasm as a vehicle for the gradual accumulation of personal power.
The demagogue, Aristotle noted, doesn't come to power as an obvious tyrant. They come to power as a populist. They come as the one who finally speaks truth to power, who isn't like the rest of them, who will shake things up and fight for ordinary people.
Sound familiar?
The demagogue's relationship with truth is purely instrumental. Truth is useful when it serves the cause. When it doesn't, something else is said instead. And the followers - because they have invested emotionally in the leader rather than in any set of principles - follow the leader into the new position rather than holding the leader to the old one.
Aristotle saw this pattern with stunning clarity. He would look at contemporary politics in multiple democracies and say: yes, this is what I described. This is what happens when you stop asking whether your leaders are genuinely oriented toward the good.
What Aristotle Would Ask That We Don't
Here is what strikes me most when I set Aristotle's framework alongside modern political discourse.
We ask all sorts of questions about leaders. We ask about their policies. Their electability. Their fundraising capacity. Their poll numbers. Their debate performance. Their social media presence.
We very rarely ask: Is this person genuinely oriented toward human flourishing? Do they actually care about the good? Are they honest - not just when honesty is convenient, but constitutively, as a character trait? Do they have phronesis? Can they discern what is actually needed rather than what is merely popular?
These are the questions Aristotle would insist are primary. Everything else, such as the policies, the strategies, the communication, flows from character. Good character in a leader doesn't guarantee good outcomes. But bad character makes good outcomes very unlikely over time, because a leader without genuine orientation toward the good will bend every tool and every policy toward the maintenance of their own power.
And here's the thing: most people sense this, even without the philosophical vocabulary. They sense when a leader is performing virtue versus actually having it. They sense the hollowness. And it corrodes trust. Not just in individual leaders, but in the entire enterprise of politics.
Which is exactly where we are.
What the Shamanic Traditions Add
This is where I find myself drawing on a very different tradition to say something remarkably similar.
In the Andean cosmology I work within, leadership is understood as service to Pachamama - to the living earth, to the web of life, to the whole. A leader who takes power for personal enrichment, who distorts reality to serve their own interests, who breaks ayni , which is the sacred principle of right reciprocal relationship, is not just a bad leader in a political sense.
They are creating spiritual disorder. They are sending poison through the web.
The Norse tradition understands this too. Odin, the Allfather, the god associated with wisdom and leadership, obtained his wisdom through sacrifice. He hung on the World Tree for nine days. He gave an eye for insight. Leadership, in this tradition, is not a privilege. It is a calling that demands genuine personal cost, genuine humility, genuine willingness to be changed by what you encounter.
What both of these traditions share with Aristotle is this: they understand that the inner life of the leader matters. Not just their policies. Not just their effectiveness. Their soul. Their genuine orientation. Their relationship to truth, to power, to the people they serve.
We have almost entirely lost this understanding in modern political culture. We have reduced leadership to performance and management. We have forgotten that it is, at its deepest level, a spiritual and ethical vocation.
The Question We Need to Start Asking
I don't have a tidy solution to offer here. I'm a philosopher and a shamanic practitioner, not a political scientist. I'm not going to tell you who to vote for or how to reform electoral systems, though Lord knows they need reforming.
What I want to offer is a reorientation of attention.
Before we ask whether a leader is effective, we might ask whether they are good. Not good at politics. Good in the older, deeper sense. Oriented toward genuine human flourishing of all people. Honest - actually honest, not strategically honest. Humble enough to know what they don't know. In genuine relationship with the people they serve rather than performing a relationship for cameras.
These qualities are not naive or unrealistic. Aristotle thought they were the baseline. The minimum. The starting point from which everything else follows.
And the ancient wisdom traditions I work within would agree. They would say: look at the soul of the person who wants to lead you. Look at their relationship to power, to truth, to others. Look at whether they are oriented toward life or toward their own reflection.
Because leadership, at its core, is not about policy or strategy or communication.
It is about character.
And character cannot be faked forever.
I'm Kathy Postelle Rixon, researcher at Cambridge, Chair of The Philosophical Society: Oxford, and shamanic practitioner working at the intersection of ancient wisdom and rigorous inquiry. Questions like this one, about how we live together, what we owe each other, and what genuine leadership looks like, sit right at the heart of everything I do. If this resonates, I'd genuinely love to hear your thoughts at kathy@magicinharmony.com or over at www.magicinharmony.com.
Who do you think embodies genuine phronesis in public life - past or present? And what would it actually take for our political systems to select for wisdom rather than performance? I'd love to know what you think.
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