Governance in Post-Neoliberal Latin America: Lessons from Brazil, Peru and Venezuela

Aristotle is often thought of as the first, in the Western tradition, to think systematically about politics (1998). What is perhaps most innovative about his Politics is not his division of polities into categories based on who exercises rule (the one, few, many), as this distinction was found within Herodotus and Plato. Rather, he sub-divided these further, looking at the various ways that deviant forms of rule functioned and how they could be remedied. Remarkably, the remedies in oligarchies could be found in democracies, similarly deviant forms of rule. What is of most interest for the chapter is that more than two millennia later, it is not clear what Aristotle’s preferred form was. Indeed, Eugene Garver suggests that Aristotle seems to entertain plural concepts of political good but a singular one of the ethical good (2011). This puts him at odds with the overwhelming majority of stated and unstated positions of Western liberal scholarship which tends to think democracy as the most (and often only) legitimate form of organizing a polity, while it insists on the need to consider competing ethical positions as (equally) legitimate….