Sterling, Aristotle, and the Best Form of Government

 

Sterling, Aristotle, and the Best Form of Government

Theoretical framework: Grant C. Sterling. Analysis and synthesis: Dave Kelly. Prose rendering: Claude.

---

The Question

Sterling favored monarchy as a form of government. Explain.

---

Response

A clarification is needed before proceeding, and it matters for accuracy.

The corpus does not record Sterling favoring monarchy specifically. What Sterling favored was the Aristotelian virtue-state — a government that affirms a clear conception of virtue and uses the power of the state to guide citizens toward it. The corpus notes that monarchism is a candidate for the potential book project, and Sterling’s Aristotelian political preference is recorded, but Sterling’s own ISF posts do not name monarchy as his preferred form. He names the Aristotelian virtue-state and leaves its institutional form unspecified.

That said, the connection between the two is philosophically substantive and worth tracing carefully.

---

What Sterling Said

Sterling holds that for a country of non-Sages — which is to say any real society — the form of government matters philosophically. Some systems encourage virtue; others discourage it; and some structurally conflict with Stoicism’s most fundamental presuppositions.

His positive political preference is the Aristotelian virtue-state: a government that affirms a clear conception of virtue and uses the power of the state to guide people toward it. He frames this explicitly as following Aristotle’s own question: given that eudaimonia is attained by individual virtue, what social systems will encourage and aid the citizen in seeking it, and what systems will lead the citizen away from it?

---

The Eliminations

Sterling eliminates the major alternatives by presupposition. Marxism requires identifying with the collective; fascism requires treating the individual as an organ of the State; Islamist theocracy requires grounding individual worth in submission to a deity. These are incompatible because they require dissolution of the individual rational agent into something external to it.

Libertarianism is also rejected. If freedom is understood as doing whatever one feels like at the moment, such a system actually encourages people to accept and act on their entrenched desires and urges, and this may lead him away from virtue faster than even the totalitarianisms considered above.

Democracy fares no better. Sterling directs readers to Plato’s Republic on democracy — the diagnosis there being that democratic preference-satisfaction produces a society organized around entrenched desires rather than virtue.

No political party Sterling knew of advocates the Aristotelian virtue-state — indeed, he doubted any party could ever secure an elective victory on such a platform. Probably most people would find it appalling. But that is what he thinks best fits with Stoicism.

---

Why Monarchy Follows

The monarchy connection follows from the logic of elimination. If democracy is structurally vicious — it institutionalizes popular preferences over virtue — and if no elective system could plausibly win a mandate for a virtue-state, then the only institutional form capable of implementing one without depending on popular consent is a non-elective one. That points toward monarchy or aristocracy in the classical sense. Aristotle himself regarded monarchy (rule by the one best man) and aristocracy (rule by the few best men) as the correct forms, with democracy as a corruption. Sterling’s adoption of the Aristotelian framework carries this implication, even if he did not press it to that conclusion explicitly in the archived posts.

Sterling’s self-description as “the fascist anarchist” is ironic and precise: he resists all ideologies that subordinate individual rational agency to collective systems, while holding that the best available government uses state authority to promote virtue. The liberal-democratic consensus finds both positions threatening — which is Sterling’s joke.

---

The Accurate Statement

Sterling favored the Aristotelian virtue-state, which is structurally incompatible with democracy and libertarianism, and which — by the logic of the Aristotelian framework he explicitly endorses — implies something in the range of classical monarchy or aristocracy as its most natural institutional expression. Whether Sterling himself took that final step is not recorded in the corpus.