Polity

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Polity

Polity (Greek

Greek language

Greek is an Indo-European languages native to the southern Balkan peninsula, the language of the Greek people. It forms an independent branch within Indo-European....
: ????te?a or ????te?µa transliterated as Politeía or Políteuma) was originally a term used by Aristotle

Aristotle

Aristocracy

Aristocracy is a form of government, in which a few of the most prominent citizens rule. This may be a hereditary elite, or it may be by a system of cooption where a council of prominent citizens add leading soldiers, merchants, land owners, priests, and lawyers to their number....
and a democracy

Democracy

Democracy is a form of government in which power is held directly or indirectly by citizens under a free electoral system. It is derived from the Greek language d?????at?a , "popular government" which was coined from d???? , "people" and ???t?? , "rule, strength" in the middle of the 5th-4th century BC to denote the political syst...
. Aristotle theorized that the problems of democracy such as rule of the ignorant masses would be kept in check by the wealthy. In turn, the problems associated with oligarchy such as rule of the wealthy would be kept in check through the rule of the many.

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Polity (Greek

Greek language

Aristotle

Aristocracy

Democracy

Ancient Greece

The term Ancient Greece refers to the period of History of Greece lasting from the Greek Dark Ages ca. 1100 BC and the Dorian invasion, to 146 BC and the Roman Republic conquest of Greece after the Battle of Corinth ....
, polity referred to the many Greek city states that had an assembly of citizens as part of the political process. Suffrage

Suffrage

Suffrage is the civil right to vote, or the exercise of that right. In that context, it is also called political franchise or simply the franchise....
did not include women, slaves, serf

SERF

A spin-exchange relaxation-free magnetometer achieves very high magnetic field sensitivity by monitoring a high density vapor of alkali metal atoms precessing in a near-zero magnetic field....
s, or resident alien

Resident Alien

Resident Alien is the debut album from the British glam rock band Spacehog. Released by Elektra Records on October 24, 1995, the album was certified as gold on July 29,1996 and included the hit single "In the Meantime", which reached the top of the Mainstream Rock Tracks chart in the United States, and remained there for four weeks....
s. Thus, voting citizens usually included only a minority of the adult males. The assembly did not hold absolute political power, however, the way it did in a classical democracy

Athenian democracy

Athenian democracy developed in the Ancient Greece city-state of Classical Athens, comprising the central city-state of Athens and the surrounding territory of Attica, around 500 BC....
(e.g. Athens

Athens

Athens , the Capital and largest city of Greece, dominates the Attica periphery; as one of the List of cities by time of continuous habitation, its recorded history spans around 3,400 years....
in the days of Pericles

Pericles

Pericles was a prominent and influential statesman, orator, and general of History of Athens during the city's Age of Pericles?specifically, the time between the Greco-Persian Wars and Peloponnesian War wars....
), but rather shared power with a more oligarchic

Oligarchy

Oligarchy is a form of government where political power effectively rests with a small Elitism segment of society distinguished by royalty, wealth, family, military influence or occult spiritual hegemony....
body such as an elected council or a hereditary gerousia
Gerousia

The Gerousia was the Spartan senate . It was created by the Spartan lawgiver Lycurgus in the seventh century BC, in his Great Rhetra . According to Lycurgus' biographer Plutarch, the Gerousia was the first significant constitutional innovation instituted by Lycurgus....
or Senate

Senate

A senate is a deliberative assembly, often the upper house or chamber of a legislature or Parliament. There have been many such bodies in history, the first of which was the Roman Senate....
. By this definition, the Athenian democracy was originally a polity under the laws of Solon

Solon

Solon was an Athens statesman, lawmaker, and lyric poetry. He is remembered particularly for his efforts to legislate against political, economic and moral decline in Archaic period in Greece Athens....
; the reforms of Cleisthenes

Cleisthenes

Cleisthenes was a noble Athens of the Alcmaeonidae family. He is credited with reforming the constitution of ancient Athens and setting it on a Athenian democracy footing in 508 BC or 507 BC....
, in the view of Aristotle

Aristotle

Aristotle was a Greeks philosopher, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. He wrote on many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, Poetics , theater, music, logic, rhetoric, politics, government, ethics, biology and zoology....
in his Politics
Politics (Aristotle)

Aristotle Politics is a work of political philosophy. The Nicomachean_Ethics#Chapters_6-9:_Politics declared that the inquiry into ethics necessarily follows into politics, and the two works are frequently considered to be parts of a larger treatise, or perhaps connected lectures, dealing with the "philosophy of human affairs." The tit...
, began the descent of the Athenian polity into a corrupt democracy.

Today, polity is used as a general term referring to the political organization of a group. It can be used to describe a loosely organized society such as a tribe

Tribe

A tribe, viewed historically or developmentally, consists of a social group existing before the development of, or outside of, states.Many anthropologists use the term to refer to societies organized largely on the basis of kinship, especially corporate descent groups ....
or community

Community

In biological terms, a community is a group of interacting organisms sharing an environment .In human communities, intention, belief, Natural resource, preferences, Need assessment, risks, and a number of other conditions may be present and common, affecting the Identity of the participants and their degree of cohesiveness....
, but can mean any political group including a government

Government

Government is the body within any organization that has the authority to make and the power to enforce laws, regulations, or rules. Typically, the government refers to a civil government -- local, provincial, or national -- but commercial, academic, religious, or other formal organizations are also administered by governing bodies....
or empire

Empire

Empire derives from the Latin word imperium, denoting ?military command? in Roman. Politically, an empire is a geographically extensive group of states and peoples united and ruled either by a monarch or an oligarchy....
, corporation

Corporation

A corporation is a legal entity separate from the persons that form it. It is a legal entity owned by individual stockholders. In British tradition it is the term designating a body corporate, where it can be either a corporation sole or a corporation aggregate ....
or academy

Academy

An academy is an institution of higher learning, research, or honorary membership.The name traces back to Plato's school of philosophy, founded approximately 385 BC at Akademia, a sanctuary of Athena, the goddess of wisdom, north of Ancient Athens, Greece....
. Polity is used in the phrase ecclesiastical polity as a synonym for church government.

Polity

See also