“Aristotle compared the sovereign rule by “the mass of people” to a great potluck dinner party: “For it is possible that the many, no one of whom taken singly is a sound man, may yet, taken all together, be better than the few, not individually but collectively, in the same way that a feast to which all contribute is better than one supplied at one man’s expense.””

(Aristotle, Politics III.11, 1281a)

James Shelley in the Caesura Letters, January 8, 2014