James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations has been getting a great deal of press lately. It is making the rounds in the blogosphere and the general media. I haven’t read it – but based on the title it sounds like ancient wisdom rediscovered.

In Chapter XI of Book III of The Politics, Aristotle argues, “The people at large should be sovereign.” In defense of democracy, when many considered it (as many consider it now) the surest path to chaos he wrote:

“There is this to be said for the Many. Each of them, by himself may not be of a good quality; but when they all come together it is possible that they may surpass – collectively and as a body, although not individually – the quality of the few best. Feasts to which many contribute may excel those provided at one man’s expense. In the same way when there are many [who contribute to the process of deliberation], each can bring his share of goodness and moral prudence; and when all meet together the people may thus become something in the nature of a single person, who – as he has many feet, many hands, and many senses – may also have many qualities of character and intelligence.”

It is typical that a concept Aristotle could describe in a single paragraph can be unpacked, studied and expanded into a modern bestseller. To iterate the cliché – we see so far because we stand on the shoulders of giants.

I use a translation by Ernest Barker who was a fellow at Oxford, it was first published in 1946. My professor at St. John’s College, the late Leo Raditsa, called it “my beloved Barker” and was very pleased when I found a copy. It was translated and the commentaries written between 1940 and 1945. In his introduction Barker calls it a “labour of love, and a permanent consolation of such leisure as was left to the writer, from the autumn of 1940 to the spring of 1945, among the anxieties and duties of war. It is a comfort, now that it is finished because it encourages a hope that something is here presented which may be of use to the students of the coming generation. For the wisdom of Aristotle grows on the mind as one ponders upon it; and the future will be all the better if it continues to digest his wisdom.”