Aristotle: Saving Politics from Philosophy

LIFE AND TIMES

UNLIKE PLATO, ARISTOTLE WAS embroiled in the politics of his day; indeed, he died in exile because the Athenians suspected his loyalty when they revolted against Macedonian rule in 323 BCE. He tutored Alexander the Great and also taught Antipater, the Macedonian general whom Alexander installed as regent to keep Greece in order when he left to conquer the Persian Empire in 334. The ancient historians do not suggest Aristotle was devoted to Alexander; Plutarch credits him with supplying the poison that may or may not have been the cause of Alexander’s untimely death. (It was rumored that Antipater feared that Alexander had turned against him and was likely to have him executed; so Antipater preempted him.) Aristotle was born in 384 in the small town of Stagira, on the borders of Greece and Macedon—slightly east of the modern Salonica. He came to Athens in 367 to join Plato’s Academy and spent the next twenty years there. The forty-five years between his arrival in Athens and his death in 322 saw Athens’s revival after the destruction of the Peloponnesian War, and then the extinction of the Greek city-states’ political independence following their defeat by Macedonian forces, first at the Battle of Chaeronea in 338 and when the death of Alexander the Great in 323 prompted Athens to revolt, at the naval battle of Amorgos in 322.

Aristotle’s career at the Academy suffered a hiatus after the death of Plato. He and his friend Xenocrates left Athens when the Academy fell under the leadership of men whom Aristotle disliked. He spent time on Lesbos, where he was supported by the tyrant Hermias, a former slave of great ability who had gone on to buy the rulership of the city of Atarneus from the king of Persia. Hermias had spent time at the Academy and was reputedly an excellent philosopher; Aristotle later married Hermias’s niece, after her uncle had been tortured and executed on the orders of the great king on suspicion of plotting to assist a Macedonian invasion of Persia. Whether Hermias brought Aristotle to the attention of Philip of Macedon is unclear, but in 342 Aristotle was summoned to Pella to become tutor to the young Alexander, a position he filled until 336. It must soon have been a part-time post, since as early as 340 Alexander was governing Macedonia in his father’s absence, while two years later he commanded part of his father’s army at the Battle of Chaeronea.

In 335 Aristotle returned to Athens to found his own school, the Lyceum. This was in the immediate aftermath of the second unsuccessful revolt of the Athenians against Macedonian rule. Surprisingly, neither Philip nor Alexander meted out to the Athenians the punishment meted out to Thebes, which was razed to the ground. Demosthenes, the most intransigent leader of the anti-Macedonian elements, was allowed to remain in Athens and not forced into exile. Xenocrates was now head of the Academy, but there is no suggestion that Aristotle set up in competition with his friend. There was no disloyalty in establishing his own school, and his school had a distinctive character. It was marked by an enthusiasm for empirical investigation; among other things, Aristotle founded the empirical discipline of politics by setting his students to describe and analyze 158 Greek constitutions. The “naturalism” of Aristotle’s philosophy struck a balance between what we would recognize as a scientific, empirical, experimental approach to understanding the world, and a more nearly religious approach that regarded nature as the source of a beauty and order that human contrivance could not match. One result is that his political analysis is an engrossing mixture of practical wisdom and an almost Platonic attempt to show that the best state is best “by nature.”

Aristotle’s life in Athens after his return was not tranquil. The majority of Athenians were bitterly hostile to the hegemony of Macedon. Athenian politics until Demosthenes’s death by suicide in 322 was dominated by the question of whether and how far the hegemony of Macedon could be resisted. Antipater was as unpopular as the head of an army of occupation is likely to be; and Aristotle felt himself not only a foreigner but an unwelcome one. The awkwardness was for a time reduced by Aristotle’s friendship with Lycurgus, a student of both Plato and Isocrates, and now in charge of the finances of Athens and the upkeep of the city; Lycurgus was a nominal democrat and an ally of Demosthenes, but was the sort of moderate aristocratic politician praised in his Politics, who safeguarded the economic interests of the propertied classes and ensured they were kept friendly to the democratic constitution. Nonetheless, Aristotle’s position eventually became untenable. In June 323 Alexander’s unexpected death in Babylon at the age of thirty-two, whether from malaria, liver failure, or poison, provoked open revolt. Aristotle retired to Chalcis, on Euboea. He died there a year later, just as Antipater’s victory at Amorgos destroyed Athenian hopes of recovering political and military independence.

ARISTOTLE’S POLITICAL PREJUDICES

Modern readers find several of Aristotle’s views deeply repugnant. The two most obvious are his views on slavery and his views on the intellectual and political capacity of women.¹ Unsurprisingly, these are connected. The relation of master to inferior—of the male head of household to wife and slaves—is a basic and natural human relationship. For Aristotle the household of a man qualified to be a citizen is a family unit where slaves do the menial work: menial work unfits a man for political life; slaves and common laborers liberate the citizen for political life. The head of a household governs his family partly politically and partly not. The relation of citizen to citizen is that of equal to equal. The relation of master to slave, husband to wife, or parent to child is not one between equals, although wives are certainly free persons, whereas slaves are not.² Fathers exercise “royal” rule over children and “constitutional” rule over wives, but there is no suggestion that husbands and wives take turns in governing the household as citizens do the polity. We shall see how Aristotle argues for the justice of these relationships. It is worth pausing to notice two things. The first is the alarming suggestion that the acquisition of slaves is a branch of the art of war or hunting.³ The ancient world was heavily dependent on slavery; and there were states, or pirate kingdoms, that regarded “man hunting” as a legitimate business and their own distinctive way of making a living. For villagers living within reach of their raids or for anyone forced to travel a long distance by sea, the danger of being seized and sold into slavery was very real. Aristotle suggests ways of regulating the practice of seizing captives in war and selling them into slavery, but the practice itself he does not criticize. Since he admits that many writers think slavery is unjust and contrary to nature, he certainly had the chance to do so.

The second thing to notice is that when Aristotle seeks a justification in the natural order for the existence of slavery, he appeals to the gulf in the capacity for self-government that—in his view—separates natural slaves from their masters. What he made of Hermias, the former slave, who was one of his students as well as his protector, a man to whom he dedicated a memorial and whose niece he married after her uncle’s untimely death, one can only imagine. Hermias’s last words were said to have been “I have done nothing unworthy of a philosopher.” Along the same lines, Aristotle maintains that women are rational enough to fulfill the subordinate role in the family that he assigns to them, but have too little rational capacity to give their own independent judgment in the political arena. Women, slaves, and children belong within the well-ordered household, not in the agora or ecclesia. It is worth considering why readers are so often outraged that Aristotle held views that were entirely commonplace in the ancient Greek world. It is surely because so much of what he writes is strikingly down-to-earth and shows an attention to how politics is in fact conducted that is quite absent from Plato’s sweeping rejection of political life in toto. Aristotle talked to many intelligent women and had every chance to change his mind; he had every opportunity to reflect on what the existence of Hermias implied for the justice of slavery. In short, modern readers might think that the remedy for Aristotle’s blind spots is a more diligent application of the empirical methods he himself advocated.

TELEOLOGY: NATURE AND POLITICS

Aristotle would have been unmoved by our anachronistic advice. His conception of “nature” was not like ours, and the search for the natural order of things was not straightforwardly empirical. Hermias was transparently not a “slave by nature,” but that did not mean there were no slaves by nature. Aristotle famously wrote that “it is evident that the state is a creation of nature, and that man is by nature a political animal.” ⁴ We must, therefore, start from Aristotle’s idea of nature. Aristotle is known for the doctrine of the four causes: the matter of what is to be explained; its form; the efficient cause, or how it is produced; and its final cause. The behavior of entities such as plants, animals, persons, and institutions was explained by their telos, or “end”—their goal or purpose or point. This is teleological explanation, explanation in terms of goals or purposes. The scientific revolution of the seventeenth century expelled teleological explanation from the physical sciences. Our idea of a physical cause is essentially that of the antecedent conditions that make something happen; we do not think that there is some state of affairs “proper” to physical nature, and the modern conception of nature is thus very different from Aristotle’s. We use the term “natural” to describe the way things are when not affected by human contrivance—think of “natural blonde”—but Aristotle included human contrivance among the things that had their “natural” and their “unnatural” forms. A society like our own, where women have equal political rights with men, is “unnatural.” “Natural” forms of life were good because they fulfilled their natural purpose. Today this Aristotelian view survives in the teaching of the Roman Catholic Church, where it is underpinned by the thought that God is the author of nature and that natural law and divine law reinforce each other. Aristotle did not think in terms of a deity who authored nature; nature itself was divine. He is therefore very exposed to the skeptical view that “natural” and “unnatural” are synonyms for “usual” and “unusual,” or for “morally good” and “morally bad.”

Throughout his Politics it is taken for granted that nature is the ground of social norms. When Aristotle asks whether there are slaves “by nature,” he wants to know whether there are persons whose proper place in the world is to serve as slaves to others. If there are, it explains both why there is slavery and why it is good for (natural) slaves to be slaves. Discovering what is “natural” uncovers both the way things are and how they should be. Moreover, nature is hierarchical; everything aims at some good, and the highest things aim at the highest good. Human beings are at the top of the hierarchy of living creatures, and we must understand human behavior in the light of how we are meant to pursue the highest good. Allowances made for his prejudices, Aristotle did not simply impose a model of the good polity upon the evidence; investigating the way people do govern themselves shows how they should govern themselves.

The way to discover what nature aims to achieve is to observe what nature actually does. Nature does not always achieve the good she aims at: there are stunted trees, sickly children, unhappy marriages, and states that collapse into civil war. But we discover the standards embodied in words such as “stunted” and “diseased” by looking at what happens when things turn out well. Political science is thus a form of natural history with a strongly normative flavor. Aristotle set out the standards that explanation has to meet in his Physics, and they remained canonical for two millennia. The four kinds of cause—form, matter, purpose, and origin—all have their place in political analysis. The form of a state is its constitution, its matter is its citizens, its purpose is to allow us to live the best life in common, the cause of its coming into being appears from the first chapters of Politics to be the search for self-sufficiency; and Aristotle’s discussion of revolution in later books of Politics is both an account of the causes of a state’s ceasing to be and an account of the causes of its persistence as a going concern.

Aristotle did not share Plato’s belief that all real knowledge must resemble geometry or mathematics. Plato condemned the world of sense as a poor shadow of reality. Sufficiently fine measurement will show that no equilateral triangle drawn by human hands is perfectly equilateral; measured sufficiently precisely, one side will be greater than another and the angles of the sides unequal. For Plato the empirical world itself was a botched copy of a transempirical reality; geometry studies perfect geometrical figures. Aristotle did not impugn the world of observation. The world is as we perceive it, though our senses can sometimes deceive us; a man with jaundice will see things as yellow when they are not. Successful explanation should “save the appearances”; it must explain why the world we see, hear, feel, taste, and smell appears as it does. In the seventeenth century Galileo, among others, persuaded his contemporaries that the earth rotated about the sun. Although he overturned Aristotelian astronomy and physics, he professed himself a disciple of Aristotle and accepted the obligation to explain why it looked as though the sun moved around the earth. He rejected much of Aristotle’s physics—Aristotle thought the earth was truly the center of the universe—but he accepted Aristotle’s claim that a successful explanation must explain why things look the way they do.

The study of politics is a form of natural history. Thomas Hobbes loathed Aristotle’s politics, and in Leviathan followed Plato in modeling politics on geometry; but he admired Aristotle’s biology. One consequence of that “biological” style is important, not only because it was at odds with Hobbes’s—and Plato’s—hankering after political geometry. Aristotle claimed that political analysis should aim only “at as much precision as the subject matter permits.” Political wisdom cannot aspire to the precision of geometry, and must not pretend to. Aboriculture suggests an analogy: most trees grow best in firm soil with a moderate water supply; a few thrive with their roots in mud and water. Scientists achieve deeper understanding by analyzing the differences between the trees that do the one and those that do the other. This may or may not assist the farmer, and Aristotle’s writings on ethics and politics suggest that it is the farmer’s needs—which is to say, in politics, the statesman’s and citizen’s needs—that are important. In ethics and politics we seek knowledge for the sake of action. Aristotle complains that Plato treated all knowledge as if it served the same goals, but in ethics and politics we seek the truth for the sake of knowing what to do. They are practical disciplines. We try to improve our ethical understanding by reflecting on the way we praise and blame certain actions and characters and ways of life; but we do it to live better, not to gratify curiosity.

One final aspect of this view of nature and science matters to us. Most of us today begin by thinking about the rights or the needs of individuals, and ask what sort of state has a legitimate claim on their allegiance or will best promote their welfare. That is, the individual is—to use Aristotle’s terminology—“prior” to the state. Not for Aristotle. The individual is intended by nature to live and thrive in a polis, so the polis is “prior” to the individual. This has the consequence that politics is the master science or the master art, since it aims to discover the conditions under which the best state can come into being and flourish. Just as the hand is explained by its role in enabling its owner, a human person, to flourish, the qualities of citizens are explained by their role in enabling the state to flourish. An analogy might be taken from the theater. Any actor longs to play Lear or Hamlet, the first because Lear is one of the greatest tragic heroes in all drama, and the second because every skill an actor might possess is needed to display Hamlet’s agonies of indecision. King Lear and Prince Hamlet are characters in Shakespeare’s plays. We understand them by understanding the plays. We understand citizens by understanding the polis, and just as any actor wishes to play Hamlet or Lear, any autonomous and intelligent being would wish to play the part of a citizen in an Aristotelian polis.

ETHICS AND THE POLITICS

Aristotle claimed that the polis existed “by nature” because nature means us to live a good life in common. We must therefore start with his view of the good life; and because the central virtue of the polis is justice, we must see how different Aristotle’s views of justice and of our motives for being just are from Plato’s. In Politics Aristotle relies on the account of justice he gave in the Nicomachean Ethics. Ethics is the study of “living well.” To know how to live well, we need to know the goal of human life, since knowing how well any activity has gone is a matter of knowing how far it has achieved its goal. Human life, says Aristotle, goes well when we achieve happiness, but only happiness of a certain sort, namely, happiness approved by reason. Only then are we exercising the capacities that nature intends us to exercise, and “living well.” If I am a Mafia boss, and I have just murdered the entire family of a rival, men, women, and children alike, I may be happy; but I am happy because I have a vile character. No reasonable man wants to be made happy by a massacre.

Nature intends us to enjoy the happiness of a good person. This argument seems circular: we ask what the good life is and are told it is a happy life; we ask what happiness is and are told it is pleasure achieved in the right way by the right sort of person; we ask what the right sort of person is and are told it is someone who lives a life of virtue according to reason; and when we ask about the virtues, we are told that they are those habits of thought and action whose practice gives happiness to the person who has acquired the right kind of character. The argument is indeed circular but not viciously circular. To make progress, we must examine the particular virtues—reason, temperance, fidelity, courage, justice, and so on—and discover how they contribute to the good life. This is what Aristotle does. The fact that practicing the virtues can be shown to fit together in a well-conducted life gives Aristotle confidence in the framework. Once again it is worth noticing that our notions of morality and Aristotle’s ideas about ethics are not quite on all fours. Many excellences that he thinks a well-found polis would encourage are not ones that we would call moral: being well-educated, having good taste, knowing how to bear ourselves in public. They are important in cementing a certain sort of social life, which is in turn important in preserving the cohesion of the polis, but they are not in the modern sense moral qualities.

Aristotle agrees with Plato that a successful polis must be built on justice, but his understanding of justice is not Plato’s. The Nicomachean Ethics criticizes Plato for collapsing all the virtues into justice; Aristotle contrasts the justice that is one virtue among others with “justice” conceived of as virtue in general. “All-in rightness” is one thing; but justice in the usual sense is concerned with the distribution of goods and bads according to merit, giving everyone what is due. In a political context, this means the distribution of authority and power according to political virtue. A just state must have just inhabitants; states are just only if their citizens lead just lives. It would be a defect in Plato’s utopia if philosophers alone could be truly just. We must therefore be able to show that an ordinary reasonable person can practice justice and will wish to do so; but it is enough if such a person wishes to be just only under nonextraordinary conditions. Republic lost sight of the limits of argumentative possibility in defending the view that justice profits its practitioners no matter what. Plato’s argument was heroic but unpersuasive because the conception of happiness to which he appealed in arguing that the just man is inevitably happier than the unjust man is too unlike ordinary happiness; Aristotle repairs the defects in Plato’s case.

A just man will wish to be just as one aspect of living a good life. It is rational to be just and to acquire a just character, but there can be no guarantee that the just man will always do better than the unjust man. Nature means the just to flourish, but a given individual may be unlucky and be brought low by behaving well. A society of just persons will always do better than a society of unjust persons, and a rational man will wish to belong to such a society; but it cannot be guaranteed that every individual in such a society will thrive. Doing justice comes more easily when supported by the other virtues. A generous man will think of his family and friends and wish them to live in a just society, and that will make it easier for him to be just. Even the least-just person believes in justice to the extent of wanting everyone else to behave justly: the burglar does not wish to be burgled, nor the robber to be robbed. But a good person wants to be just for its own sake. He is made happy by being just, and being just is indispensable to the happiness he wants: he wants the trust of his friends and the respect of his peers, and these are logically connected with his being a just person, that is, the sort of person who rightly excites trust and respect.

It can be difficult to see how right Aristotle is. If we think that the deep truth about human beings is that they are self-centered “utility maximizers,” it is hard to see how they can interact except by treating one another as a means to their own selfish happiness. This is the worldview of Polus, Callicles, and Thrasymachus. Aristotle did not think we are the maximizers of anything in particular. We pursue many goals, each with its own point. There is still a hierarchy of goals: a rational man subordinates the search for worldly goods to the search for excellence of character, for instance. He hopes to be honored as such, and he will care very much what others think of him; but he is not just only instrumentally. “Greed is good” is not consistent with Aristotle’s view, but each genuine good has its place in a well-conducted life. There is no general problem of the form “Why should essentially selfish creatures care about justice, honesty, or any other virtue that benefits other people rather than themselves?” The premise of the question is false.

Human beings seek their own well-being, but not always effectively. When they fail, something has gone wrong. What is good for us is connected with what we want, inasmuch as the well-balanced man wants what is good for himself. But what is good for us is not defined as what we want, as it was by Thrasymachus; the wrong wants (think of addiction to drugs or alcohol or gambling) are disconnected from the good. Misguided wants undermine the pursuit of our good. So does simple error, as when I drink poison, believing it to be a tonic, and die when I mean to restore my health. We may make more elaborate mistakes, as when we think that harshness toward defeated enemies will make them more cooperative rather than less, or jump to conclusions, as when we succeed once in intimidating our enemies and conclude that we shall always so succeed. Other mistakes stem from deficiencies in character; a coward misreads situations as being more dangerous than they in fact are, and fails to see the point of courage.

POLITICAL ANALYSIS

The correct mode of political analysis seems inescapable. We should inspect whatever political regimes we can, and determine what makes for success and failure; we can distinguish corrupt governments from good governments; we can ascertain which regimes promote good political character and which the reverse; we can discover why different peoples adopt different kinds of regimes, and why what we call “politics” flourishes in some but not all societies. Aristotle sent students to discover the constitutional arrangements of Greek cities, although only The Constitution of Athens survives; it is itself something of a jumble and may or may not have been written by Aristotle himself rather than a student, but is fascinating nonetheless.

Politics consists of eight books, the two last very unlike their predecessors. These provide a picture of the ideal state and its educational system, a task that earlier books seemed to dismiss as a waste of time. They are also very incomplete; the final book amounts to a handful of pages devoted to the education of the young. The first six books form a well-organized argument; the first book distinguishes political associations from all others, and distinguishes their organizing principles from those of the family and the domestic household; the second discusses ideal states in theory and in practice; books 3 and 4 tackle the connected topics of forms of constitution and qualification for citizenship; and books 5 and 6 cover the connected topics of revolutionary upheaval and the construction of constitutional arrangements that will prevent or divert or defuse such upheaval.

Nonetheless, Politics is a sprawling work, and many issues come up for discussion more than once. The nature of citizenship is a running theme, for instance. It is discussed in the context of forms of authority in the first book, when citizen–citizen relations are distinguished from master–slave, husband–wife, parent–children relations; that launches the repudiation of Plato’s model of the polity in the second book. Qualifications for citizenship are the topic of the third and fourth books, and that subject recurs in books 5 and 6 in the context of rethinking what sorts of people should have access to political power. The pleasures of brooding on these recurrent discussions are to be had by reading Politics slowly. What follows here selects rather brutally, with an eye to the discussion of Plato’s Republic, and to what others made of Aristotle in the next two millennia. My discussion does not follow Aristotle’s own sequence; it initially skirts book 2, in order to end with Aristotle’s attack on ideal state theory in that book, and his later ventures into that field.⁵

POLITICAL MAN

Almost at the beginning of his Politics Aristotle declares that man is a creature intended by nature to live in a polis. Before he does so, he makes three only slightly less famous observations. First, he claims that all associations exist for a purpose and that, as the most inclusive association, the polis exists for the most inclusive purpose. It is the ultimate form of human organization and exists to satisfy the highest goals of social life. Second, other associations need the shelter of a polis, but it requires no other association above it; it is self-sufficient and sustains a complete life for its members. Third, the correct way of governing such an association is peculiar to it; it alone should be governed “politically.” Aristotle criticizes writers who conflate the authority of “statesmen”—constitutional rulers—with that of conquerors, husbands, fathers, or owners of slaves. Plato is the target. Authority in a polis is specific to it, not to be confused with authority in other relationships. A state is not a large family, and a family is not a small state. States may have begun as monarchies because they grew out of patriarchally governed clans; but if they grew out of clans, their goals are not a clan’s goals. An association is to be understood in terms of its purpose rather than its origin; the purpose of the state is not that of a family or clan. The polis, he says, “grows for the sake of mere life, but it exists for the sake of a good life.”

Aristotle has in mind the Greek city-state. Much of what he writes seems to be applicable to any state, and surprisingly often is; what he himself was concerned with was the successful functioning of the kind of state that the Athenians had created in the late sixth century, and its Greek peers. When he goes on to say that man is meant by nature to live in a polis, he means that the polis provides the environment in which human beings can best fulfill their potential and in which they can live the good life to the full. This appears on its face to contradict what he says elsewhere (and even in Politics itself) when claiming that the best of human lives is the philosopher’s life of contemplation.⁶ Aristotle has two plausible ways of resolving this tension, and his students would very likely have invoked both.

The first is to notice that few people will wish to follow the route that the philosopher follows. It may be true that if one has the tastes and aptitudes that philosophy demands, the life of the philosopher is uniquely fulfilling, and that nobody who has followed the life of the philosopher would wish to follow any other. Not many people have those tastes and aptitudes, and most people will find that the polis provides the environment in which they can lead the best life for them. Nor is this to say that they are “inferior” people. Their lives display virtues such as courage, justice, fidelity, honesty, and temperance; they live the best possible active rather than the best contemplative life. Nor is it a simple truth that the vita contemplativa is better than the vita activa, if it is a truth at all. The second move is to observe that the fulfillment of the philosopher is slightly odd. Aristotle claims that the man who does not need the polis is either a beast or a god; animals cannot form political societies, since they lack speech and reason, while gods are individually self-sufficient and do not need political association.⁷ The philosopher aims to think God’s thoughts, and if he succeeds, he also is so self-sufficient that the assessment of the success of his life escapes the usual categories. Whether this is a condition one would wish to be in, unless so irresistibly called to it as to have no choice in the matter, is a deep question not to be tackled here. It suggests yet again a tension between philosophy’s search for absolutes and the political search for the modus vivendi, for ways of living together.

Aristotle devotes the first book of his Politics to following out the implications of this approach. Since a polis is an association of villages—he may have had in mind the demes of Athens—and a village is an association of households, he first analyzes the nature of households, with an eye to the relationship between economic and political life, always looking to differentiate the kind of authority exercised in these different spheres from political authority. Within the family, a male head governs women and children. Aristotle did not say that women were imperfect men, but he thought they were less well governed by their own reason than an educated man would be. It is therefore good for them to be governed by their husbands, and it would be bad for them to live public lives as male citizens do. A man exercises domestic authority as the head of a household, over wife, children, and slaves. As husband/father his authority is not based on force or exercised in his own narrow interests; his authority over slaves, however, is literally despotic: despotis means “master.” The aim of his rule is to ensure that the family flourishes as a family. Aristotle bequeaths to posterity the thought that the extent and the nature of the authority that sustains human associations are determined by the functions for which the association exists, that is, by the nature of the association. Locke’s analysis of the authority of government in his Second Treatise, published in 1690, relies on just this thought two millennia later; whether through Locke’s influence or by some other route, the thought itself is enshrined in the American Constitution with its commitment to limited government, and the measuring of authority by the goals to be sought.⁸

SLAVERY

The insistence that authority follows function extends to the relationship that most troubles Aristotle’s readers, slavery. Aristotle assumed that if a man (and it is only men he has in mind) was to have leisure to play a role in the political life of his society, slaves must do the manual labor that is beneath the dignity of citizens. The defenders of slavery in the antebellum American South sometimes relied on that argument, though they were more likely to draw on biblical than on philosophical inspiration, or simply to point to the miseries of “free labor” in the North, an argumentative resource not available to Aristotle. He very bleakly describes slaves as “animated tools,” instruments to be set to work to achieve what their owners require of them. Greek slavery was mostly, but not always, less horrible than the plantation slavery of the southern United States and the Roman latifundia. It was easy for men, women, and children alike to end up enslaved after military defeat, with the result that many slaves were better educated than their owners, and the condition of household slaves was often tolerable. We may recall Plato’s complaint that in Athens one could not distinguish slaves from citizens, or the depiction of cheerfully idle household slaves in any of Aristophanes’s comedies. The same could not be said of slaves working in the silver mines at Laurium, on which Athenian prosperity depended and where miners died of overwork and lead poisoning; but the Athenians had been on the receiving end of the same treatment when they were defeated at Syracuse and set to work in the Sicilian quarries, and they neither complained on their own behalf nor softened their treatment of others. Broad humanitarianism was no more current in the classical Greek world than in the Roman world.

The view that the slave is a living implement did not imply that the owner could do with a slave anything that he might do with a plow or a spade. It was rather that if the relationship between master and slave is founded in nature, the disparity between the intelligence of the master and that of the slave should be of such a degree that the slave has intelligence enough only to follow instructions, and needs the master’s intelligence to direct him. It would be good if masters and slaves were physically unlike as well. Nature, says Aristotle, intends slaves to have strong but unattractive bodies meant for manual labor and their masters to have attractive and athletic but less strong bodies. Sadly, nature often fails.⁹ Aristotle half admits that slavery is for the most part “conventional” and that many slaves, perhaps even most, may be wrongly enslaved. He avoids undermining slavery: slavery was necessary, if politics as Aristotle understood it was to be possible. If all went well, there could even be a form of friendship between master and slave, since the master would treat the slave in ways that conduced to the slave’s well-being. Unsurprisingly, when Aristotle draws up the design for an ideal state, he suggests a compromise. Greeks should not enslave Greeks, only non-Greeks, since they have servile natures, whereas Hellenes do not.¹⁰ These remarks, which remain quite undeveloped, indicate the distance between Aristotle’s casual assumption of the ethnic superiority of the Greeks over all their neighbors and modern racism, and how little intellectual pressure he was under to provide an elaborate justification of an institution that was taken for granted until the Enlightenment.

The oddity of Aristotle’s views, which explains why readers so often hope that he might really be meaning to undermine the institution, is that he contradicts himself in a way he rarely does elsewhere. The thought that a slave is an animated tool suggests the slave’s owner need take only the interest in the slave’s welfare that he would take in the well-being of a spade. A spade needs cleaning and sharpening to be fit for digging; but nobody thinks we could be friendly with a spade. The recognition that masters and slaves often existed on good terms undermines the thought that slaves are merely tools. This is not the only contradiction; Aristotle holds, as he must, that for those who are slaves by nature, slavery is good. Yet when he discusses the ideal state, Aristotle argues that slaves should be offered the prospect of manumission, although this would not be doing them a good turn if they were suited only to slavery. Defenders of antebellum slavery were more consistent in arguing that the freed slaves would be unable to survive. If freedom would be good for them, only captives taken prisoner in a just war are rightly enslaved; and their enslavement is a punishment brought to an end by manumission. Aristotle has the same difficulties with slavery as with the authority of husband over wife. If the relationship is not arbitrary and based on brute force, the superior party must be more rational than the inferior; but not only is the inferior likely to be as rational as the superior; it is implicit in the theory that the inferior must be intelligent enough to be governed as a rational human being. If slaves and women are intellectually indistinguishable from their owners and husbands, Aristotle’s framework is threatened. His mode of justification creates more problems than he can admit to. It may suggest some residual unease that he says that if, per impossibile, plows could act of themselves, slaves would be unnecessary.¹¹ It does not, of course, follow that everyone who could employ machinery in place of slaves would choose to do so; it took the American Civil War to persuade the southern states to give up their slaves. It was not obviously and indisputably irrational of the southern slave owners to make some sacrifice of economic efficiency for the sake of preserving what they saw as an aristocratic way of life.

One explanation of Aristotle’s persistence in the face of difficulty lies in a different aspect of the nature of politics. When he turns to defining politics for a second time in book 7, he says that there are climatic and cultural-cum-economic reasons why only some peoples can practice politics. In the cold and barren country of the Scythians, life is so hard that it leaves no time for public debate and for the give-and-take of politics. Peoples whose energies are consumed by staying alive can practice nothing properly called politics. They live off the land, they do not form settled communities, and their tribal organization cannot sustain political life. Conversely, people who live in too hot and enervating a climate cannot sustain the vigorous debate that politics requires; they will find themselves living under a despotism. The Persians, for instance, do not govern themselves politically. They are doubly non-self-governing. They do not govern themselves, since their lives are managed by the satraps of the Persian king; and the process whereby the satraps decide how to manage the people under their control are not public processes of debate and discussion, but secret and unaccountable. Aristotle does not quite say that we cannot talk of the “politics” of the Persian monarchy; but he makes a sharp contrast between the ways events are controlled and initiated in Persia and among the Greeks. Unsurprisingly, in view of Aristotle’s habit of looking for the proper course of action in the mean between two extremes, he finds the Greeks uniquely suited by nature, climate, and economy to practice politics. In Greece there is, or can be, freedom without anarchy, and order without tyranny.¹²

ECONOMIC ACTIVITY

The economic activities that permit political life to flourish can also threaten it. Aristotle considers what sort of production and consumption best sustains citizenship. As one might expect, he seeks the mean between excessive austerity and riotous moneymaking and consumerism. The Spartans were obsessed with the dangers posed by the helots whom they enslaved and kept down by murder and brutality, and with the danger of their own citizens’ becoming corrupted by soft living; they kept foreign trade to a minimum and made their young men eat at military messes, so that commensality would maintain public spirit and prevent them from hankering after a comfortable private life. It worked only partially. Spartans were notoriously rapacious once away from the repressive discipline of their own city. Spartan education and militarism were not successful in internalizing the desired morality. The Spartans turned their city into a boot camp; it produced soldiers willing to die for good, bad, or indifferent reasons, but not an intelligent devotion to duty. Spartans were easy to bribe; they also lacked the cultural refinements of less militaristic states.

Aristotle shared the aims of Plato and the Spartans: to create public-spirited citizens and avoid the subversion of public spirit by private economic activity, but he hoped to achieve them by nondrastic measures. Plato admired the Spartan contempt for physical comfort; Aristotle did not. More importantly, he was skeptical of Plato’s obsession with abolishing private property. He agreed that use in common in the context of public feasts and festivals encouraged public spirit, but he denied that production in common could be efficient. He mocked Plato’s belief that the community of wives, children, and property would encourage people to transfer the sentiments ordinarily attached to “my family” and “my property” to “our” common family and property. He saw a truth that the state of much public space reinforces today; we do not think that what belongs to all of us belongs to each of us; we think it belongs to nobody, and we neglect it. For a man to have an incentive to provide for his family, he must think of it as his family; to have an incentive to look after his farm and crops in the most productive way, he must see them as his. Aristotle argues for private production and common use.

Even more deeply embedded is the thought that some work is intrinsically degrading and bad for the character of those who do it; and some kinds of economic activity are wrong in themselves. The basic thought is familiar. Nature tells us what we need: what food and drink, what shelter and clothing. We need enough but not too much food, drink, shelter, and comfort, as any properly brought-up person understands. We may not be able to give a very detailed account of these needs, but we do not have to. We know what work is degrading even if we cannot say exactly why; and we know that a decent person would engage in some occupations and not in others even if we cannot say exactly why. Modern economists do not ask, as Aristotle and medieval writers did, about the proper end or goal or purpose of economic activity; we do not talk as they did about the just price of things, though we do have a strong, if not very clear, sense that some prices and some incomes are unconscionably high or low. Trade unions have always been committed to a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work, which is not so different from Aristotle’s economics. Aristotle thought that our natural needs set the bounds of acceptability. We work to provide food, drink, clothing, and shelter; the aim of production is consumption. Money is therefore problematic. Official coinage was a fairly recent invention in Greek society, the oldest surviving coins dating from around 600 BCE, and was regarded with suspicion by conservative moralists such as Plato and Aristotle. The way money is “worth” things to which it bears no physical or other relationship is “unnatural.” When one considers that a pair of shoes is worth or costs $175, and that this is what a hundred loaves cost or are worth, it is tempting to think that something must underpin their shared value. Whatever underpins it, it is not the fact that people will give us pieces of silver for shoes or bread; the value of money itself is what needs explanation.

Two plausible views have dominated purported explanations from that day to this. One relies on the thought that what we use requires human effort to make, catch, dig up, or find; the other relies instead on the fact that what we purchase reflects what we want. The first measures value by the efforts of the producers; the second measures value by the desires of the purchasers. Neither works well in all circumstances, and certainly not on its own, though they work well in combination; if I am a terrible shoemaker, my shoes will cost me much effort, but have little value in the marketplace since nobody will want to wear them. If I stumble across a diamond, it will sell for a great deal, but it will not have cost me much effort. The two thoughts together suggest that the price of anything measures its scarcity relative to the demand for it. We all need bread for survival and diamonds only when our hunger is sated; but bread is easy to produce in quantity and diamonds are not.

Aristotle began the tradition of thinking that behind the prices of goods in the marketplace there lies a true or natural value that should determine those prices. His discussion of money and usury had an enormous influence on later economic thought; most importantly, he inspired the medieval condemnation of moneylending and usury, though not of course its anti-Semitic aspects. Those flowed from the fact that Christians were supposedly prohibited from lending money at interest, and Jews were shut out of most economic activity, with the result that the Jews became moneylenders and loathed in consequence. Aristotle does not only denounce gouging or excessively high interest rates; using the biological metaphors that came so easily to him, he argued that things really useful to life were organic and that their creation and use are part of the natural cycle of production and consumption. Money is helpful when it promotes that cycle. It itself is barren, mere metal that cannot produce offspring as trees and plants do. Usury is therefore unnatural. The man who made his living by lending money at interest was setting barren metal to breed. As an unnatural way of making a living, it was to be deplored.¹³

Aristotle might be thought to be attacking the nouveaux riches. His complaints are rather more than social polemics, however. Most productive activities have a natural cycle; first we create and then we consume what we have made. Making money has no such beginning and ending. It has no natural terminus. Banking and moneymaking are solvents of social order, a point made by poets, playwrights, and social theorists ever since money was invented, and one that is made today whenever the excesses of operators in the financial marketplace threaten to impoverish everyone else.

Given Aristotle’s views about economic activity, and his praise of self-sufficiency, it is unsurprising that he thought the polis is best governed by moderately well-off men who draw their livelihood from farms on which they themselves do not do so much work, or work of the wrong sort, that they unfit themselves for public life. Speaking of a regime in which farmers and the moderately wealthy form the citizen body, he suggests that they should have some but not too much leisure; if they cannot spend too much time in the agora “politicking,” they will have to rely on standing regulations, that is, on the rule of law. Aristotle is the first writer to wish for the “government of laws not of men.” When Aristotle speaks of “farmers” in that context, he means small landowners or tenants, who owned a slave or two with whose assistance they worked their farms;¹⁴ at other times he means by “farmers” those who actually labor in the fields, and in the ideal state they would be slaves, some owned by private individuals and some by the state.¹⁵ Having distinguished the domestic arts from politics as the master art concerned to create the conditions of a good life in common, he turns aside in book 2 to discuss ideal states. But he has laid the foundations for what most concerns him: citizenship, constitutional order, and the avoidance of stasis, and we can follow that discussion before turning back to the ideal state.

CITIZENSHIP AND CONSTITUTION

With the ground cleared of ideal states and utopian experiments, Aristotle advances on the topics that have kept his work alive for two and a half thousand years: the nature of citizenship, the qualities of good constitutions, the causes of revolution, and prophylactics against upheaval. Their connection is that constitutions distribute power among citizens; the rules governing the gaining and use of political power are the central element of any constitution; and whether the inhabitants of a political community are content with the allocation of political rights and obligations is decisive in whether the community is stable or conflict ridden. Ways of allocating rights, obligations, and power that are least likely to provoke discontent are what we are seeking.

The subject raises questions about the connection between the qualities of the citizen as a member of a community and his qualities as an individual: loyalty, for instance, is a virtue in individuals and in the members of groups, but if the group is devoted to bad purposes, loyalty to the group is less obviously a virtue, because it will help the group achieve its (bad) goals. Criminologists suggest that there is in fact rather little honor among thieves, but our belief that there must be reflects the obvious thought that thieves who were honorable among themselves could prey on the rest of us more effectively. Whether a man can be a good citizen only by being a good man was hotly debated for the next two millennia. Among writers who drew their inspiration from ancient ideals, Machiavelli insisted that the man who is loyal to his country must often behave in ways a good man would flinch from, while Rousseau feared that Machiavelli was right and followed Plato in urging the merits of a small, simple, isolated, and uncommercial republic whose near-isolation from its neighbors would prevent the military and other entanglements that lead us into the temptation to sacrifice humanity and a wider justice to a patriotism that amounts to individual selflessness and collective selfishness. The modern nation-state has not rendered these anxieties obsolete; we are all too familiar with the fact that we know how to train young men to serve in our armed forces but do not know how to retrain them for civilian life.

Aristotle’s ideas about the qualities needed by citizens reflect the assumptions of well-off Athenians about the members of different social classes as well as a hardheaded view of the way economic interests affect political behavior. Citizenship for Aristotle is not the modern world’s notion, which is that of an entitlement to benefit from the protection of a particular government, and to exercise such political rights as that system confers. In most modern states, resident aliens can be expelled for misconduct; citizens cannot. Greek city-states habitually exiled their own leading citizens. Conversely, Swiss women were until recently unable to vote, but they were Swiss citizens in the modern sense of the word, since they carried Swiss passports and enjoyed the usual legal rights of inhabitants of modern states. In Aristotle’s terms, they were free—not slaves—but not fully citizens. It is the right of political (but not economic) equals to rule and be ruled in turn that constitutes citizenship as he discusses it. Mere membership of a polity is not his central concern; nor was it to Greeks generally, living as they did in a world devoid of passports, and without the welfare arrangements that raise questions about our identities and entitlements. That is not to say that membership was unimportant; when the Athenians murdered the male inhabitants of Melos and enslaved their wives and children, membership was no light matter.

Aristotle keeps his eye on the question of who can safely be given the right to rule and be ruled in turn; and to that question his predilection for finding virtue in a mean is relevant. Since men are neither beasts nor gods, their social arrangements must suit an existence lying in a mean between the invulnerable self-sufficiency of gods and the mindless self-sufficiency of beasts. Political existence rests on a form of equality (or inequality) among men. Thinking of the constitutional arrangements that determine citizenship, he is impelled toward a familiar position. If there were such a difference between one man and all others as there is between a god and men or between men and animals, that man should have absolute authority.¹⁶ There is no such difference. Conversely, if there were no difference between rich and poor, slave and free, men and women, adults and children, natives and foreigners, all could be citizens of whatever city they found themselves in. But there are important differences between them. The equality that citizenship implies is to be found in the mean position.

Aristotle did not argue that since everyone needs the protection of the laws, everyone should have the rights of (modern) citizenship. Slaves, foreigners, and women were entitled to much less than Athenian citizens, and Aristotle had no difficulties with that, even though he was himself only a resident alien in Athens. Indeed, the calmness with which he describes people in his own position is astonishing: “we call them citizens only in a qualified sense, as we might apply the term to children who are too young to be on the register, or to old men who have been relieved from state duties.”¹⁷ Nor did he suggest that human beings possess common attributes that should ground a human right to citizenship in whatever state one happened to be born in. The Stoics later argued something close to this, and it is a commonplace of liberal democratic theory, but Aristotle did not. He took it for granted that there are better and worse candidates for citizenship and that properly educated, economically independent, native-born, free men are the best. Nature meant women to be ruled by their husbands, so it would be against nature to admit women to citizenship. Men employed in repetitive manual labor where they did not exercise their own judgment were unfit to give their views on political matters. He did not argue, like later opponents of female suffrage, that women do not bear men’s military burdens and therefore cannot claim the same political status; nor did he suggest that regardless of mental capacity and occupation, the fact that we are all at risk from the errors of government entitles us to a say in their activities. His test was whether a person was naturally “autonomous.” Someone who was not self-governing domestically could not be part of the self-governing political community.

No Athenian believed that a Greek could be uninterested in politics. At the very least, self-defense demanded that a man keep a close eye on the holders of power; they understood what Trotsky observed twenty-five hundred years later. “You say you are not interested in politics; but politics is interested in you.” The uninterest in politics and the ignorance about both politicians and political institutions displayed by British or American “citizens” of the present day would have been incomprehensible. It would also have been very surprising in such small, face-to-face communities. Within the polis politics was often class warfare; it was understood that the upper classes would try to restrict eligibility for citizenship to protect their wealth and status, and that the lower classes would try to extend their political power in self-defense. The prehistory of Athenian democracy was a long struggle to open the right to participate and hold office to those not already entitled by wealth and birth; once Athenian democracy was instituted, it remained a struggle in which the common people tried to extend their grip on the political process and the oligarchically minded tried to roll back the gains of their opponents. These struggles were sometimes conducted with a degree of savagery that no political system could readily contain; Thucydides’s account of the massacres that took place all over Greece when the war between Athens and the Peloponnesian League sparked off civil wars elsewhere makes it clear that rich and poor were ready to bring in outsiders to settle local scores, and settle them violently.¹⁸ The violence of the Thirty Tyrants during their short-lived regime was notorious, and they were violently overthrown in turn, but atrocities were commonplace all over Greece. Aristotle’s obsession with political moderation is all the more compelling given the long history of immoderate behavior that constituted Greek political life. Unsurprisingly, he wants moderate persons to be citizens and institutional mechanisms to moderate conflict.

Who is to be a citizen is the obverse of the question of the best form of constitution. The nature of a constitution in Aristotle’s understanding of it is very like the modern understanding: the set of rules adopted by a polis that allocates functions to institutions, and lays down who possesses the right to participate in political decision making, and how decisions affecting their polis are to be made. Aristotle felt, but resisted, the temptation to which Plato succumbed. If “the best” could rule, everyone would do well to obey them. If there was one best man, there should be a panbasileus, a single ruler with no check on his authority. Since by definition he would always do what was best, there could be no reason to hold him back. More plausibly, there might be a group of individuals who were “the best,” and if so there should be an ideal aristocracy. Aristotle muddies the waters by assuming that “the best” would be intended by nature to form a hereditary ruling elite and that nature would try to ensure that the appropriate qualities would be passed down from one generation to the next. The difficulty, as the history of Athens and everywhere else attests, was that the genetic transmission of political wisdom and political flair cannot be relied on. The puzzle that obsessed Plato—why virtuous men have wicked sons—did not obsess Aristotle, but he noted the contrast between the heritability of desirable qualities that breeders could readily achieve in animals and the absence of any similar inheritance of good character in humans. To his credit, he also noticed that the “naturalness” of aristocratic rule was less obvious to nonaristocrats than to the upper classes themselves.

Aristotle came very close to the solution that would have resolved his anxieties. He had the right premises: the talent for political rule is not widely distributed, so politics is intrinsically “aristocratic”; the talent is not reliably inherited, so hereditary aristocracy is imperfect. Many people who do not possess political talent can recognize its presence in others; they can choose a nonhereditary aristocracy. This is modern representative government. The reason he did not suggest it is instructive. The premises were in place. Aristotle firmly believed that although the wearer of a pair of shoes may not know how to make a pair of shoes, he knows where the shoe pinches. He also went out of his way to point out that in many contexts many heads are wiser than one. He lived two millennia before the invention of modern representative government; but representative government essentially allows a democratic citizen base to choose its own rulers. It is, when it works as we hope, the device for producing an elective aristocracy that Aristotle needed in order to unite the common sense of the many with the talent of the few. James Madison and James Mill, writing within two decades of each other in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, thought that representation was the great discovery of the modern age. It allowed democratic, or more exactly popular, government on a large scale. Aristotle thought a state in which citizens did not know each other by sight was no state at all; a state was necessarily limited in size. If there were no more than a few thousand citizens, they did not need representative arrangements, and the only purpose of election would be, as at Athens, to choose the occupants of official positions. His discussion of the correct size of the citizen body implies that Athens is far too large. The idea of representative democracy did not come easily to modern thinkers; representative institutions existed centuries before they were seen as a way of creating a form of democracy, namely, “representative democracy.” Rousseau proposed elective aristocracy as the best of all forms of government, but denounced the idea of representation on which the modern version of elective aristocracy rests. A few years later, Madison saw the modern argument clearly, as did Jefferson when he distinguished “pure” and “representative” forms of democracy.

ARISTOTLE’S CLASSIFICATION OF CONSTITUTIONS

Aristocracy is in principle the best form of government: there the best men rule because they possess judgment, courage, justice, and moderation in the highest degree. They display excellence as citizens, and a constitution that places power in their hands achieves excellence as a constitution. A true aristocracy is the constitutional regime in which the few best rule in the interest of the whole. Yet experience shows that aristocracies have a regrettable habit of becoming oligarchies in which class pride, not public spirit, rules the day, and in which moderation gives way to the oppression of other social classes. To see how Aristotle resolved the difficulties as he understood them, we must turn to what he is best remembered for, the sexpartite distinction between forms of government according to the numbers who participate in them, on the one hand, and their goodness or corruption, on the other.

The three virtuous forms of government are kingship, aristocracy, and politeia, in which one, a few, or many persons possess ultimate power, and employ it to govern for the sake of the common good; the corrupt forms are tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy, in which one man, a few men, or the poor many govern in their own narrow interests.¹⁹ When “democracy” became the preferred label for modern representative government, the fashion sprang up to call the bad form of popular government “ochlocracy,” or mob rule; Aristotle had no such qualms. The demos are the “poor many,” and like all Greek thinkers he assumed that the poor many would use political power in their own interest. The problem in designing a constitution is to distribute power so as to give every incentive to those who have it to use it for the common good, not in their narrow class interest. Democrats believed that poverty and the practice of mean occupations should not disqualify a man from active citizenship; Aristotle thought them doubly wrong. Poor men and practitioners of the banausic trades cannot raise their heads to contemplate the good of the whole society; as a class, the poor resent the better-off and will try to seize their wealth by whatever means they can. The “narrow democracy” or “expanded aristocracy” of the well-balanced politeia is the remedy. A narrow democracy would be a more restrictive version of the democracy that Cleisthenes had instituted, where the lowest social class was not yet permitted to hold most offices; conversely, an expanded aristocracy would be a system in which the requirements of birth and wealth were not as onerous as oligarchical parties wanted to institute. The thought is not complicated: too restrictive a constitution arouses resentment; too broad a constitution also does so. Somewhere in the middle ground lies the answer.

It is now clear how Aristotle connects the excellence of citizens with the excellence of the constitutional form. Although some men are undeniably superior to others, nobody is so unequivocally superior to every other man that his fellows will obey him unquestioningly. A virtuous man is more likely to be corrupted by absolute power than to become wiser and more virtuous; and untrammeled monarchical rule will turn tyrannical. Unbridled democratic government will so frighten the better-off that it will cause civil war. If it does not, it may become a collective tyranny. What is needed is what later came to be called checks and balances, and a selection process for political office that secures the service of people whose characters are adequate to the task. Nonetheless, Aristotle’s perspective is not ours. Modern political discussion is imbued with a concern for individual human rights; we look to institutions to hold accountable those who wield power over their fellows, so that the rights of individuals are respected. Aristotle does not. Because he sees the world in teleological terms, he asks—as Plato did—how we can ensure that the state functions as it should. The excellence of the citizenry and the excellence of the constitution are understood in that light. Hence, of course, Aristotle’s focus on the collective intelligence and collective good sense of collectives; if “the many” are not to be trusted, it remains true that many heads are better than one.

One way in which Aristotle surprises modern readers whose conception of democracy is tied to the existence of representative institutions and occasional visits to the polling booth by around half the electorate is his acceptance of the radical democratic view that the democratic mode of choice is the lottery.²⁰ Something else that surprises modern readers who reflect a little is how right he is. If what we wish to achieve is equal influence for all, and an equal share in the governing authority, choosing the occupants of political positions by a random procedure—a lottery—is uniquely effective. The fact that most people flinch from that conclusion suggests that—like Aristotle—they do not wish for equality of political influence above all else. They wish to secure both the benefits of aristocracy and the benefits of democracy without the defects of either. If we achieve this, we shall have created a politeia, the state that Aristotle claims is “on the whole best” and most likely to survive the problems that beset a political community.

THE AVOIDANCE OF STASIS

Aristotle seems to set his sights very high in arguing that the polis exists to provide the best life in common for man. But his eyes were also firmly fixed on the need to avoid revolution. The fact that politeia is the best practicable state is not a small matter; practicality is a central virtue in a state. Aristotle’s theory of revolution, or perhaps one should say his theory of the avoidance of revolution, is interesting for innumerable reasons, of which one is that it is intrinsically highly persuasive and makes excellent sense two and a half millennia later. Aristotle’s conception of revolution has two parts. It refers, on the one hand, to what he termed stasis, the situation in which political life simply could not go on any longer, and, on the other, to the bloody civil war to which this kind of breakdown could easily lead.

Stasis in the first sense is the antithesis of what every British civil servant is trained to regard as his purpose in life: “keeping the show on the road.” Stasis occurs when the show is decisively off the road. But the struggle for power does not stop when matters come to a grinding halt. When an existing ruling elite, or single ruler, loses the confidence of the populace and loses the capacity to hold their attention and to coerce dissenters into obedience, it is invariably replaced by another ruler or rulers, immediately or after a period of civil war. So the other face of Aristotle’s interest is in what later theorists summarized as “an unconstitutional change of constitution,” not just matters coming to a grinding halt but some new ruling group seizing power. This conception of revolution embraces both what Marx and other thinkers have taught us to think of as “real” revolutions, involving insurrection, bloodshed, and the mass mobilization of the populace, and what Marx’s disciples dismiss as mere coups d’état, in which no mobilization occurs and one elite is displaced by another, probably violently, but without popular involvement.

Aristotle was concerned with two situations above all, and about them he was extremely acute. The first was the tension between democratic and oligarchical factions. His interest was unsurprising, since it was this tension that marked Greek city-state politics and led to the most violent and prolonged bloodshed. He had an interesting, if schematic, view of what was at stake. His first insight was that revolution was provoked not only by a conflict of economic and social interests but also by a sense of injustice. Aristotle added the thought that two distinct conceptions of justice were at issue. The democratic conception of justice fueled the argument that men with equal political rights should be equal in their economic advantages. This suggests that revolution in democracies is essentially economic, driven by the needs of the poor or by a desire to be better-off. Unlike Marx, Aristotle did not think that the many are driven to revolt by sheer need. He thought it a brute fact about democracy that men who say to themselves that since they are equal in political status, they should be equal in everything, will turn to the elimination of economic inequality as their revolutionary project. Aristotle had no sympathy with an aspiration for economic equality. His politics is founded on the belief that nature provides for differences in intellectual and other virtues, and therefore in desert, and he did not doubt that the better-off were generally entitled to their wealth and social position. The point was to meet everyone’s aspirations sufficiently to preserve political stability.

If the democratic conception of justice might lead to an economic revolution among people who have the same political rights as their economic superiors, an oligarchical revolution proceeds in exactly the opposite way. The oligarchical notion of justice was that men who were unequal in wealth ought to be unequal in everything, that they should remove the political rights of the many and monopolize power as well as wealth. The history of Athens would have seemed to Aristotle sufficient evidence for this thought; but he could have drawn on innumerable other examples. The Peloponnesian War had been marked by savage struggles between oligarchs and democrats all over Greece and throughout the Aegean, and city-states were torn apart as oligarchs in one city aided their counterparts in another and democrats came to the aid of democrats.

Aristotle’s delicacy of touch comes out in his recipes for holding off the evils of stasis. Even relatively bad states can profit from the intelligent application of the rules of self-preservation. Aristotle was happy even to advise tyrannical regimes on preserving their power. His advice has been echoed through the ages, and makes a great deal of sense. It is simple enough, though hard to follow. Since what disables a tyrant is either the simple illegitimacy of his rule or the wickedness of his behavior, and the first of these is by definition irremediable, he must adopt a double strategy; on the one hand, he must keep his opponents divided, so that they do not unite against him, and on the other, try to behave as a decent monarch who had come to power by constitutional means would do: moderately and virtuously. Pre-echoing Machiavelli and other advisers to princes ever since, Aristotle advises against undue greed and self-indulgence; the rationally self-interested tyrant, to employ the idiom of a much later day, will sacrifice the pleasures of the flesh and the satisfaction of personal grudges, to protect his hold on power. In particular, he should be careful to eschew sexual advances to the wives and children of upper-class men. It is one thing to deprive others of their rightful share in the government of their society, quite another to affront their family pride and their honor by assaulting the chastity of their wives and daughters. The same advice evidently applies to seizing their property. The tyrant whom Polus imagines in Gorgias would be short-lived.

The advice suggests Aristotle’s concern to analyze how a state could function smoothly rather than to moralize from the sidelines about the wickedness of tyrants. The modern tendency to restrict the term “tyrant” to murderous dictators in the mold of Idi Amin makes Aristotle’s willingness to give advice to tyrants on how to preserve their position seem more shocking than it is. Aristotle’s patron and uncle-in-law, Hermias, was a good man but technically a tyrant. Not everyone was as unlucky as Plato in Sicily. Moreover, in Aristotle’s day there was no such disparity between rulers and ruled in their access to murderous military power as there is today. Tyrants were uneasier then than now and had to watch their step in a way their modern successors do not have to, as long as they can preserve the allegiance of their armed forces.

Given his advice to tyrants, it is easy to guess that Aristotle advises other regimes to look to their strengths and avoid their weaknesses. Democracies are in danger of provoking revolution if they add to the distress caused to the traditional ruling elite when it was forced to yield power to the poor; so attempts to create an equality of wealth as well as an equality of power should be eschewed. The temptation to load all the burdens of public life onto the backs of the well-off should be resisted. Moreover, the better-off ought to be allowed a proper place in the political system; the more democracy counterbalances itself with the characteristics of aristocracy, the safer and longer lasting the regime will be. The converse holds good for oligarchies; they must strengthen those features that will make them less repugnant to democrats, and should endeavor to avoid the risk of a revolution in which the poor many revolt against being reduced to near-slavery.

In offering this advice, Aristotle began a tradition of empirically minded constitutional theorizing often described as the theory of the mixed constitution; his place in that tradition, however, is not easy to characterize. Commonly, theories of the mixed constitution set out to provide a recipe for achieving the advantages of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy within one “mixed” constitution. Two centuries later, Polybius praised the Romans for adopting the recipe. More recently, much self-congratulatory thinking about British politics has pointed to the mixture of Crown, Lords, and Commons as such a mixed system, matched by American self-congratulation on the subject of the virtues of a separation of powers and the ability of executive, legislative, and judiciary to check and balance one another. Aristotle was interested in something different. His recipe for a stable governmental system relied on matching political power and economic interest, and it anticipated the findings of twentieth-century political science. A political system that gives political power to the majority of the citizens so long as they also possess the majority of society’s wealth is uniquely likely to be stable. This requires what sociologists called a “lozenge-shaped” distribution of wealth; if there are few very poor people, few very rich people, and a substantial majority of “comfortably off” people in a society, the middling sort with much to lose will outvote the poor and not ally with them to expropriate the rich; conversely, they will be sufficiently numerous to deter the rich from trying to encroach upon the rights and wealth of their inferiors. American political sociologists explained the resilience of American democracy by noting the United States’ achievement of this happy condition after World War II. This is not an account of a mixed constitution in the sense of a regime that combines elements of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, but an argument about the economic basis of political stability. Nonetheless, both it and the genuinely mixed regime reflect Aristotle’s search for a mean between extremes, as he acknowledges. He admits that commentators praise the mixed regime; it certainly benefits from being a mixture, just as bronze is stronger than the metals of which it is an alloy, but Aristotle’s interest is really in what to do if we cannot simply rely on “the best men.”

One-man rule degenerates too easily into tyranny, and democracy into mob rule; dictators are proud and prone to run amok, and the poor are ignorant and prone to be misled by demagogues. One difficulty Aristotle faced in giving unequivocal assent to the virtues of the mixed regime in the strict sense was that the system was made famous by Sparta; and Sparta failed in the task of encouraging the widest range of excellences among its citizens because it was devoted to one excellence only, military prowess. Aristotle relies instead on the good sense and steadiness of the middling sort, and his politeia allows the middling sort to exercise a preponderance of power that should ensure that things never get out of hand. This is why the distribution of wealth and income must support the distribution of political power. In 1961 Seymour Martin Lipset published a justly famous account of the conditions for stable liberal democratic government, freely acknowledging his debts to Aristotle and entitling the volume in which his argument appeared Political Man.²¹ Dante’s description of Aristotle as “the master of the wise” holds up very well six centuries after Dante.

A modern treatment of the subject would emphasize that if the middle class outnumbers the poor, as it is said to do in most prosperous modern economies, there is little advantage to be had in reducing the poor to beggary; even if the poor have some resources to exploit, the payoff for each member of the middle classes is too small to provide an incentive for misbehavior. Aristotle does not argue in those terms; he focuses rather on the effects of occupying a middle-class position on the character of middle-class people. The moderate social and economic condition of their lives would create a corresponding moderation in their desires; they would not wish to tear down their betters or to oppress their inferiors. Once again, we have to remember the principle that in all subjects we should aim only at as much precision as the subject affords. Aristotle’s views do not apply to all times and all places, or to all sorts of economies. The middle class in modern liberal democracies is not exactly the middle ranks of Greek society, nor should we extrapolate from a small, poor agricultural economy to a modern industrial economy with an elaborate and extensive public sector. The panic-stricken middle class that has been accused of bringing Hitler to power, described by Marxists as the wildgewordene Kleinbürger, is not what Aristotle had in mind. While we may admire the ingenuity of Aristotle’s analysis, we cannot simply “apply” it to ourselves. Nonetheless, it remains astonishingly suggestive.

IDEAL STATES

Aristotle’s genius was for showing the ways in which we might construct the “best practicable state.” This was not mere practicality; the goals of political life are not wholly mundane. The polity comes into existence for the sake of mere life, but it continues to exist for the sake of the good life. The good life is richly characterized, involving as it does the pursuit of justice, the expansion of the human capacities used in political debate, and the development of all the public and private virtues that a successful state can shelter—military courage, marital fidelity, devotion to the physical and psychological welfare of our children, and so on indefinitely. For this project to be successful, the state must practice what Aristotle regarded as politics in its essence. This essence is the bringing together of a diversity of people with a diversity of interests—to the degree that a community of Greeks from the fourth century BCE is not anachronistically described in such terms.

One of Aristotle’s most famous distinctions was the one he drew between the mere gregariousness of bees and cattle and the political character of human beings. Recent evolutionary theory suggests that he may have underestimated the complexity of the social lives of bees and ants, but the distinction he had in mind holds up well enough. Gregarious animals come together without speech; their need for one another brooks no discussion. People unite in a political society only by agreement on the justice of the terms on which they do so. This agreement invites a lot of discussion. This is a thought that Hobbes later twisted to his own ends, claiming, quite falsely, that Aristotle had described ants and bees as naturally political, and going on to argue that humans were not naturally political precisely because they had to establish political communities by agreement on principles of justice.²² The power of Aristotle’s argument is perhaps attested by Hobbes’s need to misrepresent it while stealing it for his own purposes.

The fact that politics achieves unity out of a plurality of interests and beliefs without suppressing them is the moral that Aristotle draws from his glancing discussion of Plato’s Laws and Republic in book 2. The book discusses the theory and practice of ideal communities, but Plato’s picture of utopia receives the most attention. If it is really true that Aristotle had worked with Plato on the writing of Laws when he was a student in the Academy, it would explain the similarities between the ideal state that Aristotle sets out in books 7 and 8 and the polity of Laws. In book 2, however, Aristotle criticizes Republic and Laws very severely. Plato, says Aristotle, was obsessed with disunity. This was not unreasonable. Athens was always on the verge of civil war; social class was set against social class; and the city’s self-esteem was fueled by constant wars with its neighbors. The attractions of social cohesion, and of a society that did not keep peace at home by waging war abroad, were obvious. Still, Plato’s attempt to secure peace by making the polis an archetype of a unitary order is a mistake.

It is a mistake because it turns a city into something other than a city. It is of the essence of the city that it is a compound of parts that have to be kept in a constantly changing but orderly relation to one another. Aristotle was the first critic to level against Plato the charge that has a particular resonance today as a criticism both of a certain sort of overly rationalistic politics and of the totalitarian state to which that kind of politics can lead. Plato does not provide for a better politics but for a society with no politics. He has purified politics to death. Nonetheless, Aristotle felt the attraction of this mode of thinking. At the heart of the attraction was the impulse to self-sufficiency. The centrality of self-sufficiency to Aristotle’s analysis is evident. The polis is logically prior to the individual as being the more self-sufficient of the two; individuals must live in a polis because they are not individually self-sufficient. This is not merely a matter of physical survival; it is a moral matter as well. Without mutual discipline, men become worse than animals. The being with no need of a city is either a God or a beast. The temptation is to think that the more complete the unity of the city, the greater the degree of self-sufficiency, and the greater its immunity to the ravages of time and conflict.

Both the larger claim that Plato abolishes politics by overemphasizing unity and Aristotle’s particular criticisms of Plato’s work are well taken. We have already seen his defense of the family, his acceptance of the need for private property, and his skepticism whether Plato’s abolition of family life for the guardians would mean their loyalties were transferred to the city. No doubt, some sorts of moneymaking are unnatural, and property for use is more natural than property for exchange and acquisition, but that does not impugn the desirability of private property as such. Aristotle approved of the Spartan tradition of making their young men dine in common messes, without thinking that it implied the end of private ownership or that Spartan austerity was good for us. Aristotle finally produced a devastating objection to Plato’s belief that the society described in Republic would be happy. Plato had said that in spite of the deprivation of property, family, and private life, the guardians would be happy serving the polis; but he backed away from that claim and argued that the city would be happy—implicitly admitting that many of the citizens would not be. To which Aristotle replied that happiness was not the sort of thing that could exist in the whole without existing in the parts. If the citizens were not happy, the polis was unhappy.

Yet Aristotle ends his Politics by setting up his own version of an ideal state. Exactly what is happening in books 7 and 8 is obscure, in the sense that, even more than elsewhere in Politics, Aristotle recurs to themes tackled elsewhere, in ways that threaten the consistency of the work. The dismissive treatment of the construction of utopias in book 2 casts doubt on whether the project of books 7 and 8 makes much sense. That book’s insistence that politics is the art of constructing a setting for the good life against the background of difficulties that can be controlled but never eliminated suggests that constructing ideal states is a dubious undertaking, suffering the problems suggested by the famous joke against the economist on a desert island who responds to the absence of a can opener with which to open the canned food washed up with himself and his companions with the sentence “Let x be a can opener.”

Nonetheless, the last two books of Politics have an interest as revealing what Aristotle thought perfection would look like. Like Plato, Aristotle turns a central problem of politics on its head; abandoning the question “Given the frailties and imperfections of human character, how does a statesman preserve order and pursue the common good?” to answer the question “How does a statesman ensure that the citizens are of good and amenable character?” Aristotle produces the town planner’s ideal state. The ideal polis will have no more than ten thousand citizens, so that all citizens can know one another, and in this context Aristotle makes his famous observation that a state can be neither too little nor too large, and rashly appeals to the obviousness of the fact that a ship cannot be five feet long or five hundred. Readers may wonder what we should call supertankers or the Chinese state. The citizens will be supported by an agricultural economy in which slaves will supply the workers needed for the farms, and the citizens will be fed at common tables. The detail into which Aristotle goes when discussing where the common tables should be established and especially where the common tables sponsored by the officials of the city should be located is surprising in itself and an indicator of the grip that Sparta exercised on his imagination as well as Plato’s. It may also reflect his friendship with Lycurgus, who was responsible for the organization of festivals and the like.

More importantly, it reminds us that Aristotle’s emphasis on the plurality of legitimate interests that politics exists to reconcile is not the ancestor of the social, moral, and religious pluralism of modern political liberalism. For although Aristotle acknowledges that different elements in a community will have strong views about the justice of their share of the benefits and burdens of social and political life, he does not acknowledge that they might legitimately have different and irreconcilable views about the nature of justice or the nature of the good life. The perspective is authoritarian. One aspect of this is Aristotle’s uninterest in any such concept as that of privacy. For Aristotle, it is perfectly proper for the state to regulate the sexual and family lives of its citizens; he sets down strict rules governing the ages at which men and women should have children, and provides for compulsory abortion where women become pregnant in a way that might imperil population policy or produce unhealthy children. In the process, he begins a long history of controversy by suggesting that when miscarriages are induced, it should be before the fetus has life and sense, which he puts at the time of quickening.

In short, Aristotle’s conceptions of a free society, political freedom, and the free man are not wholly foreign to us, but they are not ours. One can see this vividly in his fragmentary remarks about education at the very end of Politics. Aristotle is perhaps the first author of a theory of liberal education, which is to say, an account of the value of an education devoted to knowing things that are worth knowing for their own sake, and calculated to make the young man who learns them a gentleman. The definition of a liberal education as a gentleman’s education persisted into modern times; when Cardinal Newman wrote The Idea of a University in the middle of the nineteenth century, he declared that the object of a university was to turn out “gentlemen.” Conversely, Locke’s more utilitarian and vocational account of education had made an impact a century and a half earlier precisely because it subverted the older Aristotelian picture. But “liberal” in this context has nothing to do with political liberalism. It means “nonvocational” or “suited to a free spirit,” and its social connotations are unabashedly aristocratic.

A piece of advice that strikes oddly on the modern ear is that well-bred young people ought to learn to play a musical instrument but not with such skill that they might be mistaken for professional musicians. This was not simple snobbery, or a matter of urging that a violinist of good family ensure he was not mistaken for Menuhin or Heifetz. Professional musicians were in demand in places of ill repute, hired in for parties at which prostitutes provided the entertainment. Today we would not expect a stag party to hire both strippers and a string quartet. Nonetheless, Aristotle’s enthusiasm for the preservation of social distinction and his emphasis on the social position of the “high-souled” man remind us that even in his favored politeia, with as many respectable and steady men of the middle class admitted to political participation as is possible, Aristotle hankered after the rule of true, that is, natural aristocrats. If that attitude is not unknown two and a half millennia later, his unconcern with those left out of this vision of the world—women, ordinary working people, foreigners, slaves—is happily rather less common. But we do not see much sympathy for ordinary lives and ordinary happiness for many centuries more.

NOTES

  1. Aristotle, The Politics and The Constitution of Athens, ed. Stephen Everson, trans. Jonathan Barnes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) (1.4–7, slaves; 12–13, women), pp. 12–15, 27–30.

  2. Ibid. (1.12), p. 27.

  3. Ibid. (1.7), p. 19.

  4. Ibid. (1.2), p. 13.

  5. Though some commentators think the conventional ordering of Politics is anyway not what Aristotle originally intended.

  6. Aristotle, Politics (7.2), pp. 168–69.

  7. Ibid. (1.2), p. 8.

  8. John Locke, Second Treatise (sections 89–90), in Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 325–26.

  9. Aristotle, Politics (1.5), p. 17.

10. Ibid. (7.2), p. 181.

11. Ibid. (1.4), p. 15.

12. Ibid. (7.7), p. 175.

13. Ibid. (1.10), p. 25.

14. Ibid. (4.6), p. 100.

15. Ibid. (7.10), pp. 180–81.

16. Ibid. (3.13), pp. 80–83.

17. Ibid. (3.1), p. 62.

18. Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, ed. and trans. Steven Lattimore (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998), pp. 164–72.

19. Aristotle, Politics (3.7), p. 71.

20. Ibid. (4.9), pp. 104–5.

21. Seymour Martin Lipset, Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1960), foreword, pp. 7–10.

22. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 119.