Plato created an idea of political philosophy focused on the need for those with knowledge and virtue to serve others less able to understand or to attain them. In his vision, politics was a rare expertise, one that only an expert statesman or a small group of philosopher–kings and philosopher–queens could most safely and beneficially practise (it was second-best to have a large group of people governing themselves, as in the Laws). The highest and best form of politics was a service that an elite could provide to the many, saving them from sordid power struggles and directing them for their own best interests. Such an elevated political art could be possessed by only one or a few, who must use it to guide the ordinary humans incapable for the most part of doing so for themselves.

The Academy that Plato founded came to nurture an important transformation of this vision in the ideas of Plato’s student Aristotle. Studying and researching under Plato from the ages of seventeen to thirty-seven, later founding his own school in Athens (the Lyceum), Aristotle – who will be introduced in more detail below – would eventually develop a view of politics that was at once profoundly shaped by Plato’s and profoundly distinct from it. We might say that for Plato (again setting aside his Laws) doing politics is in essence an hierarchical relation: in most of his writings, it is a power that one or a few people can and should wield to shape those who cannot sufficiently shape themselves. For Aristotle, by contrast, to do politics is in essence a cooperative relationship. Politics is something that human beings, qua human beings, do together. It is an expression of our most distinctively human capacities. While the Platonic view of the proper goal of power – using knowledge to achieve virtue – remains fundamental to Aristotle’s vision of politics, Aristotle sees that goal as generally best achieved when virtuous citizens are able to share in carrying it out for themselves.

That fundamental idea of citizenship has a complicated relationship to the other ideas that we have so far discussed in this book (beyond the point noted in Chapter 2, that politeia originally means ‘condition of citizenship’, so that the relationship between constitution and citizenship is extremely close). For, in implying a relationship of equality among citizens who share together in a community (a koinonia), citizenship may seem to be also proto-democratic or at least to have an elective affinity with democracy. But, as we have seen, there were many other kinds of constitution in Greece; Aristotle was aware that he must also account for the citizenship shared in oligarchies and under monarchies. Moreover, he had learned from Plato to recognize that no existing constitutions actually aimed at virtue in the way that their theories of politics ideally prescribed. They may aim at freedom, wealth or honour, but not at virtue; in pursuing their chosen aim, they will develop their own self-serving theories of equality, justice and liberty.

To think about citizenship is, therefore, to think about who is ideally and actually ‘inside’ a given constitution as a citizen, who is ‘outside’, and why. This makes it a Janus-faced ideal. It seems to articulate a universal potential, and also to close it down, defining a community that is smaller than humanity and directing its members to serve each other and themselves preferentially over others. (Chapter 6 will consider the genesis of the alternative ideal of ‘Cosmopolitanism’, or, literally, the conception of being a citizen of the entire cosmos rather than one polis.) When Aristotle reproduces the exclusion of slaves and the partial exclusion of women from politics, positing a category of natural slaves, those exclusions contrast for modern readers with his affirmation of humans as political animals. Likewise, his exclusion of the poor from citizenship in his version of an ideal polis (‘the polis of our prayers’, Politics, Books 7–8) disturbingly crosses the normative and empirical lines, holding that their lack of education and leisure debars the poor from the pursuit of virtue that a normatively good polis demands.

For readers today interested in Aristotle’s ideas of citizenship, this tension takes a further special form in the case of the idea of democracy. Modern democrats characteristically celebrate the innate and equal potential in all citizens to contribute to self-rule. That makes democracy sound like the ultimately rational form of constitution, expressing the basic meaning of citizenship, and so leads many modern democrats to seek in Aristotle a theoretical justification for democracy despite his specific criticisms of it as a non-ideal regime form.1 In sorting out why Aristotle was critical of democracy and also how his thought has been appropriated by democratic theorists, we will be able to understand the complexities of his theory of citizenship. The identity and goals of a citizen will be fundamentally shaped by the politeia of each regime, in both the narrower and the broader senses. Thus the value of citizenship in any particular regime ultimately depends on the values that regime pursues, embodies and instils in its citizens, indeed in all of its inhabitants. To celebrate citizenship is also to raise the possibility of a radical critique of those regimes that fail to direct it to the most worthwhile ends.

Human nature for Aristotle was fully realized only when its potential for citizenship flowered fully (and so, too, its potential for understanding the world, a higher capacity still). But that capacity was not one that ordinary people, who would have to work for a living and who lacked education, would necessarily be able to develop and exercise well. Aristotle’s vision of an ideal polity was indeed deeply interactive: those who were equal to one another should exercise their capacities for virtue and practical wisdom in determining political affairs together. Yet, ideally, those exercising self-rule would be limited to those with the opportunity actually to exercise and cultivate the ethical and political virtues. Virtue for him, as for Plato, remained the ultimate aim and test of political life. If some or most people were unable – whether for innate or circumstantial reasons – to achieve it, they were not fit participants in politics. In taking inspiration from his work, we need to attend to the sources and limits of his own vision as well as to the ways in which it can be developed further in our own age.

Who was Aristotle?

Aristotle’s life (384–322 BCE) is marked by a paradox. The great exponent of citizenship and political participation lived abroad for the whole of his adult life and so did not participate in politics among his compatriots. He left his homeland of Stagira when he went away to university in Athens at the age of seventeen, never to return, spending most of his life (with the exception of two interludes described below) in Athens, first as Plato’s pupil in the Academy and later as the founder of his own school, the Lyceum.

Aristotle’s lifetime in the 4th century BCE coincided with the rise of a new threat to the independence of the Greek poleis (the plural of polis), in the form of the kings of Macedon, who came from northern Greece near Aristotle’s own birthplace. Following in the footsteps of his father, who had been physician to the Macedonian court, Aristotle served these rulers for a brief time, tutoring the young prince who would come to power in 336 BCE upon the assassination of his father Philip and become known as ‘Alexander the Great’ for conquering most of Greece and much of Asia as far as Afghanistan. When Alexander died suddenly in 323 BCE, the furore in Athens (which was chafing under the domination of Alexander’s general Antipater) gave rise to an accusation of impiety against the resident non-citizen and Macedonian-aligned Aristotle, who was living and teaching there. Unlike his teacher’s mentor Socrates, who had also been charged with impiety, Aristotle fled Athens to avoid a trial – so as, he supposedly said, to prevent Athens from sinning a second time against philosophy. He died of natural causes within a year, leaving as executor of his will the very general Antipater whose rule was bitterly resented by many Athenians.

Thus, unlike Socrates and Plato, who were citizens of Athens, Aristotle was enmeshed in the complex rise of Macedonian power that threatened the independence of the city in which he lived and taught and of other Greek cities more generally. The dramatic and unprecedented reach of Alexander’s conquests, extending from Greece far into Asia and incorporating Persia and a number of other eastern kingdoms, would forge a new model of imperial monarchy, fusing Greek and more eastern political ideals, languages and styles (even though cities and realms retained varying forms of relative autonomy within it). It was at some point while such global political reconfiguration was looming or under way in the hands of Philip or Alexander that Aristotle penned his paeans to citizenship and the polis – probably during his second stay in Athens (335–323 BCE) when he founded the Lyceum. Living in Athens as a metic who celebrated the civic self-rule in which he could not there take part, aware of the attractions and ambitions of imperial kingship, while praising the self-contained ideal of the polis – these are the tensions that marked Aristotle’s staggeringly productive intellectual life.

There is one more tension that we need to examine. I have stressed so far that Aristotle praised politics as a distinctively human excellence. Only humans, he argued, have the capacity for speaking and for reasoning individually and collectively about how to act – practical knowledge or wisdom (phronesis) – that makes politics both possible and necessary. But at the same time, he held that humans are not merely human. Mortal human animals share some capacities with the gods. In particular, we share the capacity for reasoning about the nature of things and for understanding and appreciating (‘contemplating’) the permanent truths of reality, which Aristotle called theoretical knowledge (theoria). Paradoxical as it sounds to us, such contemplation is in fact for Aristotle the highest possible form of activity, since in contemplating the natures of things we are actively understanding them (Pol. 1325b).

This leaves humans in Aristotle’s account of nature in an unusual position. He identifies the distinctive nature of most creatures as also constituting their highest capacity. For example, what makes a cow’s life distinctively cow-like are the capacities that sum up the highest possibilities of cow-hood. For humans, however, the most distinctively human capacity that we have, which is political participation, is not the same as the highest capacity that we have, which is contemplation. We might say that the life of politics is the most human life, but it is not the best human life. Yet the best human life, the life shared with the gods of contemplation, is not a fully possible human life at all – because, being human, we can only contemplate in intervals, having to interrupt to look after our other needs and functions in ways that the gods have no need to do. Humans are perched between beasts and gods, ideally aspiring to live as much like gods as we can, while knowing that we cannot do so all the time.

An Aristotelian Approach to the Universe

Opening his Metaphysics with the confident assertion that ‘All men by nature reach out to know’ (980a), Aristotle throws himself into the search for knowledge with unparalleled energy and erudition, directing his associates in research on topics from the soul to colour to plants to metaphysics to poetics. And these are only the works that survive (some thirty out of about 500 recorded titles), most of them in the form of lecture notes by Aristotle or his students, as opposed to the treatises and dialogues that were irretrievably lost in the centuries between Aristotle’s lifetime and our own.

All his inquiries are governed by a special method. He begins from existing beliefs or opinions (the endoxa, sometimes also called the ‘appearances’ or phainomena). These include, on the one hand, the beliefs of ordinary people (‘the many’) and, on the other hand, the theories of the especially learned (‘the wise’). In Aristotle’s view, all these are sources of potential truth and understanding, though they might need some correction and refinement: for different reasons, the many, and the wise, may get things wrong or make mistakes that have to be corrected. Still, fundamentally, the way that people see the world is a good guide to understanding its true nature. Unlike Plato, who was inclined to treat ordinary people’s beliefs as misleading and deceptive, Aristotle saw humans as by nature well suited to understanding the world.2

With this method in hand, Aristotle launches into understanding the eternal truths of nature as well as the special qualities of human nature. Nature, for him, is populated by ‘substances’: distinct individual beings, whether animals, plants or artefacts, that embody a particular kind of nature (a form) within matter. The form of each kind of nature is best defined by its telos, its goal or end, which in turn determines the characteristic way that each being functions (its ergon, or function). This is easiest to understand in the case of artefacts, shaped by their makers to carry out specific functions for a given purpose or end: for example, a bowl that is given a concave shape in order to serve the purpose of holding fruit. Aristotle applies the same kind of analysis to the species of living beings, which he sees as eternally existing, embodying functions and serving ends. For example the telos of a cow is to live the full life of a cow, carrying out its distinctive function so as to reproduce another generation of cows. For living beings, the full development and exercise of one’s capacities for appropriate action, the life of characteristic activity, is what counts as happiness.

What about humans? Humans share with other living beings, especially with other animals, a set of common functions: nutrition, reproduction, movement, perception, emotion. And humans share with the gods the function of being able to contemplate eternal truths. Yet humans also have a sphere of action that pertains to them alone: the sphere of deciding how to act in the case of things that could be otherwise, deciding by using language and deliberation, rather than acting (like ants or bees) from instinctually guided forms of communication. In reaching out to explore the world, we form an intention (prohairesis), which is at once a grasp and a yearning. That intention structures our reflections as we decide how to act – shaped by our habitual dispositions to act either appropriately or excessively.

What is unique in human nature is this capacity for practical reasoning, a capacity that we perfect when we develop ‘practical wisdom’ accompanied by the dispositions to act rightly in the diverse respects that constitute the ethical virtues. Aristotle thinks of virtue as lying in a mean between two excesses: for example, courage is the mean between rashness and cowardice. Because happiness comes from activity, we can’t really be happy if we remain as couch potatoes or live isolated, bored lives. We are doers, happy only when exercising capacities that include the sublime, divine activity of thinking and contemplating along with the characteristically human activity of deliberating and deciding, in the proper degree, moment and context.

Where does politics belong in this story? Human action is not a precise domain of study, as is the study of the changeless truths about the universe. But it is a special domain of study, pursued not merely to understand but in order to act well. In his major treatise on ethics, the Nicomachean Ethics, addressed to his son Nicomachus, Aristotle writes that ‘The goal is not knowing but doing’ (EN 1095a), specifically, the doing of virtuous action. In the domain of human action, ‘we are inquiring not in order to know what virtue is, but in order to become good.’3 So the fundamental goal of human action is to act well in relation to things that could be done otherwise, that is, in relation to the choices that humans face. Moreover, there is no sharp divide between individual and collective action, between ethics and politics. Ethics and politics alike aim at what is good as the goal (telos) of action, understanding this highest good as happiness; both use practical reasoning and knowledge in order to do so.

Politics is the domain of collective choices and decisions. And those, in turn, make possible virtuous individual decisions, because the laws and customs of a political community provide the context in which individuals can learn to exercise their capacities for virtue well. Humans are capable of developing bad and vicious habits just as they are capable of developing good and virtuous ones. The laws established in a polity help to make the difference, providing the context for habituation to form a virtuous ‘second nature’ out of the potential of our inborn first nature – and giving an extra incentive to obedience by imposing the fear of punishment. Once again, we see how the narrowly political politeia shapes the broader politeia, how political organization and structure shape the way of life and the character of a polity’s citizens.

In bad or imperfect polities, people don’t learn to aim at virtue. Too often they are seduced instead by the goals of pleasure, wealth or honour divorced from genuine goodness. People who devote themselves to feasting at the expense of health or family; plutocrats who ignore civic duties in the quest to amass wealth; generals who violate the ethical duties of war in order to retain the honour of command – each such person destroys his prospects for genuine happiness by letting some subordinate goal distort his understanding of a wider good. But this is not to say that pleasure, wealth and honour have to be abandoned altogether. Aristotle is not an ascetic. Far from it. For the capacities to enjoy pleasure, wealth and honour are also genuine human capacities. His view is rather that we should be educated in such a way as to bring these motivations together with the goal of seeking the genuine good.4 A child who is habituated to take pleasure in treating others well; to earn money by completing worthwhile tasks; and to find honour in playing by the rules – such a child will develop the kind of disposition that will allow him to be truly happy. He will enjoy pleasure, wealth and honour, but will do so only when and by exercising his capacity for virtue.

The ‘he’ here is deliberate; as we will see, Aristotle, unlike Plato, treats females as generally and significantly less capable of reliably developing and exercising reason in virtue of their sex. Women supposedly have a less secure capacity for exercising their reason, and are therefore said to benefit from being ruled by their husbands. Yet Aristotle ties himself in knots on this point, calling the rule of husbands over wives ‘constitutional’ rule (politikos, the adverb), but having to acknowledge that, unlike most forms of constitutional rule, the natures of the citizens here are not equal and so they are not to rule and be ruled in turn. Another such form of constitutional relationship that does not involve reciprocal equality in ruling will be found when Aristotle comes to consider monarchy. These two problematic cases reveal the faultline in defining constitutional rule as in some way involving equals, yet also allowing certain forms of it to permanently inscribe relations of hierarchy and inequality.

There is a further sting in the tail of this prescription. For if someone is not well brought up on these lines – if the adults around him are thieves or liars, who train him to put on a virtuous front but profit from unjust action behind the scenes – reading a book like Aristotle’s Ethics or Politics will be of no help in getting him to act correctly. Studying ethics can lead to action, as it ideally should, only if the ground is prepared with well-directed habits that dispose people to recognize and pursue what is good. The study of ethics can’t convert the immoral; its role is to further educate and to help perfect the well brought up (EN 1103b).

That again points to the sense in which ethics requires politics, in which citizenship traverses the public and the private formation of character, to use categories with a more modern valence. Habituation is not a matter merely of home life, but of the laws and customs by which children learn how to behave; we saw this in Chapter 2 in discussing Sparta, where boys and girls were subjected to such stringent training that many preferred to die rather than submit to military defeat or live as slaves. But, again, politics is not conceived here as a matter of some kind of external imposition. Rather, participation in politics is itself part of the excellence and fulfilment of adult human nature – and doing so provides the proper context in which younger people can be raised to enjoy such excellence and fulfilment in their turn. Citizenship is a condition for the good life as well as a constitutive part of it.

Inclusion and Exclusion

This puts us in a position to appreciate one of Aristotle’s most important sentences. We can begin by asking in more detail how it is that humans come to live in polities at all. In Book 1 of his Politics, Aristotle traces the origins of human communities as they originate in natural inclinations to associate. One natural association – the sexual attachment between female and male, resulting for the most part in procreation – is like the reproduction of other animals: it happens by nature in the sense of the reproductive functions, not as a result of specifically human deliberative choice. A household is composed of one such pair and their offspring; and a village is composed of an agglomeration of households, perhaps originally bound by kinship ties, as the brothers of a family establish households of their own. This is where Aristotle specifies that in a household pair, one person will be better able to govern the common life than the other, and he expects the superior in practical reasoning capacity will normally be the man (he does not consider here same-sex pairings): ‘the male is by nature fitter for command than the female’ (1259b, though he also admits there that some cases may violate this general natural principle; as he cautions repeatedly in his Physics, natural tendencies only ever hold ‘for the most part’).

All these communities arise originally for the sake of survival and fulfilling basic animal needs and functions. But, because humans inevitably use as much of their full range of capacities in associating together as much as possible, in families and beyond, this means that the family is already a locus for people to pursue the good life (the happy life, which is the virtuous life), not mere survival alone (what Aristotle calls ‘mere life’).5 Yet there are limits to the extent to which the good life can be pursued in an isolated household or village. For the capacity for practical reasoning together as equals, using speech to decide collectively how to act in relation to ‘the good and the evil, the just and the unjust’, is one that can be fully expressed only in a polis, which is the community that arises from the union of a set of villages (1253a–b).

A polis is not just a larger scale village. In having ‘reached the limit of complete self-sufficiency’, it forms a framework for the exercise of all human capacities. And so, while ‘coming into being for the sake of life’, the polis exists ‘for the sake of the good life’ (1252b). It constitutes the telos, the final end, of human association.

This is the conclusion that Aristotle draws in his famous sentence: ‘Hence it is clear that it is by nature that the polis exists, and that the human being by nature is a political animal’ (1252a). This does not mean that we find states popping up in forests like mushrooms. Quite the opposite. ‘By nature’, for Aristotle, does not mean that something is inevitably or spontaneously realized to the exclusion of human intervention. Indeed, he immediately acknowledges that not all humans do live in poleis. Political communities are built by humans, and humans may sometimes fail to build them, or be expelled from them. But what he means by saying that the polis exists by nature and that ‘the human being by nature is a political animal’ is that it is an innate capacity of human nature to associate with others to decide, using speech, how to act in relation to what is good and bad, just and unjust.

Humans have that capacity, and can live a fully human life, only if they realize it and are able to act upon it in the unique and peculiar state form of the polis. Some are simply unlucky in not getting to do so; a handful of others may be freakish solitaries, condemned by this defect in their nature to be ‘a lover of war’. So, for Aristotle, what is natural is not a ‘war of all against all’, as would be the case for the 17th-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes in his work Leviathan. On the contrary, Aristotle would say that it is unnatural to be naturally at war with other humans. Human nature (not universally or inevitably but characteristically) is to be sociable, and specifically to be political: to live in a political community, one in which people associate and speak together, making decisions for the sake of the good life and ruling themselves in accordance with justice. Only someone alienated from such a common life is ‘eager for war’, and only because he is by nature freakish in being solitary and ‘unyoked’ (1253a). The normal and natural human condition is not one of readiness for war but of readiness for politics.

This brings us to another controversial aspect of Aristotle’s analysis of human nature. This is his category of natural slaves. In a theory in which equal rule depends on equal capacity for practical reason, any significant failing of practical reason would logically require a corresponding inequality in rule.6 Aristotle thinks that he has found one such failing in women, whose practical reason, he says, is characteristically less authoritative than that of men. He thinks that he has found another in the case of natural slaves, who (on this logic) would be people who are wholly incapable of governing their own behaviour. Such people would not be independent agents at all. They would instead be living tools for their master, and would benefit the master’s purposes as well as receive benefits from a life under such despotic rule, being stipulatively unable to rule themselves.

But did Aristotle think that there were really any such people? He acknowledges that many of those who are captured in war and forced into slavery – the typical mode of acquiring slaves in Greece and neighbouring realms at the time – are not natural slaves at all. (Consider the noble women of Troy sold into slavery after their city was destroyed, for example.) And he remarks on claims having been made that all slavery is merely conventional, a matter of happenstance, with no basis in nature (alas, he names no names, so we don’t know the identities of the critics he had in mind). Nevertheless he insists on the possibility of a justified category of natural slavery: that, in principle, there could be humans who lack the capacity to direct their own actions and so are available to serve others as human tools – for the good of their masters and, as a consequence, their own.

Yet his discussion of this possibility is riven by tensions. For how can a slave be utterly lacking in rational capacity, if he is a human being, and if he has to be able to understand and follow his master’s instructions in order to serve his interests? The idea of a human being who is able to communicate and to reason sufficiently to act effectively, yet who lacks all grasp of the ends of action and all capacity for self-discipline, seems an unstable theoretical category, rather than a real possibility. (This has not stopped numerous defenders of slavery from appealing to Aristotelian natural slavery, for example, in writing of the Spanish American conquest and in defending the practices of the antebellum American South.7) And if there are, in actuality, no such natural slaves – even though Aristotle insisted that it was possible that there might be; and if women are not less capable of self-rule than men – even though Aristotle had believed they were – his theory of human nature would point not to domination and patriarchy but in the direction of equal citizenship. This is why many theorists of equal citizenship have been able to find inspiration in Aristotle, even though he himself accepted and justified forms of civic domination.

Contesting Equality

Equality is the essence of politics properly understood. As Aristotle says: ‘constitutional rule is of those who are free and equal’ (1255b). Conceptually, there should be no rule (no relation of subordination) among equals, because there is no logical basis to subordinate one equal to another. But, since rule is necessary in practice – a vital concession by Aristotle to experience – free and equal citizens take it in turns. Hence Aristotle’s famous account of the good citizen as one who knows how to rule and be ruled, though his definition proper of the citizen has come earlier: ‘he who shares in judging and in office’ (1277a, 1275a). Yet this definition does not automatically imply democracy (nor does it imply that all citizens must be eligible to hold all offices); nor does it deny the possibility of monarchy, since citizens may share in some functions of government even under a monarch. To have a share – to be equal in having a share – is not necessarily to have an exactly equal share. It leaves room for those functions, and for others, to be shared unequally on the basis of other relevant characteristics.

The fundamental question of ‘who is an equal’ is for Aristotle a question that has to be parsed logically into different possible meanings of ‘equal’. To give equality meaning, one modern scholar notes that we must always ask, ‘Equality of what?’8 Aristotle had already taught that ‘equality of what’ is always also tantamount to ‘equality for whom’. Depending on what counts as the basis for equality, some people will be included into citizenship or excluded from it.

In the ongoing conflicts between oligarchies and democracies, together with the spectre of oligarchy sharpened into monarchical empire, Aristotle acknowledges two fundamentally different ideas of equality at work. One of them is ‘arithmetical equality’: each person simply counts for one, as in majoritarian voting – which is more friendly to democracy. The other is ‘geometrical equality’: only those people are equal who are of equal merit or worth – whether that be measured in terms of virtue or more prosaically in terms of wealth – a definition more friendly to oligarchy. That is, these two logically open interpretations of equality give rise to two opposed political positions. In reality, democracies and oligarchies can both count as forms of constitutional rule. For they are each premised on equality, even though they identify ‘equals’ on different grounds. But each side will view the other’s interpretation as flawed: democrats viewing themselves as ‘being equal, claim to be worthy of sharing equally in all things’, while oligarchs, viewing themselves as ‘being unequal [to the many], seek to get more for themselves’ (1301a).

The violent tussles between partisans of oligarchy and democracy that marked the Greek world in the 5th and 4th centuries BCE were real-life illustrations of Aristotle’s point: that treating politics as a matter for equal citizens does not yet settle which citizens are to be considered equal. (The same is true of the struggles for the franchise for workers, one-time slaves and women in modern times.) Indeed, Aristotle sees the conflict over equality as lying at the bottom of virtually all political and factional unrest: ‘everywhere civil conflict arises because of inequality’ (1301b), though that desire may characterize oligarchs who resent their perceived equality with the poor as much as democrats asserting their equality with the rich. More generally: ‘Inferiors engage in civil conflict in order to be equal, and equals in order to be superior [to their inferiors, but equal among themselves: which they see as true equality]’(1302a).

It is the role of the statesman to take measures to prevent revolution, following advice that Aristotle gives in a broad spirit: for example, never to ‘treat those seeking honour unjustly in an affair of disrespect, or the many in an affair of profit’ (1308a). ‘The most important thing in every constitution and in all the laws and other administration is that they be so arranged that no one can profit from holding public office’ (1308b). Here, Aristotle recalls Plato’s conception of politics as service, versus self-enrichment and self-aggrandizement. For Plato, only reluctant rulers should rule, and they must do so for the benefit of the people, not for their own benefit; for Aristotle, even if officials may legitimately seek to hold office as a form of honour, they must be prevented from using it to make themselves rich.

As his discussion of political conflict shows, Aristotle’s understanding of the fundamental nature of politics is accompanied by a sensitive grasp of the vagaries and varieties of its actual practice. He is caustic about the way that ‘what is not said by people to be just or advantageous for themselves, they are not ashamed of doing to others; they seek just rule for themselves, but in relation to rule for others they care nothing for what is just’ (1324b). Yet he is not above using his knowledge to describe what a tyrant should do to hold on to power: either sow distrust, take away power from his subjects and humble and frighten them, or else try to act more like a king, guarding public revenues and protecting the city in case of war. He holds that each kind of regime will fall into difficulty if it pursues its innate goals too far in an untempered way, just as, in his ethical theory, virtue is always found in the mean between two extremes. Should the rich oligarchs busy themselves only with extracting more privileges for themselves, their regime will be less likely to survive than if they mollify the common people by treating them moderately. This was a live issue. Aristotle observed an oath sworn by some extreme oligarchs in his day, oligarchs who understood their own interests as opposite to the interests of their opponents: ‘I will be evil to the people [meaning, the poor or the common people who in these regimes might not even be citizens] and will seek out ways in which I may harm them.’ On this Aristotle comments tartly that oligarchic self-protection would be better served if they were to swear the exact opposite: ‘I will do the people no injustice’ (1310a).

Ruling in the Common Interest

Mediating between his fundamental account of the nature of politics as expressing the human capacity for practical reason, and these shrewd remarks about incautious tyrants and revolutionary oligarchs, is Aristotle’s classification of political regimes with respect to one crucial question. For deciding who is to hold power as a citizen is only half the battle: the other half is determining what those citizens should use their power to do. Should they selfishly pursue their own interests at the expense of others? If so, they would be deviant forms of government by the one, the few or the many defined by ruling in their self-interest only. Aristotle systematizes the definition of the good and bad kinds of the basic three Herodotean constitutions by means of a test of ruling in the common interest or in one’s own interest. On the bad side, he puts ‘tyranny’ (rule by one person in his own interest), but also the familiar Greek categories of ‘oligarchy’ (rule by a few people in their own interest) and ‘democracy’ (rule by the many in their own interest – as against that of the few), all three of these featuring as pervasive but perverse mistaken regimes. In contrast, he identifies the ‘correct forms of government’ as ‘those in which the one, or the few, or the many, rule for the sake of the common advantage’ (1279a), naming these ‘monarchy’, ‘aristocracy’ (a more self-consciously virtue-laden name than ‘oligarchy’) and ‘polity’ (in Greek, politeia, here appropriating the general name of ‘constitution’ for this one regime form in particular, and using this in place of the now pejorative ‘democracy’ for an approved form of rule by the multitude).

The correct or true forms of government are rule of the citizens and for their benefit, even if not by all of them at all times; the deviations are rule of the citizens for the benefit of the rulers alone. But it might not be easy to set up the correct forms of government, especially polity, which Aristotle says at one point will succeed in its aim of ruling for the common interest only if populated by those who are virtuous or excellent in some way. In practice, he says, these are not all the citizens but rather specifically the hoplite class, those citizens able to afford to train and fight with armour (1279b). The polity as an example of rule by the many is actually an example of their exclusion: the poor many, who cannot afford hoplite armour, will not be citizens in this constitution.

But even this kind of sociological correction may be inadequate to ensure a correct form of government, in Aristotle’s view: because the one, few or many were likely to have nominated themselves for rule on the basis of sheer wealth or power, not of genuine virtue. (So he sets apart from all six regimes just mentioned the ‘best regime’, in which all and only those who are virtuous are citizens: we will discuss this further below.) And that self-nomination opens the door to instability in the correct forms of the three regimes as well. For example, the poor many will resent the paternalist rule of a self-appointed few. This leads Aristotle to consider how regimes might in practice stabilize themselves by balancing between opposed forms.

One way to do so is for a regime to take a leaf out of an opponent’s book of policy prescriptions, as for example when in modern times a conservative government extends unemployment benefits. This requires the ruling group to look beyond its partisan blinkers and concern itself not with pure party principle, but rather with its own longevity. ‘He [the legislator] must not think that what is popular or oligarchic is that which will give the city the most democratic or oligarchic way of life, but rather that which will make it last for the longest time’ (1302a).

Another way is to establish a regime that in some way fuses two principles normally opposed, as for example by giving some rights to the free and poor many and others to the rich few. Just as Aristotle describes how tyrants might save themselves by moderating their behaviour, so here he describes how democracies might moderate themselves and become more viable long term by incorporating some measures that are oligarchical in their tendency (such as a lowish property qualification: many Greek democracies imposed a low property qualification for at least some civic purposes). This is one of the origins of what later writers would call a ‘mixed regime’.

Yet Aristotle’s favourite idea of this kind is not that of a mixed regime, but of a middling or middle regime. Unlike the mixed regime, a middling regime will not combine democratic and oligarchical policies, but will rather have its political centre of gravity and identity in a group of citizens ‘in the middle’ (as mesoi) between the few rich and the many poor (1295b). Such citizens are most likely to be ‘equals and similars’ and so to constitute a secure base for political life. In practice in most cities there were very few such mesoi to be found, though Aristotle would want there to be more for this kind of regime to work. He says that this kind of middling regime is ‘the best constitution for most poleis and the best life for most human beings’ (1295a) – for those living in the ordinary circumstances of life, as opposed to the absolutely best regime that he had much less expectation of finding realized.

How far does the ‘common interest’ extend – that is, how demanding should it be? Aristotle views the polis as ‘a community’ in which the citizens share: it is a community of common activities, embracing the activities of ordinary life in the family and household, and encompassing them with the political decision-making of citizen equals.9 The question is which common activities are necessary and sufficient for the polis to thrive. Should property, for example, be owned in common? That tenet of communism is one that Aristotle thinks has been actually proposed in Plato’s Republic for the state as a whole (Pol. 1261a; but, as noted earlier, the Republic proposes that only the rulers be deprived of property, which is a different thing).

Aristotle, for his part, rejects common ownership, on the grounds that it is generally inefficient (he thinks it will diminish responsibility and encourage factiousness) and that it goes too far in unifying the state, as if it were one giant family instead of a plurality of distinct citizens each with his own household. Yet he favours an ideal of viewing property as providing public benefit and sometimes public use. This is to be put into practice, for example, by allowing others to hunt over private land, and by providing common meals: either by tithing from the produce of private lands, or by the establishment of polis property that could be farmed to feed the community together. Common meals, as practised in Crete and Sparta, and more ceremonially and restrictedly in Athens, are both a symbol and an incarnation of the ideal of sharing in common activity by which a polis community is defined.

The Case for Democracy – and Its Limits

So far we have stressed that Aristotle’s analysis of political equality and citizenship is far from a simple endorsement of democracy. He treats the regime he calls ‘democracy’ as a deviation from a superior form of ‘polity’ that would actually exclude the many poor from citizenship. He acknowledges ways of thinking about equality that support oligarchy rather than democracy. He takes virtuous flourishing as the ideal goal and ground for political participation. And he also shares elite views of his time (and for many generations to come) that assume that the poor who have to work for a living would be unable to cultivate virtue: at the very least because they lack the leisure and education to do so. Nevertheless, at one point in the Politics, he pauses to consider in what way the poor multitude might be incorporated into politics. Is there some truth in the democratic dictum that the people (including the poorest citizens) should be sovereign in government – and, if so, what should that sovereignty mean?

That question frames a famous chapter of the Politics (3.11) that considers the claim of the whole body of the demos – as opposed to, say, only the better sort of people – to be kurios in deciding what is left open by the laws (the laws, he insists, are to be kurios overall). A good case can be made for translating kurios as ‘sovereign’ (for starters, it is the same word used for the slave master and the husband or other male guardian of a woman, just like dominus in Latin).¹⁰ With kurios translated in this way, the chapter squarely raises the question of democratic or popular sovereignty. It answers that question by developing an account of how the demos are sovereign in selecting and scrutinizing the highest office-holders. That is a real form of popular sovereignty. But it is not an indiscriminate or wholesale endorsement of any and every form of democratic participation (as it is often taken to be). Aristotle is concerned to demarcate the proper claims of the democratic multitude. In so doing, he is as concerned to rebut broader claims that they might make as he is to refute objections to their participation at all. Once again, however, the ideas that he proposes for ways of thinking about the value and capacity of mass participation in judgement have inspired later adherents to take them further, to develop them in institutional settings very different from the ones to which Aristotle restricted his own case.

His own starting point is that the highest individual offices of a political regime should be allocated only to those who could be more reasonably expected to have developed their individual political capacities. In practice, that means a property requirement on office-holding for the highest individual offices, though he acknowledges elsewhere in a Platonic spirit that wealth is only a crude proxy for virtue (there were plenty of wealthy Greek men who failed to use their means to avail themselves of virtue). Yet this in turn raises a problem. For in the constitutionalist milieu of 4th-century Greek thought, those holding the highest offices (tas archas) were easily understood as those who were ruling (archein). But, in that case, it would seem that the poor multitude excluded from the highest offices were not actually ‘ruling and being ruled in turn’ – and so were not being treated as equal citizens.

Aristotle solves the problem by expanding the linked ideas of ruling and of sovereignty in one of his characteristic on-the-one-hand-but-on-the other-hand moves. In one sense, certainly, it is the highest office-holders who rule. But at the same time, it is those who choose the office-holders (and decide by scrutiny on their eligibility to serve) and who judge their performance in office who are sovereign – not by holding high office themselves, but by controlling (in these ways) those who do. The sovereign powers of the democratic multitude are the powers to decide (who should rule) and to judge (how well they have ruled). And he gives reasons to think that even a poor multitude will be able to exercise those functions well: ‘For the many, who are not as individuals excellent men, nevertheless can, when they have come together, be better than the few best people, not individually but collectively, just as feasts to which many contribute are better than feasts provided at one person’s expense.’11

Aristotle’s image of ‘feasts to which many contribute’ is as alluring as it is elusive. The usual reading of the ‘democratic feast’, as this passage is often called, is that he is referring to the greater diversity that the many can provide, though he may rather be stressing the greater aggregated quantities that they can offer (and the same ambiguity applies to other images that he provides as examples in this discussion).¹² Whatever the precise sources of better collective judgement, the role of the many in exercising such judgement is tailored, in its political application in the chapter, to their role in controlling the high office-holders. There, it is turned to the purposes of explaining how the exercise of popular sovereignty can control office-holders even if the people are, in specific institutional contexts, excluded from serving in those offices themselves.

All officials, including the highest ones, are to be subordinate to the law.¹³ Here Aristotle again goes beyond the practice of Athenian democracy, which alternated between declaring men the judges of what the law was and paying obeisance to the laws as greater than men. Aristotle fully entrenches law as the ideal ruler in the community, above the magistrates, insofar as it is passionless and impartial: the magistrates or officials are to be sovereign only over those matters on which ‘the laws cannot pronounce with precision’.14 Laws themselves, however, will be relative to a given regime. The same laws will not suit an oligarchy and a democracy. The best regime will have laws that may differ from both.

The Best Regime

At the end of the Politics, Aristotle turns to discuss the best regime in general, the ‘polis of our prayers’, as opposed to the best regime for most men and most societies. This is a topic requiring recapitulation of what is the best life. The happy man must have all of the three different kinds of goods – ‘those that are external, those of the body, and those of the soul’ – but ultimately all these are chosen for the sake of the soul, so that ‘each one is accorded just so much happiness as he has of virtue and practical wisdom and of action with regard to both.’¹⁵ Being happy is not wholly a matter of luck. While one’s happiness might well be marred or undermined by lack of education to develop one’s capacities, or by the blows of fortune (losing one’s family or home), it is rooted in one’s own activity. The polis is happy when it makes possible the realization of the happiness – the virtuous activity, theoretical as well as practical – of its citizens. And the best polis is the one that makes possible, and is populated by, such fully virtuous citizens.

Aristotle has various things to say about how such a regime might be set up in practice. Perhaps because in his time political and military assemblages depended on the human voice for their ordering – generals shouting orders, heralds convoking assemblies – he thought that the polis had to have a natural limit in size: ‘For who will be the general of a multitude grown exceedingly large, and who the herald, if not a Stentor [someone with a famously loud voice]?’ (1326b). The best polis would need enough territory to be self-sufficient, but, unlike Plato in the Laws, Aristotle is not against the city’s having a port to engage in external trade (though he applauds cities that demarcate a political gathering space from the commercial functions of the marketplace). And we see in his discussion of this best polis the tensions that mark his consideration of politics throughout. For, on the one hand, he insists that none of the citizens must lead the life of artisans or tradesmen, ‘for such a life is ignoble and opposed to virtue’, nor the life of a farmer, since farmers have no leisure to cultivate virtue (1328b–1329a). Yet these are presented as disabilities due to habits and practices, not necessarily to inherent capacities. It is the lives they (are forced to) lead, not the kind of people they inherently are, that debar the workers and farmers from citizenship in this best polis.16 Like the ‘Old Oligarch’, who attributed the poor’s ignorance to their lack of education, rather than to their inherent capacities, so Aristotle here ascribes the political incapacity that he would enforce on the poor to their circumstances rather than to their natures.

This suggests that their exclusion is not inherent in Aristotle’s ideal regime, but rather a consequence of the way he assumes that societies must be economically constituted. In a regime where some are excluded from citizenship, a virtuous regime consists of the virtuous few governing themselves. But where economic and social conditions make it possible for the many also to enjoy the education and leisure to develop virtue, the logic of Aristotle’s argument would expand the circle of self-governing citizens to include them. We see here once again how Aristotle’s logic resists an over-idealization of democracy in his terms and in ours, yet also how it can potentially be expanded in a democratic direction.

Aristotle concludes the Politics by stressing that education should be suited for each particular constitution (1337a), in order to imbue habits appropriate to its perpetuation. Indeed, every form of regime will endeavour – some more successfully than others – to mould their citizens to suit their own political aims. This is why legislating for a good regime is of such enormous human importance. For it is only in the best regime that the good human being and the good citizen will fully coincide. In each different kind of imperfect regime, the citizens’ capacities and dispositions will be distorted to suit the particular or perverse interests of the ruling group – even if that should include all the citizens themselves exercising a kind of tyranny of majority opinion. We must endeavour to make politics in the image of what is best in our nature, lest it shape us in the image of what is worse.

While in exercising theoretical reason humans share a capacity with the gods, they can best exercise and perfect their practical reason in concert with fellow citizens. Citizenship is ideally the condition and the pinnacle of exercise of a deep capacity in human nature, a capacity that may be celebrated in its potentially equal distribution, but that may also be distributed unequally in ways taken to be consequential for the distribution of citizenship itself. The equality of citizens to one another leaves open many questions about the political arrangements obtaining among them, and also about the basis on which citizenship itself is shared.

While Aristotle’s thought encompasses much beyond citizenship, his explorations of the nature of the citizen and his relation to a regime articulate an ideal while exploring the many possible variations of, and deviations from, that ideal in real-world political practice. Different constitutional regimes may misconstrue what virtue requires or allocate political power based on inadequate proxies for virtue such as wealth or number alone. Citizens living in those regimes, internalizing and upholding their values, are vulnerable to replicating their weaknesses, while only citizens of the best regime would be able to develop the full panoply of civic virtues and strengths. For Aristotle, as for Plato, the political regime in which one lives has profound consequences for the kind of person one will become. In the next chapter, we will find that some of their successors in teaching philosophy in Athens would explore a range of ways in which the political regime might be even more encompassing, while others challenged the classical link between the best political regime and the person seeking to live the best human life.