ARISTOTLE'S THEORY OF THE STATE

ARISTOTLE'S THEORY OF THE STATE

Aristotle's Theory of the State Curtis N. Johnson Associate Professor of Political Science Lewis and Clark College, Portland, Oregon Palgrave Macmillan

ISBN 978-1-349-20878-4 ISBN 978-1-349-20876-0 (ebook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-20876-0 Curtis N. Johnson 1990 Reprint of the original edition 1990 All rights reserved. For information, write: Scholarly and Reference Division, St. Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 First published in the United States of America in 1990 Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Johnson, Curtis N., 1948-- Aristotle's theory of the state I Curtis N. Johnson. p. em. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-0-312-03678-2 1. Aristotle. Politics. 2. State, The. I. Title. JC71.A7J65 1990 320.1 '01-dc20 89--37268 CIP

For Loretta, Sophia and Alexis

Contents Preface List of Abbreviations A Note on Aristotle's Text Introduction Notes xi xiii xiv xv xxii Part I: DESCRIPTIVE POLITICAL SCIENCE 1 Aristotle's Theory of the State The Nature of the Problem The Constitution Political Theory Nature Theory and Practice Notes 1 1 2 3 5 10 12 2 3 4 First-Order and Second-Order Questions in the Politics First-Order and Second-Order Questions in the Politics 'Idealism' and 'Empiricism' in the Politics The Four Causes Statesmanship and Practical Virtue in the Politics Conclusion Notes Aristotle's Method in the Politics Introduction The Rules Governing Classification Two Additional Rules of Classification Notes The Essential Nature of the State and Specific Identities in Aristotle's Politics The Essential Nature of the Polis and Its Parts vii 16 16 20 23 25 28 30 34 34 35 39 43 47 47

viii Contents The Essential Nature of Constitutions Discovering Constitutional Identities The Taxonomies of the Politics Notes 51 55 57 61 5 Evaluating Regimes: Establishing the Goodness of Constitutional Forms 66 Assessment of the Goodness of Politeiae 66 Individual Criteria of Normative Ordering 69 Evaluation of Specific Forms 74 The Moral Hierarchy 85 Notes 86 Part II: EXPLANATORY POLITICAL SCIENCE 6 Why Constitutions Differ: Causation in the Politics 91 Introduction 91 Causality in Aristotle's Thought 92 Efficient Cause 93 Formal Cause 97 Material Cause 102 Final Cause 105 Notes 110 7 The Citizen and the Sovereign Office in the Politics 115 Introduction 115 The Citizen 115 The Citizen in the Actual Practices of the Regimes 117 The Complete Citizen 121 Citizenship and Civic Virtue 122 The Sovereign Office 125 Sovereignty and Citizenship 128 The Deliberative Element and Sovereignty 129 The Problem of Divided Sovereignty 131 Conclusion 135 Notes 136 Part III: APPLIED POLITICAL SCIENCE 8 Empiricism in the Politics: Polity and the Middle Regime 143

Contents Introduction Difficulties in Aristotle's Presentation of Polity The Identity of Polity: Nomenclature The Classification of Polity Polity and the 'Middle Constitution' Notes ix 143 144 145 146 148 152 9 Idealism in the Politics: The 'Best State Absolutely' 155 Introduction 155 Constitutional Classification and the Best State 157 The Middle Constitution 158 Aristotle's Best State Absolutely 162 Notes 166 Bibliography 170 Additional Reading 184 Index 189

Preface The work that follows is intended more for those who are already interested in Aristotle's political thought than to arouse the interest of those who are not. Indeed, I do not know how one would approach the latter audience. But to the former there is a great deal to say, even about a single Aristotelian text. Such is the richness and abundance of his thought that even a detailed commentary can usually hope to be little more than an introduction. My work does not aim for anything more. I have organized this work around a single question, what Aristotle evidently regarded as the 'first question' of politics, 'what is the state, or constitution?' I believe this is the fundamental question with which the Politics is concerned. There are other questions raised in this work by Aristotle, many other and important ones. None, though, has the centrality to the treatise that this one does. To discover the state is the ultimate goal of the philosopher in this work. His pursuit of it gives the shape - the logical structure - to the Politics as it has come down to us. I have attempted in this work to be as attentive to the recent scholarly literature as is appropriate to my theme and as space allowed. In cases of dispute or uncertainty, however, I have made it a requirement to be faithful only to a single text, that of Aristotle himself. I am seldom far away from his own words, at least as I have been able to understand them (and there are admittedly times when this has not been easy). I have often, though not invariably, supplied Latinized transliterations of Greek passages in the Politics to enable the reader better to see upon what basis I have fashioned my interpretation. All Greek passages are also given in translation; familiarity with Attic Greek is unnecessary for following the particulars of my arguments. In a few instances I have provided elsewhere more detailed arguments and defenses of positions adopted in this book. A longer and more detailed version of the first half of Chapter 7 appeared in Phronesis 29 (1984) as 'Who Is Aristotle's Citizen?' The second half of the same chapter appeared in more detailed form as the 'Hobbesian Concept of Sovereignty and Aristotle's Politics' in Journal of the History of Ideas 46 (1985). Chapter 8 in this work is based upon an article called 'Aristotle's Polity: Mixed or Middle xi

xii Preface Constitution?' that appeared in the Spring 1988 issue of History of Political Thought. I am grateful to those publications and their editors for allowing me to draw from these articles. lowe, and wish to ilcknowledge, debts of gratitude to those who helped me in the thinking and writing of this work: To Sheldon Wolin, Henry Janssen and Herbert Deane, whose lectures on Aristotle to a young studet planted the first seeds of interest (the latter two also read the manuscript in various stages of development and contributed wisely and generously in their comments); to Julian Franklin and Dwight Anderson for sharpening my political understanding; to Trevor Saunders and Jonathan Barnes for reading and commenting upon sections of the manuscript. The work that appears here has been immeasurably improved by the labors of these people; the author claims sole responsibility for its remaining deficiencies. I also must thank members of the Political Theory Discussion Group in Portland, Oregon, for several years of running commentary on this and related questions in politics, and to members of my Department at Lewis and Clark College, especially Don Balmer and Jack Crampton, for inexhaustible support and assistance with any manner of difficulty through many years of toil. I have benefitted greatly from the wise counsel and kind encouragement of my parents and other members of my family. Several other members of the Lewis and Clark College faculty have assisted in a variety of ways. Lewis and Clark College provided me generous assistance in the form of several Faculty Research Grants; it also awarded me a Junior Sabbatical in order to work on this project. Invaluable technical support has been provided to me throughout the preparation of the manuscript by Robbie Roy. Above all I wish to thank my wife Loretta who has brought her own intellectual acumen to bear on virtually every section of this work, and who has been a constant source of encouragement and support through the whole course of my labors. CN. JOHNSON Portland, 1989

List of Abbreviations When I have made reference to an ancient author I have generally used standard abbreviations. Most common are these: Pol. NE EE PA GA MA HA Ath. Pol. Politics Nichomachean Ethics Eudemian Ethics Parts of Animals Generation of Animals Motion of Animals History of Animals Constitution of Athens xiii

A Note on Aristotle's Text 1 have adopted the text edited by W.O. Ross, Aristotelis Politica (Oxford, 1957). This is the Oxford Classical Text. 1 have also consulted the texts of A. Oreizehnter (Munich, 1970) and of J. Aubonnet (Paris, 1960, 1973). (See bibliography for full citations.) REFERENCES TO ARISTOTELIAN PASSAGES 1 have referred to cited passages by the standard book and chapter numbers as found, say, in Barker or in Lord. (I have adopted the conventional manuscript order of the books.) 1 have also used the Bekker numbers (e.g. 1279 b32ff.) for every passage cited, as they are found in Rackham. Since Rackham's lines are not as long as Bekker's, there may be occasional instances where the number found in Bekker does not match perfectly that employed by Rackham. I hope the easier availability of the Rackham edition to most English readers justifies this procedure. TRANSLATIONS AND COMMENTARIES I have listed the important English translations and commentaries in the section on Additional Reading at the end of this work. xiv

Introduction Aristotle's Politics is a notoriously difficult work to make sense of. Unlike many of his other works, this one appears often to be several different works more or less loosely joined under a single title. When they were brought together, moreover, they seem to have been poorly integrated with one another, giving the work a very uneven and unpolished finish. Scholars confronting this work have accordingly found innumerable inconsistencies, obscurities and self-contradictions. In the last century theories have proliferated explaining why the Politics has come to possess these considerable defects and proposing suggestions for the proper ordering and arrangement of the arguments in it. Coherence in the Politics may be attained, various scholars argue, if one is willing to find in the work an earlier and a later Aristotle, or the notebook jottings of Aristotle's students, or the careless editing of early redactors, or perhaps simply an incorrect ordering of the eight books which make up the Politics. But whatever the particular solution to the problems of this work, few would dispute that after all is said and done it remains a most puzzling and difficult work to penetrate. My aim here is to offer a somewhat different approach to the problems of the Politics. Simply, I wish systematically to unravel the central political doctrine of the work, specifically Aristotle's theory of the state or politeia. 1 My central argument is that through the many twists and turns of Aristotle's writing on the subject of politics one may identify an inner logic which holds the many parts of the Politics together, however imperfectly. This inner logic is a development of one fundamental question: what is the essential nature (ousia) of the state? There is, I argue, a consistency and coherence to Aristotle's manner of discussing this question which gives the work as a whole a certain unity and connectedness that is often overlooked. The question itself is not an easy one; the doctrine of the state which emerges from Aristotle's discussion of it is complicated and involved. But a doctrine of the state exists nevertheless, indeed a rich and penetrating doctrine. My aim is to elucidate it. Perhaps in doing so some of the difficulties of the text will be found to be less intractable as well. xv

xvi Introduction When attempting to make sense of the political theory of the Politics it is very useful to recognize that Aristotle's thought in this work is developed more or less simultaneously at two different levels of logical priority. There is within the work a set of questions logically prior and a set of questions logically posterior. The prior questions are connected to the fundamental one about the nature of the state; they include questions about why varieties of state exist, how many varieties there are, and what is the natural order among these varieties. I call these first-order questions, the doctrine embedded in the answers to them first-order doctrine. The other set of questions is about the particular forms of constitution and includes the following: what is the best state absolutely, what is the best constitution for most states, what is the best constitution under given conditions, and how are constitutions established, preserved and destroyed? These questions I call second-order, the doctrine second-order doctrine. The justification for the use of the terms 'first-order' and 'second-order' is simply this: questions of the second sort are unanswerable (logically) in the absence of answers to questions of the first sort. It is impossible to say, for example, what is the best state absolutely, without having discovered the essential nature of the state and its varieties. To say that a particular constitution is 'best absolutely' is already to know what 'the state (or constitution)' is, in the same way in which to say whether fresh or salt water is better for drinking is already to know what water itself is. To attempt to answer the second-order question without knowing the first-order answers is not merely difficult, it is nonsensical. Logically one cannot do it. The difficulty in the Politics is that Aristotle pursues both agendas at the same time. And he does not carefully sort out the two sorts of investigation, or alert his reader when he is pursuing the one concern or the other, or when he is changing from one level to the other. He merely investigates, now these questions, now those, as the logic of his argument makes necessary at each stage of its unfolding. The two sorts of question are thus often found in close juxtaposition to one another in the text, sometimes appearing thoroughly intertwined. Yet they are nevertheless distinct kinds of questions. To grasp the logic and coherence of the Politics is in large measure to grasp this distinction. Much of the present work is aimed precisely at disentangling the two sorts of inquiries so that questions of one sort may be examined in isolation

Introduction xvii from questions of the other sort. This is principally a work about the first-level doctrine of the Politics only. My interest is mainly in illuminating it, since this is, I believe, the significant dimension in explaining the logical structure of Aristotle's work. In this respect second-order questions are indeed secondary; they do not playa decisive role in informing the organization of the work. Consider, for example, Aristotle's treatment of the second-order question, 'what is the best state absolutely?' One finds this question addressed in one way or another in Books II, III, IV, V and VII-VIII. Where, it might be asked, is the logic here? Specifically, why are not the various accounts more closely joined and the question addressed all at once? And why have discrepancies among these different accounts not been eliminated? Both questions may be answered (as I show more fully below) by appeal to the first-order doctrine. The stages through which the second-order question passes in its development depend upon the development of the first-order doctrine; the logic of the latter is in this case the decisive logic for the composition of the work. Those who try to discover a logic internal to the secondorder issue independent of any reference to the first-order doctrine are looking for something which does not exist in the Politics. Similarly, those who detect inconsistencies in the second-order discussion have failed to appreciate the extent to which the first-order agenda shapes and informs Aristotle's treatment of the second-order issue. I should also say that this is a work about the Politics only. By this I mean that I do not attempt to discuss here in any detail any other Aristotelian works, nor to discuss the implications of this study for the understanding of other works, nor even to discuss the relation between the Politics and other works in the corpus. My interpretation of the Politics is, to be sure, often indebted to other works; some of Aristotle's views in the former would be beyond adequate comprehension without the additional light thrown on them by the latter. Especially important in this regard are the Metaphysics, the Physics, the History of Animals, the Parts of Animals, and above all the Nichomachean Ethics. But I have refrained from discussing these other works in any but passing ways. Similarly, I have avoided lengthy discussions of recent scholarly literature on the Politics. Like Aristotle's treatise itself these scholarly studies run in countless different directions and embrace a hopelessly large number of problems and difficulties. Most of these

xviii Introduction lie beyond the scope of the present work. Where another scholar's reading of the Politics has been helpful to me I try to acknowledge my debt. Sometimes another scholar has discussed at length some issue of central concern to me, and in these cases I try to summarize our points of agreement and disagreement, usually in a note. Beyond that I am concerned mainly to defend as fully as possible a certain reading of the Politics from the evidence of the Politics itself. I hope at minimum not to have ignored any important commentary that touches on the questions I raise here. The view of the Politics that I defend was, however, shaped in some measure, negatively I should say, by a certain tradition of scholarship (if I may call it that) about which more should be said. For many centuries students of the Politics have not been comfortable with the manuscript order of the books (for a variety of reasons), and many conjectures about a 'correct' order have been brought forward. Beginning perhaps with the work of the German scholar Wilamowitz-Moellendorff (Aristoteles und Athens, Berlin, 1893), such reorderings have been embedded within larger theories that purport to explain these and other difficulties in Aristotle's text. In 1923 another German scholar Werner Jaeger, pursuing the same line of thought, developed his now famous theory that the Politics (and Aristotle's extant writings generally) contains two (or several) chronological strata, and that Aristotle's thought is accordingly to be understood 'developmentally'. Jaeger's basic idea, if not the particulars of his own working out of it, has had a major impact on Aristotelian studies in this century. Numerous scholars since Jaeger have lent the weight of their authority to defending some version of the developmental hypothesis. 2 Perhaps unfortunately for this view, while many could agree that the Politics exhibited chronological strata, no consensus was achieved about the strata themselves, either with respect to their absolute dates of origin or with respect to their chronological priority in the text, or even, in some cases, with respect to what was to count as a 'stratum'. The internal evidence for a proper dating is too often ambiguous or inconclusive, and the external evidence is inadequate. The vast and often irreconcilable disagreements among those working in the field left the entire developmental approach vulnerable to sharp objection. Among the first to break with the developmentalists was Sir Ernest Barker in his influential translation of the Politics for Oxford University Press in 1946. In his 'Introduction' he announced his

Introduction xix intention to 'renounce the search for chronological strata' altogether; the various parts of the Politics are, on his view, 'on exactly the same footing... as far as chronology goes', belonging to the period of the Lyceum and all composed between 335 and 322 Be (pp. xliii-xliv). Barker's arguments, sadly, are scarcely more compelling than those of his opponents; more than anything else Barker's view rests, as he says himself, on a strong feeling about the unity of the Politics that came from constant study of the text from 1940 to 1945 while he prepared the translation. 3 One undoubtedly does come to know one's author from such constant absorption; but a feeling is not entirely an adequate substitution for reasoned argument, and of the latter there is little enough in Barker's text to satisfy a determined opponent. 4 Barker has not remained alone in adopting a nondevelopmentalist position for the Politics.s But again, the arguments supporting this view are not always entirely consistent with one another, and they too are often inconclusive. No single study, moreover, has managed to mount a systematic challenge to the whole weight of evidence on the developmental side; the nondevelopmentalists usually attack the problem piecemeal, leaving huge chunks of the developmentalist edifice undamaged. As a consequence, the debate about the Politics is still an open one. This, in brief, is the context of the present study. In general, I take a non-developmentalist position. But my aim is not to vindicate this view against all of the arguments on the other side; I believe such a task would be impossible in any case. Rather, as I stated earlier, I wish only to investigate the doctrine of the politeia contained in the Politics. What I find is that this doctrine exhibits a unity throughout Aristotle's text, and indeed serves to unite its various parts together in ways that many of Aristotle's other concerns do not. If I succeed in demonstrating this much, I shall have done as much as I hoped. There are obviously important implications here for the chronology issue, but these I leave unexplored in the main. Any interpretation of the Politics is limited in what it can claim to accomplish. Perhaps the most one may hope for is that some light will be shed on important themes in the text. No interpretation can solve every difficulty, and obviously no interpretation can alter the text. The Politics remains as it was - a puzzling assortment of ideas about politics whose relations to one another are not always clear and whose organization seems often to defy rational explanation.

xx Introduction Yet, withal, it remains too a most engaging and illuminating treatise. If the former creates the need for further discussion of the work the latter justifies that discussion. Aristotle's Politics belongs to the so-called 'esoteric' writings, treatises intended for the specialist rather than the broader public (those for the latter called 'exoteric'). This fact raises a question about one's own method of interpretation; an esoteric treatise would appear to require an esoteric interpretation. With regard to Plato's works this is probably good advice. Plato himself suggests more than once that the full truth cannot be told or written; one would expect to find much of interest between the lines, so to speak, in Plato's works. Aristotle is in this respect rather different I think. My view, arrived at only after considerable attention to his text, is that he is as forthcoming as language permits him to be regarding the truths of political science as he understood them; there is no holding back, no concealment. Whatever he finds worth saying he tries to say as plainly as possible, without disguise, without adornment. Whether this is an accurate view of his manner can never be more than a guess, but at least I think it is an educated one. But if it is an accurate one, it means that the key to a sound interpretation is to allow his words as much as possible to speak for themselves and to carry their face value. This it has been my aim to do throughout the present work. The organization of this work merits a brief comment. The entire work is organized around the 'first question of political science', what is the essential nature of the state? The question itself, however, is complex, first because it entails, logically, certain additional questions: how many forms of constitution are there, how many varieties of each form may be identified, and what is the natural relation, or order, that exists among them. These questions belong to what might be called descriptive political science. Part I (Chapters 1-5) addresses itself to these questions and to the methodology appropriate to descriptive political science. The question is complex, second, because political science aims at more than description. It aims ultimately at explanation, that is, at showing not just how things are but why they are as they are. Explanatory political science, as a consequence, entails its own methodology - the so-called doctrine of the four causes - and its own set of questions: why are constitutions as they are, why do they differ, and what elements of the state are essentially involved in establishing the distinctions among them. Part Two (Chapters 6

Introduction xxi and 7) is given over to a consideration of this aspect of the Politics, what I am calling Aristotle's explanatory political science. Third, the Politics includes a large number of questions that belong to what might be called applied political science. These questions constitute what I earlier called the second-order doctrine of the treatise, and so fall somewhat outside my present scope. There are, however, two questions of the second-order doctrine that are so intimately bound up with the first-order theory, and so central to Aristotle's overall plan in the work, that some discussion of them seems warranted. The first of these concerns Aristotle's preoccupation with the state that is said to be 'best for the majority of cities', the so-called 'polity'. The second concerns his abiding interest in the state that is said to be 'the best constitution absolutely'. There is a profound tension between these two forms in the Politics, the one pulling Aristotle in the direction of a so-called 'empirical political science', the other toward what some call an 'ideal political science'. This tension, and Aristotle's manner of presenting it, have been a source of great confusion for some of those who would understand the Politics. In Part III I attempt to show how an understanding of the first-order theory can be of assistance in coming to terms with questions belonging to the second-order, that is, to his applied political science. The Politics will still be found to be rent by a fundamental ambivalence between the actual and the ideal, but at least one will have come to a fuller understanding of what is at the core of this difficulty for Aristotle and why it was a difficulty that did not permit of a final resolution. Finally, I have included a chapter at the beginning of the work, prior to the exploration of the theory of the state, which introduces the question of the work as a whole. This chapter asks, what sort of question is involved here? What does it mean to investigate a 'theory of the state'? What sort of activity is involved in theorizing, and what sort of entity is it that Aristotle is theorizing about? These preliminaries are intended to help the reader see in advance what sort of issues in the Politics are taken as central for this study, and by extension, why these issues have always been central to an ongoing discussion about the state in the history of political thought.

xxii Introduction NOTES 1. Throughout this work I use two English words, 'state' and 'constitution', to render the Greek word politeia; my work is about Aristotle's theory of politeia in its general signification. One finds several other translations of this key term in modern English editions of the Politics: regime (Lord), commonwealth and republic (Rackham), and constitution (Barker), in addition to 'state'. I wish to a v oa i controversy over my choice of terms, while recognizing that the choice of ~ any English expression, with its associated nuances and conceptual baggage, will make a difference in how Aristotle is understood. My aim is to use language that arouses as few presuppositions as possible while at the same time raising up the full richness of the idea of politeia as it emerges from Aristotle's text. 2. Among those who have focused on the Politics are von Arnim (1924), Stocks (1927), Siegfried (1933), Bourgey (1955), Theiler (1952), Weil (1960) and Kelsen (in Barnes et al., 1977), to mention only a representative few. There are certain scholars who once embraced a developmental view and who have since changed their minds, e.g. Barker (1931, who recanted in his translation of the Politics, 1946), and Ross (1927, who qualified his earlier endorsement of von Arnim in his Dawes Hicks Lecture on Philosophy, 1957). 3. 'Any translator... who has lived with the book on his desk day on day, and month after month, is bound to become familiar with his author, and such familiarity breeds in the mind a deep sense of the unity of the author, which is perhaps the strongest argument for the unity of the composition and structure of his book' (xliv; see also p. xlii, n. I, and p. v). 4. I do not mean to suggest that Barker offers no reasoned arguments for preferring a non-developmental understanding, only that his arguments fall far short of meeting all of the considerations which the developmentalists would wish to see resolved. 5. Among the most influential defenders of this position concerning the Politics are Ross (1957), I. During (in During and Owen, 1960, among other places), P. Aubenque (1965), G.E.R. Lloyd (1968), and c.j. Rowe (1977). M. Grene (1963) discusses the difficulties of the genetic approach for Aristotle's scientific works.