Title:Aristotle's Politics, Book I: a reconsideration
Author(s): Mary Ann McGrail
Source:Perspectives on Political Science. 37.4 (Fall 2008): p189.
Document Type:Report
Full Text:

Abstract: Modern science, particularly Thomas Hobbes, begins with a broad attack on Aristotle intended to replace "Aristotelity" in the universities. This attack, however, was superficial and never properly reconsidered when Hobbes and his cohort were in turn superseded. The connection between politics and nature deserves a reconsideration and receives it in this article on Book I of Aristotle's Politics. The author adopts Hobbes' assertion that Aristotle's politics and metaphysics are connected and shows how Aristotle defends politics by considering whether human beings are natural slaves and by repelling the economic view that all nature is the property of man.

Keywords: Aristotle, chrematistike, politics, slavery

A NOTE ON DELBA WINTHROP

The article that follows was found in the papers of my late wife, Delba Winthrop. It had been written in the mid-1970s and then submitted to a journal in 1982. With it were a letter of rejection from the editor of the journal and two adverse reports from thickheaded reviewers who wanted her, with some reason but very little understanding, to submit to the standards of the classical scholars' profession. They wished her to interpret Aristotle's Greek as they did or else explain to their satisfaction why they should adopt her reading as opposed to theirs. They doubted that she knew Greek, one of them hinting that she might have used a translation and nothing more.

What these critics did not appreciate, indeed did not even glimpse, was the possibility that Aristotle might have been speaking ironically (see notes 23 and 28 of the article). She had been developing this possibility since her dissertation on "Democracy and Political Science," submitted to the Harvard Department of Government in January 1974. The dissertation was a commentary on Book III of Aristotle's Politics, together with a translation designed, unlike most other translations of that work, to reveal the ambiguities of Aristotle's Greek. This dissertation was followed by two articles she published on Aristotle, "Aristotle and Theories of Justice" (American Political Science Review, December 1978) and "Aristotle and Participatory Democracy" (Polity, Winter 1979), which illustrated and elaborated the point of view from which she studied Aristotle. But in the article now being printed this point of view is made somewhat more explicit.

Delba Winthrop maintains that Aristotle's Politics (and the Ethics as well) contain an esoteric metaphysics in the very language with which he discusses directly political matters. The political discussion can be understood in its own terms at the level of political advocacy and judgment, for Aristotle begins from the common or typical understanding as shown in political actions and expressed in political discourse. Aristotle refines this discourse, bringing out its difficulties, its problems, and its contradictions as he reasons on its logic. As he does so, he encounters questions that require inquiries beyond those considered in political discourse proper. In Book I of the Politics, for example, we see him describing the master and slave relation that was so familiar in the politics of his time and has disappeared, as we believe, in our time. But what is slavery and who is truly a slave?

A slave might be someone who merely had the misfortune of being enslaved by force, as we would say who believe that all men are free and that all slavery has this character. Aristotle calls this conventional slavery, but he notices that, politically, those holding slaves believe they have some justification for doing so, such as that Greeks deserve to rule barbarians. They believe that their slaves are natural slaves who deserve to be slaves. Might there be a sense in which they are correct? Suppose a science that would subject all human beings to natural causes so as to deny them the freedom to act on their own: would they not be slaves to whoever knows that science? Is not the master, who is subject to external causes as well as the slave, thereby as much a slave as the one he thinks is a slave? It seems that human beings, who can be enslaved by brute force, can also be enslaved by science. What is the difference between being enslaved by men and being enslaved by nature--by the nature that surrounds us? For knowledge of nature would empower men to enslave other men and would justify that enslavement.

It seems, too, that we human beings are, in some sense, enslaved to nature. But is nature the same as brute force, or is it distinct from it by being intelligible? Perhaps if nature is intelligible, there can be a sense in which our freedom is meaningful and not a delusion. We can see our place in nature, in the hierarchy of nature, and find both slavery and freedom.

This is a brief, schematic demonstration of how political questions in Aristotle's Politics lead to metaphysical questions. It exposes the contradiction, or at least the problem, in modern political science, in particular that of Hobbes. Hobbes posited that men start out perfectly free in the state of nature, and yet subjected them to the slavery of their passions, as manipulated by political science. Does that sort of political science make sense, and will it cause trouble in politics through its foolish optimism? Aristotle's more sober view that freedom is problematic warns us away from the extremes of both freedom and slavery.

Yet one might easily object: why keep the connection between politics and metaphysics a secret? Why require it to be found slowly, step-by-step, through interpretation too difficult for scholars to observe on their own, or to accept when it is shown to them? Why the esotericism? The answer, again very briefly, is this: politics insists on seeing all things from the standpoint of politics, and political men need to be addressed in political terms. Their insistence deserves respect, for reasons adduced in Delba Winthrop's article. The scientists or philosophers who know rather than rule need to be taught such respect as against their tendency to substitute knowledge for ruling, to try to rule on the basis of knowledge alone. Aristotle needs to provide them with an alternative to their philosophy that shows them why and how, for the sake of human freedom, they should defer to politics and political men. Thus in his Politics he teaches respect for politics to those not inclined to such respect, and he shows political men how to reform politics within the limits of politics.

In this presentation I have stated baldly and incautiously what Delba Winthrop argues with her characteristic subtlety and indirection. I have omitted the textual analysis--the careful observations of small things (cose piccole in Machiavelli's words) and the surprising questions arising from them--that distinguishes and ornaments her presentation, and makes it convincing. It was not only in Aristotle that she found her esoteric metaphysics but also in Tocqueville and even in the works of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, studied later in her life, where she found intimations of Aristotle. Her guiding thought was the need for political philosophy that advises statesmen to reform and defends politics to philosophers.

Harvey C. Mansfield September 16, 2008

And I beleeve that scarce any thing can be more absurdly said in naturall Philosophy, than that which now is called Aristotles Metaphysiques; nor more repugnant to Government, than much of that hee hath said in his Politiques; nor more ignorantly, than a great part of his Ethiques. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 46:461-2 (1)

Modern political science begins with a broad attack on Aristotle intended to replace "Aristotelity" in the universities (Leviathan, 1:14; 44:418; 46:462; Rev. and Concl:491). Hobbes' objections to Aristotle are clearly stated. He finds Aristotle's Politics "repugnant to Government" because its rules of good and bad are not coextensive with the natural law (Leviathan, 46:461). He faults Aristotle for not deriving the rights of commonwealth from the principles of nature and for taking from the popular practice of Athenian democracy the teaching that only in a democracy is one free (Leviathan, 21:149-50; cf. 46:470). The teaching is repugnant to government because it does not secure political authority as it needs to be secured, with a demonstration that the rights of sovereignty are grounded on the full and equal natural freedom of every human being. Aristotle's Metaphysics contains an absurd teaching about "entities," or "essences," which "it may be he knew to be false Philosophy; but writ it as a thing consonant to, and corroborative of their Religion; and fearing the fate of Socrates" (Leviathan, 46:465). This teaching is absurd if there are no separated essences (2) and if physics is the study not of essences, or species, but of laws of motion (Leviathan, 2:15; 46:467). Aristotle's Ethics is ignorant because Aristotle does not know enough to assert that the goodness of the virtues lies not in themselves, but in their cause, the passions. The passions are good insofar as they are means to "peaceable, sociable, and comfortable living" as opposed, one may suppose, to the happiness of living virtuously (Leviathan, 15:111).

Hobbes believed the universities to be the source of popular opinion and therefore sought to establish his own doctrines there. With surprising speed, Hobbes' political liberalism and natural science did displace Aristotelity, though in time they too were modified and superseded. But, in the evolution of modern doctrine, the displaced Aristotelity did not receive a new hearing. In fact, it did not really receive a hearing from Hobbes. Hobbes' diatribes in the Leviathan do not constitute a sustained argument against it. (3) If Aristotle was not refuted when he was rejected, and not reconsidered when Hobbes seemed to become obsolete, then it behooves us now to examine his views.

Strange as it may appear, Hobbes' contention is correct in the sense that Aristotle is an apologist for common opinion. As distinguished from Hobbes, Aristotle does not undermine established regimes with the teaching that the only legitimate regime is one that originates in the universal natural right, or freedom, of human beings. Hobbes is also correct in attributing to Aristotle a metaphysical doctrine about essences, or species, either because Aristotle believed it true or for the other reasons Hobbes mentioned. Perhaps most interesting, however, is Hobbes' implicit connection of metaphysical and political teachings in this statement about Aristotle and throughout the Leviathan. Hobbes suggests that Aristotelian political science, though drawn from Greek practice, is ultimately inseparable from Aristotelian metaphysics--just as modern political science is inseparable from a rejection of Aristotle's metaphysics. Hobbes' suggestion is in fact borne out by the analysis that follows of the first book of Aristotle's Politics.

Book I is a problem in any case. Its very presence at the beginning of the Politics could not have been anticipated on the basis of the outline for the study of politics offered at the end of the Nicomachean Ethics (1181b12-23), which mentions legislation and the regime as the topics to come. Surprisingly, Book I is explicitly devoted not to politics, but to the household and the management of the household (oikonomike), or economics. Aristotle begins the study of politics with the household, contending that to understand best the distinctiveness of the city and of political rule one must examine the household and its parts as the parts of which the whole, the city, is composed (1252a18-26). Yet at the end of Book I Aristotle grants that he cannot even fully explain the part, much less the whole, without viewing that part and its parts in the light of some greater whole. In particular, he cannot make clear all the virtues appropriate to free human beings, because the virtues are related to the whole (1260b8-20). Book I thus appears to be an abortive beginning to the Politics (see 1260b20-23).

Moreover, Aristotle's discussion of the family is strange in itself. Three kinds of rule are found in the household--master over slave, husband over wife, and father over child. Instead of analyzing all three, Aristotle gives the second a cursory treatment and neglects the third altogether, even though he acknowledges that they are more important than the first (1259b18-21). Rather than examining these, he fastens on the master-slave relationship, and his analysis leads to lengthy discussions of property and moneymaking (chrematistike), (4) even though these are said to lie at the periphery or outside the domain of household management (1259b18-21, 1258a19-35). Either Book I of the Politics is not worthy of attribution to Aristotle himself (5) or, to save that attribution, its emphasis on slavery, property, and money-making and their necessary priority to political science proper are in need of more elaborate explanation.

Aristotle states at the very beginning of the Politics that his primary intention is to establish the sovereignty of the city, or more precisely, of "what is called the city and the political community," and the sovereignty and comprehensiveness of the good at which it aims (1252a1-6). To establish the primacy of politics, he opposes the explicit teachings of Plato and Xenophon, (6) and in two ways. First, he says that the skills of political rule, kingship, household management, and despotism differ by the fact that a city, a kingdom, a household, and a slave differ not merely in size but in form (1252a7-16). Second, he contends that political rule differs from kingly because it is something other than the application of the reasonings (logoi) of some "kingly science" (1252a13-16).

Aristotle begins to defend the first thesis with what amounts to a demonstration that the wholes or partial wholes in question are more than mere sums of their parts. To see this, he says, one must examine each association, beginning with the household and its parts because the parts of the household are also component parts of the other wholes (1252a18-26). By the end of Book I, Aristotle is unable to explain fully by this procedure either part or whole, the household or the city. Yet he does not concede that in the attempt he has not established the second distinction he intended to make, namely between political rule and the kingly science (1260b8). He also lets us know that he has said enough about the phenomena of master and slave and their distinctiveness (1255b39-40). This observation, too, should be considered in connection with his stated intention of defending the sovereignty of politics.

If Aristotle is to establish "technically" (1252a21.23), with a view to an art, the sovereignty of the political whole and the good at which it aims, we cannot expect him to assume what he hopes to prove. What he must prove is that the partial associations composing the city are necessarily subordinate parts because their ends cannot be achieved without the city and can be achieved within it. He therefore proposes to look at the city as if it has grown or evolved naturally from its parts, not as if the parts were intended to become parts of a political association. Moreover, he cannot even assume that the political association was created with specific political intent, for he would then still have to account for the origin of political intent. Hence Aristotle's initial endeavor is to explain the city as it might emerge prior to human intent, or "naturally." That is why he gives so much attention to slavery and economics in Book I, and so little to politics. In order to establish the sovereignty of politics, he has to begin with a teleology of nature for the city that excludes politics, and show that it fails.

THE NATURALNESS OF THE CITY (1252A1-1253A39)

The household, more clearly than the city, is by nature. (7) Its purposes and therefore its couplings are twofold. The human male and female associate, as do males and females of all living species, to preserve the species through generation. Master and slave have a different enterprise, which is mutually beneficial though hierarchically ruled, of saving the household. The master does this through foresight by intellection and the slave through the use of the body (1252a26-34). Nature's presumed intention notwithstanding, she seems to have taken less care for the salvation of individuals than for the preservation of the species, for whereas natural sexual differences are virtually always very clearly indicated, the distinction between natural master and natural slave can be obscure or even lacking, and must be made or asserted by human beings (1252b5-9). Because the distinction is of human making, or conventional, it is often crudely made (1252a34-b5). The Greek poets, exemplified by Euripides, assert that "it is fitting for Greek to rule barbarian," as if barbarian and slave were by nature the same and as if any and every Greek were a natural ruler, or master. (8) The poets present what is meant to be a natural distinction among individuals as a cultural (linguistic) distinction among groups, and people who accept this presentation tend eventually to hold it as a fixed prejudice. Yet if both masters and slaves are necessary and if nature distinguishes few, if any, natural slaves or masters, then a crude conventional assertion of distinctiveness, however misleading in specific cases, may serve the useful purpose of reminding us of the possibility of true and necessary natural distinctiveness and rank. If nature's intention is the preservation of human beings, individually and collectively, even crude conventional distinctions might be said to be according to nature to the extent that the realization of her intention depends on them. Crude conventions might be better than none at all, as in Hobbes' state of nature.

Aristotle began with the premise that the city could be understood as simply growing out of its parts (1252a18-23). Now we are told that the city is founded (1253a29-31) and conventional in its origins. (9) Is there some way to save the premise, some notion of nature as growth that would comprehend and even justify conventional human determinations? Can one not still posit the end of a thing as the nature to or toward which it grows? The nature of a thing, which enables us to know it as what it is, is not simply the parts out of which it grows, but its form and its end, that is, what it is when it is fully what it is intended and has the capacity to be (1252b3l-34). The natural end of the city might be the preservation of human beings, but in speaking of preservation must one not know what a preserved human being is when complete in order to know whether or not it is indeed preserved? Human being in its completion would be human being as self-sufficient (1253a1). That this completion is not often realized, indeed almost never, does not make knowledge of it less necessary. (10)

One could infer from what has been shown thus far in Book I that human nature should exhibit, at the least, the sex difference of male and female, the master's foresight by intellection together with the slave's capacity to use the body, but perhaps also the assertiveness or spiritedness exemplified by the poets. (11) It should further include reason or reasonable speech (logos) and its ability to perceive good and bad and justice and injustice (1253a15-18). Man is by nature a political animal (1253a1-5). The city whose laws and customs tame the animal can be considered natural if taming is necessary in order that the human being be preserved with the perfection of all its faculties (1253al-7). (12) Taming would amount to ordering or ranking the human faculties and therefore the beings who exhibit them in varying degrees. Nature intends, but fails to make clearly enough the judgments or distinctions (kriseis) among human beings. It is the city's legal justice (dike) that articulates the necessary determination of justice, which it here identified with rank order (1253a37-39).

If human beings have a natural perfection whose realization--or "preservation"--requires politics and justice, then the city is not only natural, but prior in being to the parts from which it seems to have grown (1252b30-31, 1253a29-31). The crucial premise is of course that human beings have a definite natural perfection. That they do is first proposed in an argument about man's place in some given whole, an argument that is apparently circular. It says that a whole is necessarily prior to its parts when "the whole's having been destroyed, neither foot nor hand will exist except as a homonym, as one might speak of a stone [hand]" (1253a20-25). Man, and only man, perceives and speaks of the good and the just. These perceptions are said to constitute the city (1253a15-18), but neither man nor his perceptions can be supposed to be prior in being to the city. How could man be said to speak reasonably if he spoke of the qualities of a whole without presupposing the existence of the whole? Hence one sees the necessary priority of the whole.

Furthermore, if only the city's existence is presupposed and its order not yet determined, notions about properly ordered wholes in which human beings have a place must be notions about a whole like, yet still prior to, the political whole. This would be the natural whole. Perhaps this is why Book I is said to be an attempt to establish the sovereignty of both "what is called the city" and the political community (1252a6-7). The city so called is what is presupposed in human speech and the political community is the truth of the matter in nature. At the same time, if only man can articulate this whole through his speeches, then man is a crucial part of the whole. He is like the hand mentioned, the tool of tools, as Aristotle says elsewhere. (13)

That one cannot in any case sustain a clear distinction between political order, or justice, and opinions about nature's presumed order or lack thereof can be seen in Aristotle's first quotation from the poets. Aristotle uses poets rather than philosophers to make the point. The poets (or makers, poietai) assert the rule of some beings over others as if they were making by assertion an order of nature that may in fact show little evidence of order (cf. 1253a37-39). In the first quotation Euripides asserts that some particular human beings--Greeks--rule and should rule as masters, and that others--barbarians--are no better than slaves. He treats the natural as if it could be political and the political as if it could be natural, in effect anthropomorphizing and politicizing the cosmos (cf. 1252b24-27). Aristotle follows the poets in taking an imitation of a human being as his model of a whole--a statue with feet and hands.

Yet, in contrast to the poets, Aristotle will deliberately bring to light a distinction between political rule and natural rule. He will attempt to establish, not merely assert, the sovereignty of the political community and "what is called the city," or of each in its own way, since the two, being distinct, are perhaps only similar, not identical. Assertions of political sovereignty notwithstanding, man may be no more nor less in nature than a tool who, by means of his work, informs the whole or gives it life. (14) Like a hand, he remains a tool, a virtual slave of whatever may direct the movement of hands. For Aristotle the status of man in nature depends not on mere assertion, but on the natural status of tools. The next topic in Book I is the slave, the animate tool (1253b12-1255b40; see especially 1253b32).

NATURAL AND CONVENTIONAL SLAVERY (1253B1-1255B40)

The slave was initially described as one who has the capacity to toil with his body. We also saw that there is a tendency to use the term slave arbitrarily, as when Greeks refer to all barbarians as slaves. When slavery is treated thematically as a part of the household, the master, in particular the human master, all but disappears, for the crucial distinction among human beings becomes that of slave or free (1253b4). Almost at the outset Aristotle states how the issues of conventional, or political, slavery and its justice bear on this new distinction between slave and free and on the principal inquiry of Book I into the supremacy of politics and its good:

   To some it seems that despotism is some science and that
   household management and despotism and skilled political
   rule and skilled kingship are the same, just as we said at the
   beginning. To some despotism is against nature, for one is
   a slave and another free by law, and by nature there is no
   difference, because of which it is not at all just, for it is by
   force (1253b18-23).

Thus "some" hold, as we have seen (1252a7-9), that all forms of rule are subjects of one science. Were this the case, in Aristotle's thinking not only the slave but even the master who acquires the science would be enslaved in a sense: enslaved by mind to an intelligible nature. (15) Surely a master, who foresees by intellection (dianoia), cannot be said to rule over pure thought (nous) and the objects of thought. He submits to what is intelligible; he does not rule it but rules by virtue of it. The human mind, moreover, might be incapable of mastering the science because of its admixture of body--in this way still more enslaved. (16) Thus there may well be no human masters, and in this view all humans should be thought of as natural slaves.

Another "some" hold that there is no natural difference between slave and free. But this amounts to believing that no one can be any more naturally and justly free than enslaved. This argument says that slavery is unjust, but at the cost of admitting that freedom too is unjust because it is as unnatural as slavery. Freedom rests on human flat and nothing more.

It seems that, for Aristotle, politics is to be the work of free human beings and yet is to have as its end the nonarbitrary, natural end of human completion. If this is so, then to fulfill these apparently contrary requirements, Aristotle must show, in accordance with the first of them, and against the first "some," that not all forms of rule are subject to a science as formidable, as enslaving, as the science of nature. And he must show, in accordance with the second requirement, and against the second "some," that there are some natural slaves and/or that the law enslaving some but not others is reasonable according to nature. Otherwise he cannot establish that freedom and dominion are any more natural and just than enslavement. Human freedom would be based on an assertion that could as easily be affirmed as denied. And if freedom is not just according to nature, then how can politics, in which freedom and rule are asserted, be according to nature? How can economics, in which property is managed or used according to a human determination be according to nature?

If, however, one were to attempt to defend the assertion by providing a reason, a natural ground, for freedom, one might have to conclude that not all human beings are or should be free. An account of the natural slave such as the one Aristotle gives here can be understood as an explanation of what in nature makes freedom difficult or impossible. Without such an account one cannot establish that the kinds of freedom and dominion characteristic of all politics are more natural and just than the slavery of despotism.

The slave by nature is a possession that is a part of the household. He is also a tool that, because he is ensouled, can use other tools; he is to a master as is a look-out man (as distinguished from a lifeless tool like a rudder) to a ship's captain (1253b27-30; cf. 1252a31-32). He is needed insofar as no marvelous craftsman or god has made tools that move themselves on command. (17) The slave is not for making but for employing tools, like garments and beds, that are needed for practice, or life. He is a part of the master, but as a human being, who, as a human being, is a possession of "another." He is a possession, a tool for use, and separate (1254a13-17).

One might well ask, as does Aristotle (1254a17-20), whether such a being even exists. Initially, it seemed that the slave was a body or a user of a body in the service of intellect. But the work of each was said to be to the benefit of (or to bring together (18)) the same thing. Indeed, we might ask ourselves whether we have ever seen or known of an intellect--a master--that is not embodied. (19) At the same time, the slave is now clearly said to be ensouled. He reminds us of nothing so much as a human being as we know one, a being with a body and a soul. In the human being, if mind rules over body, it rules through the soul, in which are also found the desires and reasonable speech (1254b4-9). (20) Desire and speech would seem to require for expression both intellect and body, and no human being exhibiting them is either master or slave simply. The slave is said to be the possession of "another" but not necessarily of another human being. He is separate, an individual ensouled body. An animate tool, he is needed to actualize nature's potential, all of her "tools" that compose the world. In so doing, the slave's purpose is not to "make," that is, not to work against nature or contrary to her inferred intention, but merely to soften her austerity to man, as is suggested by his use of garments and beds. (21) In sum, if there are any natural slaves, they are all human beings. They are enslaved because of their partial knowledge and competence. Mastery in the sense ordinarily meant is hardly august, Aristotle notes, but the works of some slaves are more honorable than those of others (1255b27-37).

Having come to the notion of differential slavery, more or less honorable, in the Politics, one may note its agreement with Aristotle's statement near the beginning of the Metaphysics that "in many ways the nature of human beings is slavish" (I, 982b29-30). But in the Politics he goes further. Before evaluating what is or seems to be man's enslavement within nature, he clarifies the difference between this rarely examined kind of slavery and the far more obvious conventional slavery (1255a3-b15). He uses the occasion of this clarification to show why natural enslavement is so little examined or even acknowledged: it is because politics can enable human beings to appear, and in fact to be, neither mere slaves nor complete masters, but free men and women.

Aristotle takes up the opinion of "those who assert the opposite" of natural slavery to show what is correct in it. The assertion that slavery is neither beneficial nor just stems from the opinion that slavery is legal slavery, and slaves by law are those conquered in war. Although the legal and the just are in some sense the same (1255a22-23), the principle that might or force gives title to rule surely does not seem just, nor does legal slavery. But if might does not make right, is might then simply wrong? Those who are tempted to think that it is overlook two considerations: first, that virtue, when equipped, can employ force effectively and, second, that it is probably impossible to use force effectively with no virtue whatsoever. If virtue could not employ strength, it would be difficult to see how goodness or excellence could rule in politics or at all. But when virtue does use force and manages to prevail in the world, it may well appear to some as injustice because it is mighty. From the fact of demonstrated strength one cannot with reason always infer a virtuous intention, of course, but one can infer superiority in something good.

Furthermore, one can never overlook the crudeness of conventional distinctions. A conventional slave is one captured in war. He would surely seem to be unjustly enslaved if conquered by someone who, though stronger, was not also more virtuous. Is the conquered noble or well-born man truly worthy of slavery because of his country's defeat in war? To contend that some are worthy of it because they are barbarians, while others are not, because they are Greeks who are worthy of enslavement nowhere (1255a24-29), is again to identify convention with nature, as do the poets. To assume that some are simply and always well-born and free is to imply that the good come from the good, as human beings are born of humans and beasts of beasts. It is to concede that conventional freedom must have a natural basis in virtue, but at the same time to assume that nature, intending the good for man by providing for reproduction, always accomplishes her intention. This assumption presumably led the Helen of Theodectes (theodektes, beggar of the gods) to assert that because she was descended from gods, she could not fittingly be anyone's servant (1255a36-38). (22) She represented her natural generation as divine, confusing the two so as to make sure that nature's intention was accomplished to her advantage.

Aristotle's analysis of conventional slavery brings to light the problematic nature of politics and political freedom. Because force and war are ever-present elements of political life, the individual's very preservation, not to mention freedom, depends on the greater force that can be deployed by a political community. (23) But because such communities use force, they are invariably conventional, not merely natural, and do not adequately reflect the natural ground of freedom in virtue. To maintain its distinctiveness as a whole and its authority as distinct, the city must obscure the difference between nature and convention. This obfuscation in turn makes it difficult to see that political freedom depends on the exercise of virtues for which human beings are given only a natural capacity, an unequal natural capacity that they must then actualize (Nic. Ethics, II, 1103a23-26). (24)

Politics must minimize the true cause of political freedom--the virtues of individuals--even while it relies on that cause. (25) In claiming authority from beyond itself, in giving emphasis to its natural necessity, politics must minimize the human contribution to itself. The inability or unwillingness to acknowledge the distinctions between convention and nature, on the one hand, and nature and virtue, on the other, leads to religion: Helen invoked not her mere Greekness to defend her freedom, but her divine descent, presumably to defend the worth of Greekness and thereby her own worth. She did not speak of her virtue. In politics freedom and rule are apparent in ways not obvious in economics, where choices are made under the sovereignty of need and necessity. But political freedom seems to be accompanied by the necessary illusion of the greatest unfreedom, for religion tends to make us all beg our freedom of the gods. (26) Slavery is one thing, prostration another.

Human beings with bodies are enslaved or ruled, and nature may have intended this slavery. What is by nature, Aristotle contends in a seemingly circular argument, can best be observed in that which is according to nature (1254a34-37). The argument is not circular, however, for we would not know whether soul rules body or body rules soul if we were not able to subordinate our bodies to our souls for long enough to raise the question of nature in a way that is of little immediate gratification to the body and its demands. (27) Nevertheless, the body that is enslaved is also the vehicle of political freedom. If nature meant to distinguish slave and free by their bodies, giving to the first a body strong enough for necessary labor and to the second a body that is erect but useless for such work, she often does the opposite, Aristotle says (1254b27-34). But this is probably just as well, for if the free man lacked a strong body, how could he fight the wars for which he is said to need a body? (28) The true mark of a free man may be his beautiful soul, but this, Aristotle willingly grants, is harder to see than a beautiful body (1254b38-1255a1). A disembodied soul could not be seen or known at all and, in any case, would not belong to a human being.

If all human beings are partly enslaved because they have bodies, those who are dehumanized in their slavery will always lack beautiful souls because they are enslaved to their bodies (cf. 1254a37-b2; 1255b27-30). If all human beings are unfree because in their striving for the good (1252a1-6) they must subordinate themselves to intellect (1254b2-9), those are most unfortunately fettered who unquestioningly enslave themselves to the most beautiful souls that can be imagined to exist from the presence of the most beautiful images--images of gods (1254b34-36). While economics suggests that the body brings nothing but enslavement, or politics understood as enslavement, politics tends to make us believe that the soul remains enslaved not to an intellect in which it can aspire to participate, (29) but to alien beings of greater goodness and power as well as wisdom. (30) It remains to be seen whether, in Aristotle's opinion, human beings are necessarily enslaved, first, by and to their bodies and, second, by and to the gods.

PROPERTY AND MONEYMAKING (1256A1-1259A36)

The nature of enslavement is, I believe, further explored in the discussion of property that composes much of the remainder of Book I of the Politics (1256a1-1259a36). Human beings as such are slaves of sorts, lacking human masters, but nonetheless, by definition, themselves constituting property. Whether and to what extent it is fitting that such slaves have property of their own depends on what nature or the gods require and permit. Knowing this much we can determine the degree of our enslavement to our bodies and to the gods. In Aristotle's opinion, nature does require and permit property, but she does not require humans to acquire many possessions for the sake of their economic wellbeing. She may, however, require and permit the pursuit of another kind of wealth in virtually unlimited quantities. (31)

The tools, or wealth, that human beings use are secured by the art of moneymaking (1256a11-12). But how human beings use wealth and therefore to some extent how much they use would seem to be determined by the household manager. So it is somewhat unclear whether moneymaking is properly the same as, a part of, or a subsidiary of household management (1256a3-8). Both the household and the city are properly concerned with the perfect preservation of human beings, and their rulers presumably acquire and use all things for that end. (32) From their point of view the art or science of use is architectonic, as it is when a statue is made from the bronze provided (1256a3-10; cf. 1253a20-25): a beautiful human being is the end. This anthropocentric point of view--that nature has made all things for the use of human beings--is the one Aristotle appears to adopt in Book I. We need as much of what moneymaking provides us as is necessary for life and for the good life secured in the household and the city (1256b26-30). Nonetheless, if the things that human beings can possess or use are of great variety, as indeed they seem to be, and if it is the task of moneymaking to contemplate where useful things and property come from (1256a15-2l), then moneymaking must contemplate virtually all of visible nature and seek its cause or causes. However useful to economics and politics moneymaking may be, the study of nature (natural philosophy), to which moneymaking gives rise might, but need not, return to its beginning in economics. (33)

Human beings can use their skills to acquire nourishment and the store of things useful for life and the good life in various ways, and nature seems to facilitate their consumption of her resources (1256b26-30). Humans and other animals are said to be able to procure nourishment with ease and even according to their choice (1256a23-29). (34) Humans can combine various nourishments and the means of procuring them in order to live more pleasantly (1256b1-6). Among the perfectly acceptable means are robbery, the use of all inferior beings in nature, and even war against intransigent inferiors. These means are not contrary to nature and do not amount to expropriation from a hostile nature (1256b20-26). On the contrary, nature seems to sanction these means as necessary. She herself gives some nourishment by providing mothers with milk for their offspring. Since this indication of nature's goodness is at the same time evidence of the limit of her charity, the necessity of man's acquisition is also made apparent. Nonetheless, the presence of mothers' milk, as well as the variety of nourishments adults can tolerate and enjoy, do signify nature's friendship for human beings (cf. 1255b12-15), despite her equally apparent harshness or niggardliness. (35)

When nature's niggardliness becomes all too apparent, a second kind of acquisition comes into being. Nature's failure to guarantee the self-sufficiency of each individual necessitates exchange (1257a14-19). Although not by nature, exchange is according to nature, for it serves her end of preservation (1257a28-30).

True moneymaking (1256b40-1257a1; cf. 1253b14) emerges reasonably from exchange, or barter, but becomes something quite different. Exchange, especially with foreigners, (36) is facilitated by the invention of money (nomisma). (37) Once its value has been agreed upon and signified by an impression on its face, money becomes the measure and standard for the value of the necessary things traded. Quantities and a multiplicity of kinds are replaced by one form or stamp (1257a35-41). As do all other things conventional, money takes on a life of its own. Money and all other things come to be used to make more money, and the generation of money from money (interest) becomes comparable to natural genesis.(1258b4-8). (38) It seems that money becomes a virtual god from which everything of value emanates and on which everything is made to depend. (39)

There is an opinion, Aristotle says, that the purpose of household management is the unlimited increase of money. The opinion originates in a concern for mere life, as distinguished from the good life, or among those who fix on the good life in the belief that it consists in the enjoyment of bodily pleasures (1257b38-l258a10). Moneymaking and devotion to money, it appears, are as limitless as the natural human desires for life and pleasure. Money assumes central importance because it is thought to ensure satisfaction of the original desire for preservation carried to its logical conclusion, the desire for immortal happiness. Although the invention and valuation of money can be seen in this way as an attempt to complete nature, the worship of mammon is in fact contrary to nature. It inspires us to pervert all our capacities to producing wealth, as if, for examples, courage, generalship, and medicine were for the purpose of making one rich, instead of producing daring, victory, and health. Unlimited moneymaking deprives the beings and things of the world of their value and purpose (1257a6-9). (40)

Aristotle acknowledges that the culmination of moneymaking in usury is hated (1258a38-b4), but he himself does not condemn the unlimited form of moneymaking. He even teaches the art of trade, a form of moneymaking (1258b20-27). He does, however, contend that it is an error to equate money with true wealth, as in the story of Midas. Midas is not said to be wrong in his greedy wish or prayer (euche) for a kind of wealth other than the necessities of mere life; rather, it is said that his example points to the correctness of seeking another meaning of wealth and moneymaking (1257b10-19). Moreover, when compared to medicine (1257b25-30, 1258a27-30), the unlimited and unnatural form of moneymaking does not appear as either hateful or contemptible, for medicine seeks the perfect preservation of human bodies. Might one not also attempt the perfect, if not the immortal, preservation and happiness of human beings through philosophizing? The only examples Aristotle recommends to men who honor moneymaking are the philosopher Thales (41) (1259a5-19) and a man--Plato?--who was in Syracuse when Dionysius ruled (1259a23-31; cf. 1255b22-24).

In contending that the amount of property, or material wealth, sufficient for the good life is not without limit, Aristotle criticizes Solon for asserting the contrary (1256b31-34). Solon made the assertion while suggesting that human beings are playthings of the gods.

   Aye, surely Fate it is that bringeth mankind both good and ill,
   and the gifts immortal Gods offer must needs be accepted;
   surely too there's danger in every sort of business; nor know
   we at the beginning of a matter how it is to end; nay, sometimes
   he that striveth to do a good thing falleth into ruin
   great and sore, whereas God giveth good hap in all things
   to one that doeth ill, to be his deliverance from folly. And
   as for wealth, there's no end set clearly down; for such as
   have to-day the greatest riches among us, these have twice
   the eagerness that others have, and who can satisfy all? 'Tis
   sure the Gods give us men possessions, yet a ruin is revealed
   thereout, which one man hath now and another then, when-soever
   Zeus sendeth it in retribution. (42)

Perhaps we cannot know that there are no malevolent or capricious gods. But then we would still have the natural desire for immortal happiness, and that desire would be no more nor less reasonably satisfied by accumulating the means of enjoyment of bodily pleasures than by supplication of such gods. Belief in gods of this sort is no different in consequence from the modern beliefs that nature is hostile to human beings (and therefore that they should do everything to overcome her) or that nature is not and cannot be ruled (and therefore that all depends on chance, which humans can only accept or affirm). In order to know that there are no malevolent or capricious gods--to know that the nature that is the origin of useful things is such that she may have a kindly intention for users--one must know and be able to give an account of everything; one must be wise. Thus it is not surprising that there is a virtually unlimited kind of moneymaking that depends on the lack of such wisdom.

THE PROVISIONAL SOVEREIGNTY OF POLITICS (1259A37-1260B24)

Although a familiarity with moneymaking would be useful to statesmen (and household managers, 1259a33-36), household management is "apparently" more properly concerned with human beings, especially free human beings and their virtue, than with possessions lacking souls, slaves, and "what we call wealth" (1259b18-21). One might then suppose that, according to Aristotle, knowledge of free human beings and their moral virtues is at least as much knowledge as is necessary to secure the perfect preservation of human beings that is the purpose of the household and city. What does this knowledge amount to?

All human beings, even slaves, presumably have some moral virtue since they are human beings and possessed of reason (logos, 1259b21-28). Indeed, we could say that it is especially the exercise of moral virtue or what appears in the world as moral virtue that makes us think of human beings as free, for morally virtuous acts cannot be compelled (Nic. Ethics, III, 1114b26-30). All human beings are alike in possessing the capacity for moral virtue and, to some extent, reason or speech, which is the architect of virtue (1260a17-20). Human beings differ from one another insofar as their moral virtues and intellectual capacities differ, and these differences suit them for their particular functions--master, slave, husband, wife, father, child (1260a14-17). Like the parts of the soul (1260a4-5) and all other beings by nature ruling and ruled (1260a7-9), free human beings can still be ranked or ordered according to their kind of moral and intellectual virtue. Ruling and being ruled differ in form (eidos, 1259b37-38). For Aristotle, the natural despotic and political orders are determined by virtue, which presupposes reason, and they parallel possible right orders of soul. Not by contemplating all of visible nature and its cause or causes, but by understanding how the rational and non-rational contribute to the work of each kind of human being, and how the kinds are related, does one appreciate how human beings can be both free and ruled in nature. Aristotle's political philosophy--what he refers to as the kingly science--is his science of the soul and its good, and of the natural constraints on the exercise of the highest virtue. It is, I suggest, an attempt to articulate a whole in such a way as to provide one possible model for other wholes.

Two obvious difficulties remain, however. First, in conjugal politics the male is only sometimes, not always, the natural leader of the female (1259b1-3). The male's political authority in the household is established in the same way that Amasis, king of Egypt, established his authority. (43) In politics, ruler distinguishes himself from ruled by means of insignia, titles (logoi), and honors; and one must give a logos like the one Amasis gave about his footbath (1259b4-9). Amasis had a golden footbath recast in a different form as a statue of a god to be worshipped, to teach the lesson that a humble origin does not preclude one from being worthy of great honor. (44) (He thereby also reminded his subjects of the humble origins of gods.) Political rule that is according to nature is justified with an argument about the priority of virtue to birth, as of form to matter. Conventional political rule at best approximates natural rule, because conventions are hardly more flexible or amenable to rapid reform than is the opinion that by nature males are superior to females. The all-important formulations of convention provided by the poets would have to be replaced by arguments about virtue and form, but even then conventions, perhaps less crude ones, would remain. (45) If the science of the human soul and its virtues can be said to be the kingly science, then political rule differs from kingly rule in having to respect form in practice as well as theory.

The second difficulty, stated at the conclusion of Book I (1260b8-20), is that the discussion of conjugal republicanism cannot be completed. The virtues of men and women (but not masters and slaves) must be understood with reference to the city's regime, for the household is a part of the city, and virtue must be seen with a view to the whole. A regime is an ordering of human beings and therefore of their virtues toward the first principles human beings choose to honor or to adopt as their ends (see III, 1278b8-10 with 1281a31). If political rule is to be more than the rule of the stronger and the end to be something more than mere bodily preservation, then some chosen regime must be shown to be right according to nature. (46) The ways in which the lives of free human beings are shaped by virtue, together with laws and conventions that inculcate virtue, can be justified, if indeed they can be, with the aid of an intellectual virtue that discovers the place of human beings in the whole. From this we could learn the limits to our moral choices. The science of the statesman or household manager has its beginning in reflection on moral virtue, but it cannot rest there. From this beginning it must ascend to or be supplemented by an account of nature. (47) For this reason the sovereignty of politics and its good can only be asserted provisionally.

In the concluding portion of Book I, Aristotle returns to the topic of slavery and reminds us of the elevated (though still lowly) sense presented in this article, in which one may be a natural slave. The slave, we learn, has some virtue and some reason. To do his work he needs continence and courage (1260a32-36). He has reason, and the master is not the cause of his virtue through teaching him (1260b3-7). Although he is said not to deliberate (1260a12-14), he is not necessarily devoid of intellectual capacity. (48) In sum, the slave is hard to distinguish from the free person. Nature is not said either to withhold or to give wisdom to man, but for Aristotle our minds and therefore ourselves remain enslaved to nature unless and until we acquire wisdom by our toil. The integrity of nature, in turn, seems to depend on our ability to bespeak its intelligibility (see 1252a31-34, 1255b12-15). In Aristotle's opinion this kind of slavery, the slavery of the philosopher, is the only sure cause of preservation for which human beings can and must reasonably hope.

For Aristotle, as for modern political philosophers, man begins as a slave to his bodily needs or desires. (49) For Aristotle, as for these philosophers, the bodily needs of human beings cannot be satisfied in the absence of politics, though politics itself can only moderate or displace, rather than satisfy these desires. (50) For Aristotle, as for the others, the bodily desires lead to or are accompanied by the desire for knowledge, if for no other reason than that one desires to know how to satisfy desires. (51) While knowledge as technology might eliminate the slavish drudgery involved in the attempt to meet bodily needs, desire remains insatiable. But in contrast to modern political philosophers, Aristotle does not believe that politics can be made to seem reducible to economics, and political science enlarged to first philosophy, without endangering the necessary integrity of politics. (52) Nor, in further contrast, does Aristotle allow that the desire for knowledge for its own sake can be either dismissed or fully satisfied. It cannot be dismissed, as for Marx, because philosophy has an independent natural source in wonder. (53) It cannot be fully satisfied, as for Hegel, because philosophy is not the self-consciousness that man's positing is the whole, but is rather the attempted intellection of intelligible forms given by nature. (54)

If Aristotle is to bring to light the slavish desire for wisdom about the whole and the political utility of the attempt to satisfy it, he must do so without openly destroying the illusions of sufficiency fostered by politics. For the activity of philosophy presupposes the politics required for civilization. Hence the argument in Book I that household management and politics properly circumscribe moneymaking and transcend it in nobility (1259b17-21). Yet only if, for Aristotle, political science were identical with natural philosophy, or if philosophizing about the whole could be shown unnecessary, would it be hard to see why the Politics begins as it does with a discussion of economics--of slavery, property, and moneymaking.

AFTERWORD

Delba Winthrop, beloved wife of Harvey Mansfield and friend and hostess to many both inside and outside the field of political science and the academy, was a scholar of Aristotle, Tocqueville, and Solzhenitsyn; a teacher of political philosophy at Harvard; and a mentor to many students of political science. Delba took her undergraduate degree from Cornell University and her doctorate from Harvard University in political science. She was a star at both Cornell and Harvard, where she studied with Allan Bloom and Harvey Mansfield, among others. Her last published work was a widely praised translation of Tocqueville's Democracy in America, which she translated and commented on with her husband, Harvey Mansfield.

Delba taught undergraduate and graduate students at Boston College, the Colorado College, Duke University, the University of Virginia, and, of course, Harvard University. She continued to enjoy teaching--her vocation--after her diagnosis of lymphoma, nearly until her passing in the late summer of 2006. As much as she enjoyed her teaching, though, her friends and acquaintances also longingly remember Delba's delight in the culinary arts--and many friends, colleagues, and students benefited from her gifts. As one student and friend, Marth Martini, described it, "It was not good food for its own sake, but good food for the soul's sake." She recalled a gathering where the movie Babette's Feast (celebrating the spell of fellowship that fine cooking can cast) was mentioned. Delba, who was busy serving, broke into the conversation to say that there was something she could believe in.

Delba loved life and fought hard to live, and she left a heroic legacy. In remembrance of her talents as a student of political philosophy, a wonderful and welcoming hostess, a wise teacher and mentor, a friend, and a loving spouse, Delba's family and friends have established an annual award in her honor to recognize scholars in the field of political science for excellence in political science toward the beginning of their careers. To date, two awards have been given: to Linda Rabieh, of Tufts University, for her book Plato and the Virtue of Courage--a fitting tribute to the extraordinary courage with which Delba battled and faced a fatal disease in the last years of her life--and to Bryan Garsten, of Yale University, for his book Saving Persuasion. The award is given in support of scholarship that aspires to the caliber of Delba's own work, one sample of which is found here. Award nominations are invited by May 1st of each year.

Donations to the Delba Winthrop Memorial Fund, which supports this award, may be sent to

Ken Weinstein

c/o The Hudson Institute

1015 15th Street, NW, 6th Floor

Washington, DC 20005

NOTES

(1.) Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); quoted by chapter and page.

(2.) Hobbes correctly attributes the doctrine of separated essences to "Schoole Divinity," the mingling of Aristotle and Scripture, not to Aristotle himself (Leviathan, 46:463).

(3.) Cf. Jerry Weinberger, "Hobbes's Doctrine of Method," American Political Science Review 69 (1975): 1340-1.

(4.) I have used the standard dictionary definition of chrematistike, "moneymaking," though I believe it to be inadequate for a full understanding of Book I of the Politics. Another possible meaning of chrematistike is "oracular." The noun chrema means "something needed." The verb from which both stem is chrao, which has as its primary meaning "to proclaim," with specific reference to gods and oracles. Secondarily it is "to furnish things." The importance of that primary meaning for Book I should become clear from my argument.

(5.) While few modern Aristotle scholars doubt that the Politics is the work of Aristotle himself, or at least substantially his own, few believe that the text we have could have been the completed manuscript for a book. Most argue that the Politics is at best a series of essays written by Aristotle, perhaps with some comprehensive plan, or at worst, merely materials from which he lectured to his students. See Ernest Barker, The Political Thought of Plato and Aristotle (New York: Russell and Russell, 1959), 251, and The Politics of Aristotle (New York: Oxford Press, 1962), xxxvii-xlvi, 22, 38; J. R. T. Eaton, The Politics of Aristotle (Oxford: Longmans, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1855), i-v; Werner Jaeger, Aristotle, trans. Richard Robinson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 194), 271-75; W. L. Newman, The Politics of Aristotle (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1887), 2:xxi-xxii, xxvii-xxviii, xxix-xl; Franz Susemihl and R. D. Hicks, The Politics of Aristotle (London: Macmillan, 1894), 11-19. For recent reexaminations of the question of the authenticity of the Politics, see Roger D. Masters, "The Case of Aristotle's Missing Dialogues," Political Theory (1977) 5: 1, 31-60; and Carnes Lord, "The Character and Composition of Aristotle's Politics," Political Theory (1981), 9: 4, 459-78.

(6.) Plato, Statesman, 258e-259d; Xenophon, Memorabilia, 3.4.12, 3.6.4.

(7.) Although the city is "by nature" (physei, 1252b30-31, 1253a1-2), it is also said to be founded (1253a29-31) and does not simply emerge from natural inclinations as does the family. It is more often said to be "according to nature" (kata physin)--a completion of nature's intention by human beings rather than by the direct, spontaneous agency of nature.

(8.) Euripides, Iphigenia at Aulis, 1.1400. The statement is made by a woman, Iphigenia.

(9.) Among the barbarians, for example, there are only male and female slaves, no rulers. It could be argued that even the barbarians live by convention, not simply by nature. But Aristotle indicates that the early Greeks lived no better than barbarians (1252b9-12, 22-24, where the reference from Odyssey, 9.114-15 is to the Cyclopes, who were cannibals). Barbarism is, if not by nature, at least ubiquitous at the beginnings. Greeks have to assert, through Euripides and Iphigenia, the conventional distinction that makes them fit to rule barbarians such as they once were.

(10.) Cf. Aristotle, Politics, IV, 1288b10-1289a5. In Book I Aristotle chooses to speak of the best but rare as godlike (cf. 1253a1-4, 1253a27-29).

(11.) Consider the "assertion" of Euripides (1252b8) and the "reviling" of Homer (1253a5) on behalf of the city.

(12.) The quotation from Homer refers to Diomedes, who was so far from being "clanless, lawless, and heartless" as to have been something of a super-patriot who urged Agamemnon not to retreat. His impudent tone had to be softened by the elderly and respected "silver-tongued" Nestor.

(13.) Aristotle, De Anima, III, 432a1-2: The soul is like a hand, and the hand is the tool of tools.

(14.) However important work (energeia) is for Aristotle, it does not have the status of appropriation for Locke, of work for Hegel, of productivity for Marx. For Aristotle the highest work of which humans partake, intellection (noesis), is the intellection of pre-existing intelligible forms. In these modern thinkers, however, human activity is dependent for its meaning on no independent standard and can be said to be essentially responsible for the whole.

(15.) In Book I at 1255b22-24, Aristotle acknowledges that there is a slaves' science, which was taught by "someone" at Syracuse.

(16.) See Aristotle, De Anima, III, 429a10-25, 430a20-25, 432a1-2.

(17.) Animate tools, it is explained at 1253b33-1254a1, would be unnecessary if tools could perform their work upon command or by perceiving beforehand, as could the statues of Daedalus (Plato, Euthyphro 11b, Meno 97d) and the tripods of Hephaestus (Iliad 18.369).

(18.) To benefit (symphero) can also mean "to bring together."

(19.) In the first parts of Book I of the Politics one finds at the beginnings of inquiries a concentration of verbs of knowing which are primarily verbs of seeing: 1252a1, 1252a17, 1252a21, 1252a24, 1252a26, 1253b13, 1253b16, 1254a20, 1254a36, 1254a39, 1254b3, 1255a4, 1256a1, 1256a15, 1258b11, 1260b14, 1260b15, 1260b23. From this we might infer that the beginning of political knowledge must be what we can see for ourselves, not, for example, tales of gods whom we cannot see.

(20.) Soul is said to rule body despotically and nous to rule the desires by a political or kingly rule. Aristotle then observes that it would be better for the body and the part of the soul having passions to be ruled by nous and the part having reasonable speech. Thus it seems that in a human being nous cannot rule the body except through the soul and by political or kingly rule.

(21.) As Barker notes (11), the examples of garment and beds as tools for use provided by the slave are surprising and a bit perplexing, though not inexplicable. He does not provide the explanation.

(22.) Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta frag. 3 Nauk. Since Aristotle is the only source given for the quotation one could doubt its authenticity.

(23.) Cf. Aristotle, Politics, 1253a10-39: While both the household and the city are communities of speech about good and bad and just and unjust, the city has the capacity to use a force which the household apparently lacks. See Aristotle's ironic use of Homer (Iliad 9.63), at 1253a4-7.

(24.) Aristotle, Nic. Ethics, II, 1103a23-26. At Politics III, 1286a38, Aristotle remarks that it is not easy for many to be good.

(25.) Early modern (liberal) political science, as distinguished from classical political science, does attempt explicitly to ground convention on nature ("the state of nature") and individual consent. But individual virtue cannot be recognized as such, for to do so undermines the asserted premise that human beings are equal in the decisive political respect. Consider Hobbes' criticisms of Aristotle's Ethics at the beginning of this article.

(26.) For the argument that political life is necessarily religious see Karl Marx, "On the Jewish Question," in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 39.

(27.) Thomas understands the argument to hold true because the soul must always move the body even if appetite and reason conflict within the soul. St. Thomas Aquinas, In Libros Politicorum Aristotelis Expositio, ed. Raymundus Spiazzi (Turin: Marietti, 1951), 1.3.64.

(28.) Congreve believes the division of the activities of politics here into those of peace and war to be so irrelevant as perhaps to make the passage spurious. Richard Congreve, The Politics of Aristotle (London: Longman, Green, 1874), 18. Oncken, never one to suspect Aristotle of irony, finds it strange that Aristotle "overlooks the fact that the domestic service of the slave hardly demands more strength than the military service of the freeman." Quoted in Franz Susemihl and R. D. Hicks, The Politics of Aristotle (London: Macmillan, 1894), 167.

(29.) See Aristotle, De Anima, III, 430a22-25.

(30.) Aristotle, no less than the Marx of "On the Jewish Question," appreciates the connection between politics and religion, and its dangers. His intention, however, is not to abolish both, but to suggest the desirability of reforming religion in such a way that the gods worshipped resemble as much as possible the Aristotelian nous. They are not the sort to be prayed to for intervention in human affairs, but rather they are to be admired and imitated. See Politics, III, 1286a9-1288a6; Metaphysics, XII, 1074a38- b35.

(31.) Cf. note 4 above for the meaning of chrematistike. It should also be noted that for Aristotle wealth seems to consist not only of possessions (ktemata), but also of things that can be used without necessarily being owned (chremata). I have subsumed both words under the general category of property.

(32.) In the long discussion of moneymaking (1256a1-1259a36) the positions of household manager and statesman with regard to moneymaking are consistently equated.

(33.) As Susemihl and Hicks, citing Oncken, note (Politics 211), to ask whether chrematistike is a part of oikonomike is "perverse," for the former should include the latter, not vice versa.

(34.) For the reading of hairesis as "choice," cf. Thomas Aquinas, In Libros Politicorum, 1.6.103. Newman would read this striking word as Aristotle's only use of its sense of "taking" or "getting." W. L. Newman, The Politics of Aristotle (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1887), 168.

(35.) Thus the disagreement between Aristotle and Locke on the goodness of nature in this sense would appear to be a difference of emphasis. See John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, 2.26-32.

(36.) See above, p. 7. Most foreign to us are the gods.

(37.) Nomisma means not only money but "all things conventional." The root verb nomizo means "to believe" and "to conform to established religious practices."

(38.) The word used for "interest" here (tokos) has as its primary meaning "offspring." Cf. Plato, Republic, 507a.

(39.) "Money" in this context also reminds one of Plato's idea of the good as it appears in the Republic, Books VI and VII. Aristotle's criticism of the tendency to find money to be the first and final cause of all good is similar to his criticism of the Platonic logos about the good. See Nic. Ethics, I, 1096a11-1097a14.

(40.) Cf. Marx, "On the Jewish Question," 48: The Jewish God is in truth money because that God is the god of practical need and self-interest.

(41.) The explicit point of the anecdote of Thales and the olive presses is that anyone can apply the principle of moneymaking. Nonetheless, Thales' monopoly was profitable only because his astronomy had enabled him to predict that the next year's olive crop would be large. Thales is said to "have made a demonstration of his wisdom (sophia)."

(42.) Solon frag. 13 Berkg, 1.63-76. The translation is by J. M. Edmonds, Elegy and Iambus (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961), I: 131-33.

(43.) The story of Amasis is recorded in Herodotus, 2.172.

(44.) See p. 6 above to make the contrast of Aristotle's Amasis to Theodectes' Helen.

(45.) In this section Aristotle quotes Homer (Iliad 1.544) and Sophocles (Ajax 293) with seeming approval. In the first instance Aristotle attributes to Homer the words of his Hera that reveal how the goddess in her prudence defers to her husband, conceding to him not merely political, but kingly rule over her. In the second instance Aristotle attributes to Sophocles the words of the mad Ajax who silences his wife as she attempts to make him be sensible. Thus the poets are made to appear as the spokesmen for the conventional authority of men. Aristotle reveals the superior prudence of women while acquiescing in its concealment. For a possible figurative meaning of "women" cf. 1260a12-14 with note 48 below: Someone who deliberates, but subordinates deliberation to something else, for example science, could also be a philosopher. From this standpoint the barbarian prejudice equating women with slaves (1252b5) might rise to the level of insight. Cf. W. W. Fortenbaugh, "Aristotle on Slaves and Women," in Articles on Aristotle, ed. J. Barnes, M. Schofield, and R. Sorabji (London: Duckworth, 1977), 135-39: To say that the deliberative is not sovereign is to say that the alogon part of the soul is sovereign.

(46.) Aristotle's thematic consideration of which regime or regimes are right according to nature is found in Book III of the Politics, commencing at 1278b6.

(47.) Hobbes' thought can be taken as the prototypical modern position in contrast to Aristotle's. For Hobbes, virtue is reduced almost completely to passion (Leviathan 15:111) and the ground of political science is in no other aspect of nature than the thoughts and passions of human beings (Intro:10).

(48.) Susemihl and Hicks (Politics 211) contend that if the slave lacks the deliberative faculty, he surely cannot possess the capacity for science. But this conclusion is not a necessary one. In Nic. Ethics III, 1112a18-34, we are told of the restricted sphere of deliberation, a sphere which does not include natural, as distinguished from intentional human, causality.

(49.) See John Locke, Two Treatises, 2:32; G W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, ed. and trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1942), 34-52; Alexandre Kojeve, Introduction a la lecture de Hegel (Paris: Gallimard, 1947), 11; Karl Marx, "The German Ideology," Marx-Engels Reader, 154-55.

(50.) For Aristotle, however, there is a part of man that naturally has a specifically political outlet: thymos, which means spiritedness or assertiveness. See III, 1287a30-32.

(51.) See Hobbes, Leviathan 11:74-75.

(52.) For the elevation of political science in modernity consider Hobbes, Leviathan, 46:458: "By PHILOSOPHY is understood the Knowledge acquired by Reasoning from the Manner of the Generation of any thing to the Properties; or from the Properties, to some possible way of Generation of the same; to the end to bee able to produce, as far as matter, and humane force permit, such Effects, as humane life requireth."

(53.) Aristotle, Metaphysics I: 982b12-28.

(54.) Cf. Stanley Rosen, G. W. F. Hegel (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974), 50-56, 230, 266-70.

DELBA WINTHROP (1945-2006), This article, written in the mid-1970s and rewritten in 1982, but never published, has received minor editing from Delba Winthrop's husband, Harvey C. Mansfield. No attempt was made to deal with the scholarly literature since that time, and it is clear that the author intended to make more references than she left. Copyright [c] 2008 Heldref Publications

McGrail, Mary Ann

Source Citation (MLA 7th Edition)
McGrail, Mary Ann. "Aristotle's Politics, Book I: a reconsideration." Perspectives on Political Science 37.4 (2008): 189+. General OneFile. Web. 29 Aug. 2012.
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