CUP (2016) h/b 259pp £64.99 (ISBN 9781107631007)
This collection of unpublished essays emerged from a conference in Boulder, Colorado in 2014. There is no guiding theme other than intensive grappling with some of the big problems in this extremely important and influential but notoriously inconsistent text. The reviewer can do nothing more than give a brief overview of the closely-argued contents of the twelve papers, all of which range far further and wider than can be indicated here.
In ‘On logos and politics in Aristotle’, Jill Frank takes logos to mean ‘speech’ and argues that for Aristotle the soul acts, as it were, in the middle voice: the speaker can persuade it, but the soul in being persuaded makes an active decision to be persuaded: it is something the soul has done for itself. To that extent, it mirrors the middle voice of peithô ‘I persuade’→ peithomai ‘I persuade myself [of something]’→ ‘I [actively] believe, put my trust in’. She develops this theme in relation to a speaker’s use of enthymemes (logical syllogisms based on probable premisses), the ending of the Eumenides and Aristotle’s claim that he who rules must also learn to be ruled, suggesting that logos draws speaker and audience into a dynamic conversation.
Since Aristotle claims that the polis exists ‘by nature’, and man is a ‘political animal’ (politikon zoon), Pierre Pellegrin asks ‘Is politics a natural science?’ for Aristotle. His answer is ‘no’. True sciences are theoretical for Aristotle (to us a most odd notion), while politics is a practical activity. The point is that a theoretical science like biology is defined by its strictly organic, causal rules; the animals were endowed with their capacities by nature from the very beginning, which are all that they need. But man as a political animal lives in a polis, which need not have come to pass, and has practical choices to make, via deliberation and discussion, about ethics, happiness and so on, a far cry from the world of the animal kingdom.
Marguerite Deslauriers, reflecting on the relationship beween males and females in her ‘Political rule over women in Politics I’, wonders exactly what Aristotle means when he says that, while both are free, a man rules over a women politically (politikôs). She concludes that free women, like slaves, lack authority—i.e. the capacity to command or make decisions—and so must learn obedience, but are able to deliberate about and evaluate men’s proposals; slaves, meanwhile, play no role in deliberation, unless (presumably) on banausic technical matters.
Politics II is a wide-ranging discussion of different sorts of constitutions, from Plato’s utopias and Solon’s Athens to Carthage, Crete and so on. In ‘Political critique, political theorising, political innovation’, Thornton Lockwood sees Aristotle’s criticisms in II as both an essential preparation for his proposals for an optimal state that emerge in VII and VIII and at the same time an exercise in political theorising. So, for example, the proper form of state-controlled education in VII/VIII is the solution to many of the problems raised in II; and Aristotle’s proposal for communal property in VII, while as old as the hills, raises the question of how and when such ancient ideas should be revived.
J.J. Mulhern’s ‘Politeia in Greek literature, inscriptions and in Aristotle’s Politics: reflections on translation and interpretation’ does exactly what it says on the tin. He identifies four senses—‘citizenship’, ‘citizen-body’, ‘arrangement of offices’ and ‘regime’—and argues that Aristotle saw them as critically connected not just for historical reasons but because ‘achieving or preserving stability required attention to the condition of citizenship in which the citizens partook, to the citizen body or men, to the constitution or arrangement of citizens and offices, and to the regime that occupied these offices’.
A besetting evil of the Greek city-states was its capacity for ferocious in-fighting. In his ‘The “mixed regime” in Aristotle’s Politics’, Ryan Balot shows that the ‘mixed regime’ was not a feeble-minded compromise of high ideals or a mishmash of disparate elements that solved no problems but rather the best way—because it was the ‘middle way’—to ‘negotiate diverse, and at least partially just claims, to rule the city’ and allow citizens to live a tolerant, stable existence based on a working civic concord. Thanassis Samaras in his ‘Aristotle and the question of citizenship’ shows that Aristotle can barely be defined as a democrat when his best constitution would seem to enfranchise not the (undistinguished) democratic ‘many’ but only the ‘middling class’, i.e. independent farmers and those who could afford hoplite armour. Christopher Bobonitch, meanwhile, grapples with the most serious problem in III, that Aristotle suddenly produces a quite unexpected hymn in praise of the masses’ ability to make sound critical judgements, in strong contrast with his views elsewhere (‘Aristotle, political decision-making and the many’). But as B. points out, the arguments are all from analogy and simply do not add up. One such analogy is that some impure food mixed with pure food is more nourishing than a little pure food. But how does that show e.g. that a mixed crowd of people make better judgements than the better people alone? This is a ‘curious text’ indeed, and B. judges that no progress is possible unless one clearly confronts the problems.
In his ‘Little to do with justice: Aristotle on distributing political power’, Eckart Schütrumpf points out that for Aristotle ‘justice’ or ‘just distribution’ cannot solve the problem of the tension between elitism—allowing only those who merit it to hold power—and the ‘necessity’ of allowing all free citizens to be involved in government, in order to avoid civil unrest (in the course of this argument, S. suggests that Aristotle would have welcomed the concept of civil rights). Arlene Saxonhouse continues the theme: there will always be unrest in a city if there are those who feel unjustly excluded from the honour due to them as citizens. So the job of the statesman is to diminish the resentment and humiliation felt by such against those who do enjoy the privileges of power and position; only so will he stand a chance of maintaining a stable city. To that extent, ensuring good relations beween cities would make a start, even if that will not prevent arguments within a city about the fair distribution of power.
Pierre Destrée argues that, though Aristotle was aiming to imagine an ideal state, he did not thereby give up on the notion of reforming failing states (‘Aristotle on improving imperfect cities’). Indeed, as a practical man, he surely assumed that a theory of the perfect city should have some relevance to our imperfect ones, enabling them to enjoy some degree of ‘relative order and stability’. But how could even Aristotle justify improving a tyranny? Killing the tyrant was no answer: it would lead to even worse trouble. Aristotle sees the answer in turning the tyrant into a benevolent king. Josiah Ober closes the collection (‘Nature, history and Aristotle’s best regime’) by arguing that Aristotle’s ideal state is one with institutions derived from historical evidence and a mixture of ‘a kind of aristocracy and … a kind of democracy’.
Conclusion: a very stimulating collection of papers.
Peter Jones