Melissa Lane, Introduction to Aristotle’s Politics, Economics, Constitution of Athens
Origin of polis in primordial relations, democracy as perversion of good constitution which treats equal citizens equally, teleological approach, historical accuracy
Melissa Lane wrote:
Introduction
This volume presents the reader with Aristotle’s Politics, one of the most fecund and profound works of ancient Greek political philosophy. Written, or perhaps compiled as lecture notes, in the fourth century BCE (Aristotle lived from 384 to 322), it offers an account of politics as oriented toward the fulfillment and flourishing of human nature while also surveying the landscape of actual and possible political institutions and the dynamics of political conflict. Its vision of political community as ethically valuable has soared into political philosophy, while its attention to the sordid side of politics has been likewise influential. …
… The Politics is anticipated at the end of one of Aristotle’s great ethical treatises, the Nicomachean Ethics, insofar as for most humans to become good, they need to be brought up under good laws, which requires study of the science of legislation and of politics and constitutions more generally.
This volume takes the story from politics to the specifics of constitutional history and practice in Athens and on to a further exploration of an Aristotelian perspective on economics. It does so by including two works—the Economics and the Constitution of Athens … However, the authenticity of the ascription of these two works to Aristotle is today “seriously doubted” and often denied outright, in the case of the Economics, and not universally accepted by scholars, in the case of the Constitution of Athens. The Economics most likely dates, in part or as a whole, from after Aristotle’s death (and its various books were probably penned by one or more members of his Peripatetic school, so called from the scholars’ habit of walking as they talked); the Constitution of Athens was most likely compiled by a member or members of the Lyceum overseen by Aristotle, if not written by him.
In their close connections to Aristotle’s circle in his lifetime and after his death, these two works help us respectively to understand important implications and extensions of his thought about politics for the management of households and estates—a topic introduced in Book I of the Politics and in the Economics—as well as the analysis of constitutional change and institutions, treated especially in Books IV–VI of the Politics and exhibited in the Constitution of Athens. The Economics … extends the geographical and chronological range of the volume, for, unlike Aristotle’s Politics, it does not focus its discussion of political forms on the Greek type of state known as the polis—the distinctive Greek political unit, composed of a single urban center surrounded by an agricultural hinterland, generally animated by a shared communal identity. Instead it reaches out beyond the polis to consider also the economic management of royal domains and satrapal provinces associated with some of the great empires that would consolidate their domination of the Greek world in the years following Aristotle’s death—for he died less than a year after his erstwhile pupil Alexander the Great, whose empire was then carved up among his generals.
Politics
The Politics is advertised at the end of the Nicomachean Ethics as a necessary turn to “study the question of the constitution, in order to complete to the best of our ability the philosophy of human nature”. Indeed Aristotle there sets out a fuller program for the discussion that is needed to inform would-be legislators. It is to include a “review” of what previous thinkers on the subject have said well; a study of “what sorts of influence preserve and destroy states, and what sorts preserve or destroy the particular kinds of constitution, and to what causes it is due that some are well and others ill administered”; and, building on these, seeing “which constitution is best, and how each must be ordered, and what laws and customs it must use” (returning to an earlier question of “what form of government . . . is best suited to states in general,” as opposed to “what is possible and what is easily attainable by all”).
This three-part program is undergirded, especially in Books I and III of the Politics, by an analysis of the nature of politics, the political community, humans as political animals, being a citizen, and a constitution. These books are perhaps the most original and influential of the whole work. Because they also provide relevant background for the other texts included in this volume (the Economics and Constitution of Athens, respectively), a selective overview of their arguments will serve here as an orientation to the Politics as a whole.
Book I begins by defining a polis as a kind of community or koinonia, a shared and mutually dependent way of life. Indeed the polis is defined as the highest kind of community, embracing all others, and as coming into being for the sake of mere life (physical survival) but maintaining its existence for the sake of the good life. The good here is to be understood as the happiness that consists principally or exclusively, depending on how Aristotle’s ethical works are understood, in the actualization of one’s rational capacities, both practical and theoretical. Humans are not the only “political” animals (ants, bees, and cranes are among those also considered “political” by Aristotle), but we are more so, by virtue of being the only ones endowed with the power of speech. Speech and the reasoning that it facilitates allow us not only to vocally signify pleasure or pain but also to articulate what is expedient and inexpedient, just and unjust.
Yet while humans naturally have the capacity and indeed the need to live in a political community, being not individually self-sufficient, this does not mean that we will always do so or that we will always act justly toward one another. Indeed, shortly after making his famous declaration that “it is evident that the state is a creation of nature, and that man is by nature a political animal”, Aristotle acknowledges that some men will choose to pursue “armed injustice” against one another. This is because the capacity to make evaluative judgments about ethics and politics does not ensure that this capacity will be exercised correctly. We pursue what we judge to be expedient or just, not necessarily what actually is so. Hence our political actions are likely to differ profoundly, and sometimes violently, from those of others, whether because our judgments are simply mistaken, shaded by different upbringing and customs, or systematically distorted by individual or group interests (all mechanisms of disagreement that the Politics explores). Such diverse perceptions, judgments, and orientations are among the sources of the dizzying multiplicity of political forms that arise on Aristotle’s account notwithstanding his claim that humans are political animals. Indeed they arise precisely because of what that claim means when properly understood.
At the beginning of Book III of the Politics, Aristotle acknowledges just this diversity in making the very definition of a citizen relative to a specific kind of state—for “[h]e who is a citizen in a democracy will often not be a citizen in an oligarchy”. This example would have been especially significant for his contemporaries, for Greece in the century or so before Aristotle wrote had been marked by an ongoing struggle between emergent democracies, embodied and led for most of the period by Athens, and oligarchies in which a relatively small and wealthy elite group ruled and sometimes exploited a much larger group of poorer people, embodied and led during the fifth-century Peloponnesian War by Sparta. (At the same time, the Greeks were contending with monarchies and tyrannies of various kinds, both within Greece and in neighboring societies such as Persia.) Each of these different political forms is a constitution or form of government, in Greek a politeia, a word that can refer not just to a narrow set of legal rules but to the whole set of practices that define the distinctive nature of a given society.
For a constitution to be well ordered, it must both aim at the common good and also treat equal citizens equally—a citizen being understood as someone in a given constitution who is eligible to hold a magistracy or office. Aristotle identifies six principal kinds of constitutions. Three are good forms, in which the rulers aim at the common good of all the citizens: kingship, or the (good) rule of one; aristocracy, or the (good) rule of a few; and what Aristotle calls simply “constitution” or “constitutional government” to signify the (good) rule of the many. To each of these there corresponds a perverted counterpart, a form of government in which the ruling individual or group aims at their own good rather than the good of the whole: tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy (a word that Aristotle chooses to reserve here for the flawed constitutional form).
Unlike in the household, where natural capacities to rule and be ruled are (according to Aristotle) distributed in such a way as to enshrine ongoing hierarchical inequality, in the political domain, citizens who are equals are not naturally suited to be permanently ruled by others, nor is any one of them naturally suited permanently to rule. Kingship, on this account, would be suitable only where one person was in fact so superlative in excellence as to be uniquely suited to permanent rule. As this suggests, the question of who is to be counted as an equal is in practice one of the most central, and controversial, questions that any regime must confront.
Are the common people to be counted as equals to the elite, as in polities and democracies, or are the elite able to insist that only those wealthy enough should count as full citizens who are eligible for office, as in the case of oligarchies? In Books IV–VI of the Politics, Aristotle details the rival understandings of equality, and therefore of justice, that partisans of oligarchy and democracy develop, and that animate both their own distribution of offices and their hostility toward one another. By contrast, the best constitution generally speaking, when Aristotle turns to discuss it in Books VII and VIII, will be one in which all citizens are equal in moral excellence or virtue and in their capacity to act as citizens.
The oikos and the polis : Book I of the Politics as the basis for the Economics
We must return now to another part of Book I of the Politics: its discussion of the origin of the polis, both chronologically and functionally, in the household, or oikos. The origin of the polis is in primordial relationships, the simplest forms of community, that meet two specific kinds of particular and reciprocal needs: the need that male and female have for each other in reproduction, and the need of what Aristotle calls “natural ruler and subject” for each other, “that both may be preserved”. Notice that, in Aristotle’s view, each of these is rooted in nature (phusis), meaning the natural potential for growth and actualization of capacities belonging to a being, primarily by virtue of its belonging to a certain kind. Aristotle writes in Book III that “a state is not a mere society, having a common place, established for the prevention of mutual crime and for the sake of exchange”; rather, “to choose to live together is friendship,” so that both the primordial relationships and the common life of the polis as a whole serve the end of the good life or living well. This remains the case even when that common life is structured according to principles of hierarchy that stem from differences in the developed natures of its members.
Natural ruler and natural subject are, according to Aristotle, found in principle in three sets of relationships within the household. He claims that a man with fully developed rational capacity is naturally able and suited to rule a woman whose rational faculty is less steady, a child whose rational faculty is undeveloped, and a slave whose rational faculty is stunted so as to be able only to serve as an instrument for the master’s pursuit of the good life, not to determine or pursue virtuous ends alone. It should be noted that all these claims evince some tensions in Aristotle’s own writing, such as whether these various fulfillments and limits in rational faculties are either internally consistent or typically manifested. It should also be noted that Aristotle’s account of natural slavery was both unique in antiquity (so far as we know) and essentially irrelevant to the practices of Greek slavery at the time, which for the most part were viewed as originating simply in victory in war. …
Economics
To govern the household consisting of the relationships outlined here, together with the property needed to support them, is a skill, a form of knowledge or expertise named oikonomia or oikonomikē. In Book I of the Politics, Aristotle is emphatic that the expertise of governing an oikos is not the same as the expertise of governing a polis (contrary to the approach taken in Plato’s Statesman, where the expertise possessed by the statesman, king, slavemaster, and household manager is said to be one and the same). He offers a discussion of the expertise of governing a household. This discussion famously distinguishes between the proper or natural aim of achieving a limited supply of money and property necessary to live the good life, and the unleashing of the arts of wealth-getting through commerce, usury, service, and exchange in an unlimited way that confuses money and property as means to the good life with their being ends in themselves.
… Xenophon’s Oeconomicus clearly serves as a source and model for Books I and III of the Economics, even though the two works diverge in some important respects. In style, Xenophon uses the Socratic dialogue form, while the Economics does not. In substance, Xenophon argues that husband and wife should equally govern children, for example, versus the gender hierarchy that the Economics posits as natural. But in understanding oikonomia to be focused on the increase of wealth without any limits, the Economics is much closer to Xenophon in treating the four functions of acquiring, guarding, ordering, and using wealth on a par than it is to Aristotle’s insistence on natural limits to the acquisition of wealth in Book Iof the Politics.
In contrast to the clear fourth-century BCE genre that can be established as background for Books I and III of the Economics, its Book II is sui generis, for rather than contrasting the governing of an oikos with governing of a polis as do both Xenophon and Aristotle, Book II of the Economics extends the idea of oikonomia to include four kinds: of the royal domain, the gubernatorial domain (that of an imperial province), the polis, and the individual. This extends the idea of household management to the idea of the administration of the finances of a city more generally (an idea, it has been noted, for which there is some fourth-century BCE precedent, in a speech by the Athenian orator Dinarchus criticizing his rival Demosthenes for his uselessness in managing oikonomia involved in the city).
Book II then goes on to a collection of notable historical stratagems for acquiring money, for the most part in the context of governing or administering a political community. Some involve self-denial, as in the case of the Lacedaemonians (Spartans) choosing to fast for a day in order to save money to give to the Samians for safe passage home after a war. Others involve clever ruses for exploitation, such as Timotheus the Athenian’s decision to sell to the Samians he was besieging the very produce of their own lands, or Memnon the Rhodian’s exploitation of his power in Lampsacus by first exacting tribute from the wealthy and then commandeering a forced loan of the very proceeds from the poor that the wealthy had collected to cover the original tribute. These stratagems often involve ruses, ranging from those practiced by a people or demos to those by tyrants, governors, or satraps. Most of the measures described are ad hoc ways for a ruler, or a people as a whole, to get hold of money or resources in times of immediate need. While some involve the establishment of institutions (such as a tax assessment by the Athenians in Potidaea), virtually none involve what we today would consider public macroeconomic interventions.
“Economics” in Book II is not macroeconomic policy but rather, as befits the name, the clever management of a royal or public domain, or use of royal or public powers, for short-term financial gain. It treats the science of oikonomia as applying directly to political domains—a further indication that the work is not authentically by Aristotle, given that Book I of the Politics begins by denying that the forms of rule of statesman, king, householder, and master are the same.
Constitution of Athens
Just as Aristotle’s views about the naturalness of slavery did not blind him to the fact that many who were in fact legally enslaved should not have been so according to his theory, his views about the naturalness of the political life did not lead him to suppose that all human beings do in fact choose, or have the opportunity to choose, to live such a life. The Politics is as interested in tyrannies, which are perverted political orders (or, strictly, nonorders), and in the clashes between democrats and oligarchs, each of whom have in Aristotle’s view a perverted understanding of the values of equality and justice that politics should instantiate, as it is in defining the kind of polis that one would wish and pray to live in. While “democracy” is used by Aristotle as the name of an inherently flawed regime, it commands considerable attention throughout the Politics as the constitution of Athens for most of its recent political history (and as a widespread form of constitution elsewhere in the Greek world in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE as well). And so one would expect that in the “collection of constitutions” that the Nicomachean Ethics mentions having been assembled as a source for the Politics— in which there were said in antiquity to be 158 individual constitutions (Diogenes Laertius V.27)—Athens would feature significantly.
And indeed the Constitution of Athens preserved in the Aristotelian corpus is a remarkable text, as much because of its textual history as because of the intrinsic interest of its subject matter for modern readers—for while fragments and ancient citations of many of the 158 constitutions survive, only that of Athens has been preserved in extensive (if still incomplete) textual form, recovered from two papyri in the late nineteenth century. It is difficult to know how typical this “constitution” may have been compared to the others in the collection, given the exceptionally extensive nature of the documentation of Athenian law and politics that existed even in antiquity. Nor was the Aristotelian collection of constitutions unique in being dubbed “Constitution of [ X ]” (where X is the people of a polis; the title here translated as Constitution of Athens is literally in Greek Constitution of the Athenians). Once again, Xenophon offers us useful points of comparison, in that he wrote a Constitution of the Spartans (discussions of the Spartan constitution having generally predated those of the constitutions of other cities), and in his corpus there is also preserved a Constitution of the Athenians that is now believed to have been written, probably in the late fifth century BCE, by an unknown author sometimes referred to as the Old Oligarch. …
Xenophon’s Constitution of the Spartans was likely to have been fairly typical of the general classical Greek genre of “constitution of ” works.While it discusses the Spartans’ political institutions, it dwells far more on their customary practices, in particular their distinctive ways of organizing the activities of women, marriage, and the education of children, as all shaped to contribute to the austere military prowess needed to subordinate the helot serfs who provided the Spartan citizens with subsistence. By contrast, the Constitution of the Athenians found in Xenophon’s corpus is a very different, and unusual, kind of work. It takes up a distinctive, argumentative point of view, that of a self-identified Athenian who is hostile to the contemporaneous democratic Athenian constitution for its assertion of popular power over the more wealthy and educated (and so, he takes it, worthier) elite, but who nevertheless devotes himself to explaining the mechanisms by which the Athenian poor majority successfully maintain their hegemony within the constitution.
In contrast to the explicitly partisan perspective adopted by pseudo-Xenophon in his Constitution of the Athenians, the Aristotelian Constitution of Athens in the present volume— whether written by Aristotle himself or by his students under his supervision—adopts a primarily analytical and historical approach (which is not to say that it betrays no political sympathies). Its account is summed up in the delineation of eleven distinct “constitutions” in that history, the institutions of the last of which (that current at the time of writing) are then described in depth. The innovations by Draco and Solon; the complex nature of the Pisistratid “tyranny,” and its overthrow by a popular revolution giving legislative power to Cleisthenes to reorganize the tribes and demes, making the constitution “much more democratic”; the roles of Pericles and Ephialtes in redefining citizenship by birth and curtailing the traditional powers of the aristocratic Council of the Areopagus; the two attempted oligarchical coups that punctuated Athens’ waning fortunes during the Peloponnesian War with Sparta in 411 BCE and then its devastating loss in 404; the successful popular resistance to the Thirty who had led the most brutal of those coups and the eventual pioneering amnesty established by the restored democracy; and the bevy of complicated procedures for the offices of the “constitution of the present day” (including some chosen by election, some by lottery, many boards of collective responsibility, restrictions on repeating in office, procedures for scrutiny and accountability, and the complex voting procedures in the popular jury courts) all give a reader perhaps the best orientation to ancient Athenian politics and especially Athenian democracy one could hope to find.
This is to say that the Constitution of Athens furnishes much of its own historical context; it has been an enormously important historical source even where, and often because, it contradicts other ancient evidence. Indeed, on certain points of detail, it contradicts the Politics, something with which modern historians have coped in various ways (either by positing a sequence between the texts or sometimes by using this to support the claim that Aristotle could not have been the author). Yet other aspects of its composition seem to be Aristotelian in a deeper sense. One of the most interesting is its willingness to characterize as “democratic” constitutional reforms that took place long before the events generally taken by modern historians to have established democracy proper. Whereas the earliest Athenian constitutions are said to have given the people “no share in anything”, the sixth-century lawgiver Solon is credited with having given the common people a share in the assembly and the juries, though no eligibility for holding the offices proper. The author does not hesitate to call that role of the people in the juries, together with the abolition of debts secured on a person’s bodily services and the introduction of a right of prosecution on anyone’s behalf, the “most democratic features” of Solon’s constitution. Doing so would seem anachronistic to a modern historian. Yet it fits into a typically Aristotelian teleological explanation of something’s development in terms of its ultimate end or realization. In this sense, many aspects of the basic orientation of the Constitution of Athens are imbued with an Aristotelian approach and show us Aristotle’s political theory put in motion to explain the history of Athens, whether or not the text was written by Aristotle himself.
Two of the most fundamental aspects of Aristotle’s Politics are its treatment of the oikos as a building block of the polis and its analysis of constitutions as fundamental to the study of politics. The latter project is complemented by the Constitution of Athens, which brings its analysis to life in the vicissitudes of Athenian history, while the former is extended in the Economics both in terms of the oikos itself and in a novel extension of oikonomia to political domains both within and outside the polis.
The Source:
Melissa Lane, ‘Introduction’, in Aristotles Politics: Writings from the Complete Works, Politics, Economics, Constitution of Athens, edited by Jonathan Barnes, Princeton 2016
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