Roger Scruton, 'Aristotle' in The Dictionary of Political Thought [end of year Aristotle series]
Aristotle, polis, constitutionalism, political obligation, justice
Roger Scruton wrote:
Aristotle (384–322 BC)
… Aristotle held that man is a rational animal and, as such, also a political animal: it is inevitable and right that he should seek to fulfil himself through living as part of a state (Greek: polis). …
… Aristotle classified states according to two variables: who holds power? And: in whose interest is it exercised? There are three politically possible answers to the first question (one, some and all), two politically possible answers to the second (the holder of power, and everyone). The ideal is aristocracy: the state in which the best, who are inevitably few in number, exercise power in the interests of all. However, since that ideal is hard to achieve, and even harder to sustain, Aristotle advocated a form of mixed government, or ‘polity’, in which all citizens ‘rule and are ruled by turn’, and power is monopolized by no particular class. …
… Aristotle defined a citizen as anyone who can ‘hold office’, and his description of the ideal system of offices provides the foundation for many modern forms of constitutionalism. The power of individuals in government is both curtailed and guided through offices, which are in turn governed by law, so that, in the Aristotelian polity, laws are supreme, and the outcome of the concentration of power in offices is a rule of law. Moreover, government is given a character that endures from generation to generation, despite the successive changes in office holders, so that settled expectations begin to arise, and the bond between the rulers and the ruled becomes intelligible to both. In the context of his account of citizenship Aristotle raised in its modern
form the question of political obligation. He argued that political obligation is founded in distributive justice, which is the principle that unites citizen to citizen and all to the state.
Distributive justice involves ‘treating equals equally’. This is possible only in the context of judicial procedure, together with the means to determine the individual rights and duties with respect to which citizens are to be compared. Aristotle favoured, as a source of such rights and duties, custom and customary law over the written statutes that can be made and remade by fiat of those in power. His defence of custom and his emphasis on the value of political stability are underpinned by a conception of the state as ‘organic’. The whole, he argued, is ‘prior to’ its parts, which therefore depend upon it. …
Polis:
Western political thought began with the study of the polis, and its transference to the study of modern states and nations involves an extension of theory and concept that some have criticized as unwarranted. The polis was surrounded by other states whose citizens spoke the same language; it competed openly with its neighbours for territorial and economic privileges; its institutions were the object of observation, criticism and emulation from only twenty miles away; often it seemed to have a tribal character in which relations of kinship were as important as relations of law; and the Greek city-states were constantly at war with each other. Such features distinguish the city state, in part, from the modern nation state; nevertheless it is not at all clear that they render the observations of Plato and Aristotle inapplicable to modern constitutions.
Constitutionalism
The advocacy of constitutional government, i.e. of government channelled through and limited by a constitution. The major current of Western political thought in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was constitutionalist, and included Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu and the Founding Fathers of the US. There seem to be two distinct thoughts underlying constitutionalism: that a constitution is necessary in order to limit government, and that it is necessary if there is to be government by consent. While some theorists concentrate on limiting devices (such as the separation of powers), others concentrate on the devices necessary to obtain and elicit consent (such as representation). …
Political obligation
… Roughly, the obligation of the citizen towards the state, or of the subject towards the sovereign. The expression is sometimes used to denote the reverse obligation from sovereign to subject, or the reciprocal obligation between the two. The definition is rough since some theories of political obligation deny that there can be obligation towards a state, but admit the possibility of obligation towards society; others deny even that, and argue that political obligation is held neither towards the state, nor towards society, nor towards any other abstraction or office, but towards each member of society individually. … The problem of political obligation – what it is and how it is justified – has come to be one of the central problems of political philosophy. The major theories can be classified thus:
(i) Social contract theories, according to which the obligation arises from a contract, either with all members of society individually (Hobbes, Locke), with society itself (Rousseau), or with the sovereign (Bodin).
(ii) Theories of consent which fall short of contract – e.g. tacit consent, whereby the citizen shows his acceptance of an arrangement by so acting under its protection as to bind himself in an obligation towards it. This is often presented as a part of (i), as by Locke.
(iii) Theories of non-consensual obligation, which describe political obligation as arising independently from any choice of the subject, say from piety (as in Burke and Hegel), or from the sovereign’s right to obedience.
(iv) Theories (of which (iii) provides some examples) which are framed in terms of conditions for legitimacy, arguing that there is an obligation from the subject towards every legitimate sovereign. The divine right of kings is such a theory, as is the very different theory of the mandate, and similar theories emerging from the idea of election.
(v) Negative theories. For example, the theory that the citizen is always under an obligation towards the state unless and until the state acts unjustly, or so as to negate some necessary human good, such as freedom. Most such theories can be rephrased as special theories of legitimacy, which argue that the concept of legitimacy is ‘defeasible’ – i.e. every government is legitimate unless . . . – upon which might follow a possibly open-ended series of conditions. It is possible that Aristotle’s theory of political obligation was of this type, and that his reference to justice as the binding political obligation principle of the state was meant to indicate one among several unspecified conditions, the absence of which would suffice to take legitimacy away.
Justice:
Plato’s Republic begins with the question, ‘What is justice?’, and with the famous refutation of the view that justice is the interest of those with power: in other words, it argues for the non-identity of rights and powers. … Since then, Plato’s question has lain at the heart of all moral, political and legal philosophy, and is often considered to be the single most important question in political thought. Aristotle, who thought of justice as the true subject-matter of political philosophy, and of its execution as a major purpose, perhaps the major purpose, of the polis (a view also expressed by Aeschylus in the Oresteia), made a famous distinction between distributive and commutative
justice, the first being concerned with the distribution of goods among a class, the second with the treatment of the individual in particular transactions (e.g. when punishing him). In the second case justice involves giving to someone what he deserves, or else what he has a right to receive. In the first case it is, according to Aristotle, a matter of ‘treating equals equally’. These are not necessarily the same idea (although it could be said that, in the abstract, equals do have a right to be, and deserve to be, treated equally). If I have to distribute a cake among five starving people, then they may each deserve the whole cake, but it may be unjust not to divide it. The Aristotelian distinction survives in various forms, although it would now be very unusual for a philosopher to think that there are really two concepts of justice rather than two applications of a single idea. …
… The important questions seem to be these: (i) Is justice primarily the attribute of an act, of a person, or of a state of affairs? If of an act, then states of affairs (e.g. ‘distributions’ of goods) are just or unjust only to the extent that they are the outcome of just or unjust acts. If of a person, then rules of just action must be subordinate to a conception of human virtue (e.g. an action is just if it would be recommended by the ‘impartial judge’ or the ‘just person’) – a conception which vastly complicates the discussion, and probably undercuts the desire of many modern philosophers to establish simple laws of justice. If of a state of affairs, then we might consider it unjust that one person is born more advantaged than another, even though human agency has nothing to do with it. Aristotle seems to have favoured the second idea; much dispute between socialists and liberals in modern politics comes from socialists being attached to the third of those ideas, and liberals (Hayek, for example) to the first. …
The Source:
Roger Scruton, The Palgrave Macmillan Dictionary of Political Thought, first published 1982 by The Macmillan Press, 3rd edition 2007
[MGH: Tomorrow is the final day of the Aristotle Series and I think we will boldly ‘re-order’ the logic and sequence of the Politics top to bottom, and inside out.]
Evolutions of social order from the earliest humans to the present day and future machine age.