Aristide Tessitore, ed.: Aristotle and Modern Politics: The Persistence of Political Philosophy. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002.

Originally published in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy. Volume 35, Number 2, Spring 2008.

Republished with permission.

 

By ‘modern politics’ Aristide Tessitore means first and foremost modern liberalism, variations of which continue to flourish, despite rumors of liberalism’s imminent demise, some of them more than two centuries old. In recent years the debates over liberalism often center on Aristotle, of all people, a philosopher rightly described here as “unacquainted with modern politics” (2).

Then again, philosophers tend toward some acquaintance in principle with every major human possibility. For example, Aristotle’s firm critique of those who elevate the life of acquiring goods, for the household above the management of those goods after they arrive in the household stands as an expression of reluctance toward any project such as that introduced by Machiavelli in The Prince, which begins with an invitation to a life of acquisition. What is more, intelligent non-philosophers or would-be philosophers or self-imagined philosophers—contributors to scholarly journals, for example—have reached for help from Aristotle in their attempts either to shore up modern liberalism or to bring it down, whether those attempts address the question of the structure of political communities (liberalism vs. ‘communitarianism’), the moral foundations of liberalism, or the relations between political economy or ‘acquisition’ and government or ‘management.’ Finally, Aristotle continues to offer guidance on the vexed question of philosophy’s relationship to political life, a question ideologues of the past hundred years—with their grand claims to wisdom and their often squalid, vicious effects in practice—sharpened to an edge that with which even Aristotle might be supposed unacquainted.

Another theme ought to be mentioned, however, as it haunts many of these essays rather in the matter that the specter of communism haunted industrializing Europe, according to Marx. Machiavelli conceived of a political device instrumental to his politics of acquisition, namely, the state. Centralized, bringing government to bear throughout the prince’s realm in a way not seen since the ancient polis, and yet extending far beyond the polis in the size of the territory it could rule; ruling with a material effectiveness impossible for the Church; dominating hitherto independent nodes of authority such as aristocracies, towns, and provinces, the state might be formed into one of at least two regimes—monarch and republic. But, as it actually developed, the state folded into every regime an indispensable regime-unto-itself: a new kind of regime of ‘the few.’ This regime-within-the-regime, required in practice by every modern state, features a new kind of aristocracy (eventually called ‘meritocracy’ and imbued with technical competence as its chief virtue) with a new kind of oligarchy (the rule of the few who were not personally rich, but rich by virtue of their command of the wealth of the state, and by the state’s command, its regulation, of the wealth of the wealthy). Aristotle never saw such a thing, but contemporary Aristotelians have, and must address it.

This is why Tessitore’s concentration on liberalism makes sense. Insofar as political life, ruling and being ruled, finds some direct expression in modernity, within its states, liberal states permit that life in ways not seen in (for example) Wilhelmine Germany or today’s Russia or China, let alone in the tyrannies that oppressed those nations in the twentieth century.

The first three essayists bring Aristotle to bear on considerations of modern liberalism and communitarianism. In his unfailingly sensible contribution to the volume, Bernard Yack recalls Aristotle’s insistence that the political community is in some sense ‘prior to’ the individuals who compose it. He rightly observes that this priority does not support any aspiration to communal harmony; Aristotle understands political communities as scenes of “conflict, competition, and compromise”: “Just as there are peaks of virtue and cooperation that can be found only among citizens, so there are forms of distrust, conflict, and competition that only citizens experience” (6). Aristotle rejects the communism of Plato’s guardians, let alone “the exaggerated hopes for moral harmony and elevated behavior associated with today’s communitarianism” (20).

Aristotle’s zoon koinonoikon finds pleasure in his group, finding in his capacity to reason a means “to see the mutual advantage to be gained” from ‘groupishness.’ Human groups comprise persons who differ from each other in some significant (at best complementary) ways but who also share goods and dangers, establish ways to manage what they share and their mutual relations to those things, and who bind themselves to one another by ties of friendship and justice. But Aristotelian fathers, villagers, tribesmen, and citizens differ from the communalists envisioned by such moderns as Rousseau, in at least two ways. “Nowhere will you find in Aristotle’s writings the lyric celebration that Rousseau, among others, has taught us to associate with community. Nor will you find a discussion of Rousseau’s favorite passion, love of country, in Aristotle’s account of the passions in the Rhetoric” (22). Aristotle formulates no General Will; rather, it is “individual actors”—”fathers, ship-captains, oligarchs, demagogues, or tyrants—who speak in the name of Aristotelian communities” (23). Aristotle wants to know, Who rules? Aristotelian friendship “means a disposition to give individuals what is good for them,” and rests on “a sense of mutual obligation,” not an impassioned attachment (26-27). Justice is still less a sentiment but develops rather from long habituation and requires “extensive training and moral education” (29). Justice derives from nature, not in the Rousseauian sense of natural sentiment but from the distinctively human capacity to speak and to deliberate about the good. “[W]hile many animals surpass human beings in social friendship and mutual concern, only human beings hold each other accountable to standards of justice” (30). Justice differs from friendship, “which involves other-regarding actions we are ourselves disposed to perform,” because it “concerns other-regarding actions that we are disposed to demand from others” (30). Establishing such habits of action in any community must “reflect a choice that some individuals make and impose on others” (30); in political communities, these are the regimes.

Thus Aristotle does not involve himself in such modern dichotomies, fundamentally derives from Rousseau, as mechanism versus organism, Gemeinschaft versus Gesellschaft. Not regarding human communities as contracts among anti-social or a-social beings in a state of nature, nor needing to respond powerfully to other thinkers who do so regard those communities, Aristotle feels no temptation to run to the other extreme. “Aristotle’s understanding of community cuts right across these familiar modern dichotomies” (32).

“Communitarians have been making vain predictions about the coming dissolution of liberal and individualistic societies since the end of the French Revolution” (35). But the countries where modern liberalism is oldest give every appearance of the greatest social stability—far more so than many communities that would hold themselves together with much stronger social bonds. The experiences of the past two centuries provide “good reasons for doubting that communion always arises out of community and that the sense of belonging that communitarians seek can be anything more than a temporary social phenomenon” (36). Aristotle would not be surprised, himself having doubted famously, that harmony can be reduced to a single beat.

Martha C. Nussbaum writes on “Aristotelian Social Democracy.” This is an unusual theme, inasmuch as Aristotle more than suspects that the many who are poor, when they rule, will (as the expression goes) ‘soak the rich.’

Rightly observing that Aristotle “spoke about human being and good human functioning” along with “the design of political institutions,” and that he “connected these two levels of reflection through a certain conception of the task of political planning,” Nussbaum argues that the task of such planning “is to make available to each and every citizens the material, institutional, and educational circumstances in which good human functioning may be chosen; to move each and every one of them across a threshold of capability into circumstances in which they may choose to live and function well” (47). For Aristotle, such considerable political and material ambitions immediately raise the question, ‘Who is a citizen?’ Nussbaum seems to take this as settled, however, at least in the modern West. There, most residents of each country are citizens of that country. But the debaters over immigration in Europe and North America remind us that Aristotle’s question remains pertinent.

Public health, common meals for the poor, free and equal citizenship for all adults, the setting aside of half of privately-held lands for common use as in Sparta (48-49), without either the slavery or the military aristocracy of Sparta: these begin the list, which also includes “being able to laugh, to play, to enjoy recreational activities” and “being able to live one’s own life in one’s very own surroundings and context” (70). “The job of government, on the Aristotelian view, does not stop until we have removed all impediments that stand between [the] citizen and fully human functioning” (60). The liberalism of this social democracy—its share of liberty—inheres mainly in one feature: “The government aims at capabilities, and leaves the rest to the citizens” (59). That is (for example) Nussbaum’s social democracy will provide us with parks but will not force us to stroll in them. “The entire structure of the polity will be designed with a view to these functions” (76). In order to choose freely and prudentially citizens need coercively to frame and enforce a set of social and political structures in which choice can flourish (85).

With Yack, Nussbaum acknowledges Aristotle’s interest in the way practical reasoning distinguishes human sociality from animal sociality—indeed, how it distinguishes all non-autonomic human activities from animal activities. “Practical reason is both ubiquitous and architectonic. It both infuses all the other functions and plans for their realization in a good and complete life” (72). Here, however, is where the silent presence of the modern state begins to loom. “It is important to notice that in defending common ownership Aristotle is not defending state ownership. Common ownership is in a very real sense ownership by all the citizens in common, and not by some remote bureaucratic entity” (77). “[I]t is especially difficult to foster common ownership under modern conditions of size and population,” she prudently notes, citing as an example the worker-controlled industry (77). She does not here sufficiently reflect upon the size and bureaucratic character of modern industrial corporations themselves, which Tocqueville already compared to empires.

Perhaps in response to the difficulties of modern statism, Nussbaum finds that social democracy “needs a scheme of basic rights in order to give further definition to the concept of strong separateness,” by which she means individuality or personal integrity (85). “In this area the Aristotelian must diverge from Aristotle” (86). Aristotle is too paternalistic and harsh in ways “likely to horrify most liberals” (86). He does not engage in “sustained philosophical reflection on the limits of the law” (86).

This criticism might strike one as implausible, given the dialogue between the citizen and the philosopher Aristotle presents in the late chapters of the Politics and indeed given the importance for Aristotle of the very prudential reasoning in which citizens engage—quite apart from questions of the philosopher’s way. But Nussbaum’s dilemma really reflects the problem of the modern state itself, the problem faced squarely by such writers as Benjamin Constant and Tocqueville. The next essay does not take up this problem. Susan D. Collins raises instead an ethical question, which in turn leads to the volume’s second set of essays, on moral virtue.

Collins addresses the question of justice in Aristotle, considering not the Politics but the Nicomachean Ethics. Today’s “neo-Aristotelians” would bring Aristotle into the camp of liberalism. In doing so, they tend to favor one of two aspects of human life that Aristotle tries to balance: virtue “as a quality of civic devotion” and virtue “as a constituent of human flourishing” (106). As a quality of civic devotion, justice differs “in different political orders or regimes,” and also according to circumstances” (106). The political and the exigent can make human flourishing possible, but they can also limit it. The magnanimous man, whose soul “comprises all the virtues and each to the greatest degree” (107), might find his great soul limited in any regime, even in a kingship ruled by him.

Neo-Aristotelian liberals (among whom Collins numbers the social-democratic Nussbaum) incline to see politics and human flourishing as mutually reinforcing, in principle if not in practice. Aristotle doubts this: “Aristotle confronts in a full and systematic way the questions of either side of virtue’s coin” (111). Although human beings are indeed political animals who require the polis in order to flourish, and although politics is “the ‘authoritative’ voice with respect to the human good,” it “does not follow” that politics is therefore “the correct or true voice” (111).

Accordingly, Aristotle presents “two meanings of justice”: justice as the lawful—”general” justice—and justice as the fair—”particular” justice (113). Justice in its “lawful” aspect points not merely to conventionality; if it did, there would be no theoretical problem, inasmuch as one could easily say that there is justice defined by the polis and justice according to nature. But “lawful” justice points to the unique feature of justice, its ‘other-directedness.’ “[J]ustice is not complete virtue simply but complete as the sum of the virtues ‘directed toward another'”; “justice is thus identical with the ‘use [chresis] of complete virtue,'” the use of virtue “‘with a view to another, and not only with a view to [the virtuous individual] himself'” (115). “Citizenship in the community means that any action, including a virtuous action, has a dual aspect: it can be understood from the point of view either of one’s own good or another’s good” (115). These two things might easily contradict one another, as anyone who considers the policy of military conscription will see.

Further, the same problem arises with respect to “particular” justice, which is that part of general justice that “pertains to the desire for gain” (117). Justice as fairness refers to either the distribution of goods, including public honors and offices, or the redress of unjust distributions. Once again, in practice it is the regime that determines what acts of particular justice will be practiced, from one polis to another. And an act of distribution that serves the common good might not entirely serve the good of the individual to whom the distribution is made. “[T]his is the dilemma of moral virtue: as justice, it looks to the good of the community, and as virtue, it looks to the good of the virtuous individual, yet these are different ends and different perfections” (122). The dilemma would be eased but not removed by taking up residence in the best regime—a regime notoriously difficult to find, even in the pages of Aristotle’s Politics. 

The dilemma of justice may disappear among friends, who share all things and wish one another’s good. Thus Aristotle “is at one with liberalism in marking a sphere outside of the political that might be called private” (123). But in the modern state the virtues seen in true friendship are only “one possibility among many possible pursuits of happiness” (123). That is to say, liberalism in modernity means liberty first, perhaps because privacy marks out a sphere of protection against the state, a formidable type of political organization Aristotle does not contemplate.

The collection next turns not toward a consideration of the state, however, but to a consideration of virtue in essays by Tessitore, David K. O’Connor, and Charles R. Pinches. Tessitore takes up Alasdair MacIntyre’s critique of modern rationalism. MacIntyre charges that the teachings of such moral philosophers as Diderot, Hume, Smith, and Kant depend upon “a shared historical background” their rationalism rejects; the substance of that moral tradition owes its existence to Aristotle (136). In rejecting, contra Aristotle, “any notion of a human telos, rationalists “ensured the failure” of their project, leaving only an account of human nature and a set of “moral injunctions” without “their teleological context” (137). But human nature without a telos wrecks itself on nihilism, as Nietzsche eventually insisted.

MacIntyre himself rejects the foundations of Aristotelian moral teleology—its “now discredited metaphysical biology,” its “understanding of community” that assumes “the Greek polis,” and the Platonic notion of “the unity of individual and political virtue” (138). For these MacIntyre substitutes, first, what he calls “practice” (“a complex form of socially established human activity that leads to the attainment of a good internal to the activity of the activity at issue”—for example, chess, which aims at the good of checkmate, or victory); second, what he calls “narrative unity” (“the historical narrative of a particular human life”); third, “tradition” (“a set of practices and a particular understanding of their importance and meaning” (138-140). To put it perhaps too bluntly, MacIntyre purges Aristotelian moral philosophy of nature and of politics. In Tessitore’s words, MacIntyre “attempts to establish a delicate balance between Nietzsche’s insight into the historicity of all truth claims without surrendering the Aristotelian argument for an objective order, a larger truth to which and by which our efforts are and must be measured” (140).

But, Tessitore rejoins, far from being a passive ‘epistemological’ victim of his historical circumstances, Aristotle “questions authority” (141). This may be seen in Aristotle’s “notoriously problematic teaching on the relationship between ethical and intellectual virtues” (142), the account of the rival modes of life, political and philosophic, to which Aristotle provides precisely no conventional answer, and no clear answer at all. “Against MacIntyre’s view that Aristotle inadvertently codifies an existing and authoritative Greek tradition of class-based morality, his account…in fact preserves and reveals, rather than dispels, a wide range of persistent tensions that necessarily characterize human attempts to live well” (146). The polis itself turns out to be imperfect, thus “a catalyst for the full development of both practical and theoretical excellence” (47). Prudence and the capacity for political philosophy are “permanent political needs,” needs “logically prior to the notion of political authority in Aristotle’s thought,” providing “the ground by which the authoritative good held out by the polis is established and evaluated” (147). Although Aristotle never saw the modern state, he of course did see a form of political organization other than the polis, namely, the empire in which he lived, to say nothing of the sub-political communities of household, village, and tribe. “It may well be the case that the fortuitous set of circumstances that gave rise to the development of the Greek polis becomes the locus classicus for Aristotle’s study less out of cultural bias, and more because it offers the most transparent window from which to view the ethical capacities and problems of political animals” (148); one might agree with Tessitore by observing that the polis may be the one circumstance in which human beings can fully achieve autarchia or self-sufficiency. One might also add that Tocqueville’s critique of modern statism rests on a similar judgment, a fact that gives evidence for the non-‘relative’ character of Aristotle’s argument.

MacIntyre’s attempt to replace Aristotle’s natural teleology with a historical teleology or “narrative unity” is unnecessary if one does not assume that biology is destiny. Aristotle does not so assume, and neither does much of the modern biology that has in many ways superseded Aristotelian biology. Enlightenment mechanism does not fully explain nature, which turns out to be more complicated than Newton supposed, in the estimation of Newton’s modern-scientific successors. It is Newtonian physics that underlies the attack on teleology seen in the Enlightenment moralists.

MacIntyre’s traditionalism too easily elides the distinction between Aristotle (and philosophy generally) and the Bible. Tessitore reminds his readers that the Great Tradition didn’t start out as a tradition at all; it took Aquinas to convince generations of thinkers that philosophy and revelation could mix. And Aquinas rests the authority of his achievement not on “the verdict of human history” or “the powers of human rationality” (156). “Paradoxically, MacIntyre’s historicist defense of the superiority of the Thomistic perspective is unable to account for the heart and soul of the very version of inquiry he upholds as the example par excellence of the rationality of tradition” (156). “Notwithstanding the profound differences separating the Thomistic tradition from the modern paradigms of [Enlightenment] encyclopedia and [Nietzschean] genealogy, there is one respect in which all three versions of inquiry have more in common with each other than with Aristotle—all are imbued with some form of the historical consciousness that  informs MacIntyre’s own analysis. The Thomistic, or more generally biblical, tradition elevates history as the locus of divine revelation and lives from a hope that is directed to the City of God. The encyclopedic tradition looks to a secularized version of Christian hope, one that will be fully achieved in history based on the gradual and steady progress of science. The genealogical perspective registers disappointment at the loss of Enlightenment hopes for rational progress, unmasking all claims to larger purpose as disguised expressions of the will to power. MacIntyre’s critique of contemporary sensibilities is circumscribed by the historical consciousness from which it arises.” (156-157)  None of what Tessitore here classifies as historicist versions of inquiry actually refutes the Aristotelian understanding of human ‘groundedness’ in nature or an “unchanging ground of being from which these [historical] variations arise” (157). Aristotle’s “account of nature” moreover “is free from both the hopes and disappointments entangled in historical consciousness” (157) and, if so, may prove morally superior to them. MacIntyre’s account of biblical revelation may itself partake too much of a later historicism. ‘History’ or the course of human events may be the locus of divine revelation, but, according to the Bible, the origin of such revelation is God, creator of that locus and of all else besides. That is, the Holy Spirit of the Bible is not the Absolute Spirit of the historicists. Holiness is not immanence.

In contrast to MacIntyre, Leo Strauss turned to Aristotle after listening to the most radical of the historicists, Martin Heidegger. David K. O’Connor’s essay on “Strauss’s Aristotle” is a highlight of this collection.

“The existential choice between the political life and the philosophic life informs all of Aristotle’s investigations of political affairs,” O’Connor contends (163), and Strauss’s interpretation of Aristotle “became the central vehicle through which Strauss worked out his own complicated appropriation of and resistance to Martin Heidegger” (164). Strauss appropriated some of Heidegger’s “account of philosophy’s responsibilities to prephilosophic experience” while resisting “Heidegger’s attack on the Aristotelian dichotomy between political engaged practical reason and detached or disinterested theoretical reason” (164). Heidegger’s conflation of theory and practice (seen in his celebration of ‘resoluteness’ and ‘authenticity’) struck Strauss as political dangerous and philosophically dubious, but that conflation does at least follow from giving the prephilosophic pragmata their due. Strauss aimed to show that the Aristotelian insistence on the integrity of prephilosophic experience as the ground of philosophy need not issue in radical historicism, as it does in Heidegger, where it “infect[s] philosophy with the very aspects of willfulness, passion, and partisanship that made Heidegger’s view of philosophy distasteful to Strauss” (167).

Philosophy for Heidegger consists of an energeia or “being-at-work” that forms as well as informs human beings through their national culture and political existence; philosophy “is essentially ‘practical'” and “essentially ‘patriotic'”—inherent in the patria or fatherland (168). This energy, it might be said, resembles Hegel’s Absolute Spirit not of course in its dialectical rationality but in its immanence and its thoroughgoing ‘historicity.’ O’Connor finds in Strauss’s exchanges with his philosophic friend, Alexandre Kojève, a dialogue with Heidegger ‘once removed.’ (There are limits to the Heidegger-Kojève parallel. O’Connor mentions Kojève’s employment as “a minister playing midwife to the birth of the Common Market” (193). It is unlikely that a Heideggerian would find such a job interesting; as Nietzsche said about the ‘common good,’ is not the Common Market ineluctably common?)

In Strauss’s estimation, the “unqualified attachment to human concerns” seen in historicism leads not to philosophy but to tyranny (176), to an ultimately mad attempt at godlike creation, a comprehensive re-shaping of reality beyond the capacities even of the highest human beings. Although O’Connor does not quite say this, Strauss regards the historicist project—in its very resolute commitment to practice—as profoundly imprudent, and therefore impractical as well as self-deluding. Genuine wisdom must ‘place’ human individuals, nations, and even humanity itself within their real context, which is nature. The desire to know is not the same as care for the human (178). At the same time, the philosopher does rightly and prudently care for those who do or might in his estimation share in his enterprise. This philosophic care for philosophers and for potential philosophers rests not on the historicist concern for “intersubjectivity and recognition” (179) but on the shared love of wisdom, “the intrinsic nobility of resolute openness to questioning” (180, italics in original). Philosophic resolution differs from political resolution in needing no enemies to ‘energize’ it; “philosophic friends may be quite different from one’s fellow sectarians,” as the Strauss-Kojève friendship demonstrates (180). For such friendships no philosopher need engage in “the total direction of human affairs” (Strauss, quoted 181). Indeed, the attempt to direct human affairs through the impersonal bureaucratic structure of a modern state or would-be super-state might likely preclude friendship, insofar as that attempt absorbed the attention of the philosopher.

Strauss’s Aristotle addresses political men “without inflaming political passion” and addresses philosophic men “without inflaming political passion” (182, italics in original). Strauss’s Aristotle makes this dichotomy sharper than Aristotle himself does, O’Connor argues, because historicism has changed the political and intellectual circumstances in which philosophers live. Aristotle’s own treatment of the choice between the political and the philosophic life gives more “autonomous dignity” to “morality and politics” than Strauss’s Aristotle because radical historicism has transformed nomos into pure will, not pure reason (185). “In resisting the Heideggerian intensification of this common ground between theory and practice, Strauss intensifies instead the philosophic perception of the ‘secondary’ status (Nicomachean Ethics 10.8, 1178a9) of merely political action” (185). Secondary status does not imply either strict subordination or a complete separation of the practical from the theoretical. A philosopher might find himself a place not as a citizen-philosopher, then but as a foreigner or ‘stranger’ who serves as “a teacher of legislators” (195), a role unlikely to endanger either the body of the philosopher (landing it in a circumstance in which it must ingest hemlock) or the philosopher’s soul, untempted by the ambition of making ‘its’ philosophic inclinations “essentially formative of nation and state” (196). “To steel oneself to Machiavellism is not to untrammel one’s mind, but to close it” (197).

O’Connor closes with some remarks on Strauss’s abiding philosophic interest in piety, an interest O’Connor describes as more Socratic than Aristotelian. That is to say, Strauss’s Aristotle does not exhaust the philosophic interests of Strauss. Piety is the topic of this volume’s third and concluding essay on virtue. Charles R. Pinches points to another man who “transforms Aristotle as he uses him” (208). Unlike Strauss, Thomas Aquinas “runs [Aristotle] through the mill of Christian theology” (208), but they share what Pinches calls a non-instrumental understanding of virtue, an appreciation of virtue as a condition of the soul ‘good for its own sake.’ As a Christian, Pinches regards neither Aristotle nor Thomas as congruent with modern liberalism and resists efforts by liberals to appropriate either.

A crucial distinction between modern liberal and “classical accounts” of virtue is simple: “According to liberalism, one does not need to be good (be virtuous) to know the good”—”a substantial change” from the Aristotelian and Thomistic views (212-213). For modern liberals, for example, ‘prudence’ means only the ability to identify “what is advantageous or useful to the attainment of goals that suit us or me” (213); prudence is no longer “perfected practical reason” (214), a thing noble in itself.

Recent liberal thinkers friendly to Christianity tend to want to use Christianity: “Liberalism as a [political system has a need for virtue among its citizens if it is to be sustained,” such liberals argue. “Put bluntly, liberalism is in need of virtue capital” (215). “[T]his is a deal the church can do without,” Pinches’ own prudence tells him (217). The Christian regime—specifically, the Christian Bios ti or way of life—must not lend itself to the task of propping up something other than itself, subordinating itself to some way of life other than that commanded and exemplified by Jesus. Among the several extant liberalisms, Pinches prefers the attempt by Richard Rorty to make liberalism into a sort of religion, albeit a ‘secularized’ one—the sort of progressivist historicism seen in John Dewy and Walt Whitman. This effort at least refuses to abstract from the circumstances of America, but rather makes of American history a sort of teleological story or myth. Pinches clearly regards Rorty’s project as wrong, but at least it has the modest virtue of avoiding cynicism. More profoundly, it shares with Christianity (as Pinches understands it) and also with Aristotle (as Pinches understands him) a rootedness in a particular “social location” (222), not in a state of nature, a categorical imperative, or an original position. Rorty “embraces his particular location as an American ‘reformist liberal’ at the turn of the twenty-first century, even as Aristotle “presumed the setting of the polis in fourth-century Greece” and as (if I understand Pinches) a Christian will understand himself as part of the concrete and Providential circumstances that inflect his own life (222). Liberals are insufficiently historicist, to use that term in a loose, none-too-Hegelian way. 

Christians must also finally reject Aristotle as well as liberalism, Pinches argues. Following Harris Rackham, Pinches translates megalopsychia as “pride” (221). Aristotle understands vice, which he regards as reparable, but not sin, which Christians learn to regard as humanly irreparable, because Aristotle does not know the God of the Bible, or the Bible’s Satan, for that matter. In contrast with Aristotle, “according to St. Paul and to Augustine, there is nothing we can do to break the power of sin in our lives” (225). Only God’s grace can free us from that power. That is why Aquinas “insists that the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity, which transform the life of virtue particularly as they transform prudence, are ‘infused’ rather than ‘acquired'” (225). Human equality “resides in that we are all equally condemned by a righteous God”; but “Aristotle knew nothing of such ideas,” regarding human beings as decidedly unequal, at least with respect to virtue and vice (225-226). Rorty’s progressivism shares the pride of Aristotelianism (if little else?) and therefore cannot satisfy Christians, even if it is in Pinches’ estimation superior in honest to non-historicist versions of liberalism.

Pinches does not clarify the Christian’s proper relationship to the modern, liberal state. If Christianity must not serve that state, should, can, Christians nonetheless make it serve them? Not in the sense of making of the state an instrument of Christian education or legislation, but rather in the sense of using the liberal state as early Christians arguably used the Roman Empire: as a sort of dangerous but often convenient platform for Christian evangelism. Liberalism’s hard-won freedoms of travel, of speech, and of religion itself present themselves as instruments for Christian use. Might these features of the liberal state not commend themselves to Christians, even if Christians politely and piously decline to serve as instruments of liberalism? the liberal state might not so much “buy virtue from the Christians” (as Pinches acidulously describes the ambition of some liberals [215]) but find a loving limit in their free activities and spirit, thus remaining liberal.

The liberty of citizens within the liberal state requires the right of property defended by the rule of law—limits to the liberal state. That Miriam Galston, Jill Frank, Douglas J. Den Uyl, and Douglas B. Rasmussen find Aristotle a helpful adviser in these matters betokens his status as a philosopher and not merely as a thoughtful observer and critic of ancient Greek politics.

Galston considers the varieties of legal theory in the United States, recalling the textual formalism of the nineteenth century, largely replaced in the twentieth century by the legal realism of Oliver Wendell Holmes and the sociological jurisprudence of Roscoe Pound. She sees in recent years a “renewed interest in formalist-type theories, such as neo-Aristotelian natural law theory” (234), in the writings of such scholars as Russell Hittinger, John Finnis, and Robert P. George, as well as a turn toward anti-rationalist theories—critical legal studies, post-structuralism, and some forms of feminism. In their several ways, all American legal theories address not only the ‘rule of reason’ but the role of reason in the rule of law. Between the “two extremes” of formalism and subjectivism/relativism lie “theorists of the middle way” who “reject the idea that knowledge must be absolute and unchanging to be worthy of the name” (234); Cass R. Sunstein, Suzanna Sherry, and Bruce Ackerman exemplify this approach.

Aristotle famously teaches that the precision possible in mathematics does not obtain in ethics. He does not call this “a practical concession to the limitations of human cognition” or an admission of the superior truth of the precise sciences (235). Similarly, “middle-way” legal theorists do not quickly advert to ‘abstract’ moral and political principles, principles “that exist independently of a particular legal order”; at the same time, they do “recognize and incorporate such principles into reasoning about human affairs to some extent” (235). Middle-way theorists prefer community-wide debate, government by consent, and “transformative political participation” to any more elite-centered account of lawmaking and legal interpretation (237); they pay attention, therefore, to the conditions under which such debate is conducted and such consent attained, lest some citizens be excluded.

Galston finds a philosophic precedent for this in Aristotle’s practice of reviewing prevailing opinions and putting them to the dialectical test. But Aristotle differs from middle-way theorists in widening the dialogue to include those not present and even those long dead; in America he would engage not only his neighbors but Publius and Jefferson. Nor does Aristotle assume the democratic principle of equality: “Aristotle equates the force of the opinion of one wise man with the opinion held by all or most people” (238). Aristotle does not use the word ‘autonomy’ to describe the formation of law by citizens; rather, “the importance of being able to govern oneself (and be governed by others) finds pride of place in his philosophy” (239). He defines politics itself as such reciprocal ruling and being-ruled, a practice that requires practical wisdom. “Aristotle thus differs from contemporary legal theorists in identifying self-governance with the active exercise of reason rather than the initiation of, participation in, or assent to rules by which a person is governed” (239). One might say that Aristotle never loses sight of the regime behind the rules, of the political character of decent regimes, or of the life of reasoned discussion seen in those regimes.

Middle-way legal theorists also incline toward what might be called transformative conventionalism. They hope to generate public goods and also moral virtues in individuals out of sociopolitical processes engaged in by adults. Less optimistic than they are about the malleability of human nature, Aristotle looks to childhood education as the main source of “the moral qualities upon which social cooperation depends” (240). If you would have a moral citizenry, begin before your children are old enough to join in citizenship. Moral virtue culminates in citizenship, is not ‘created’ by it. Concomitantly, Aristotle does not understand political association merely as one social activity among many; it is the authoritative political community that most clearly requires us to think comprehensively of the good life as such. “Aristotle warns the reader against imagining that fitness to govern any one type of association can be generalized to fitness to govern any other” (240).

Galston sees in this tendency among middle-way theorists a reflection of life in the modern state. “Given our enormous and diverse country, it may well be that intermediate associations bear a closer resemblance to certain aspects of the classical city than our nation as a whole ever can” (241). But such civic associations, however salutary, seldom consider the common good in the way a self-governing political community must. Further, middle-ground theorists, in imagining the production of the common good, assume an egalitarianism that modern states—centralized, anti-aristocratic, bureaucratic—themselves encourage. In one sense these theorists aim too high, expecting a selflessness not to be found in this world, a selflessness they imagine could be found if only each voice can make itself heard through the right social preconditions undergirding the political process itself. On the other hand, the very assumption that the political playing field can be so effectively leveled reflects and conduces to the anti-political statism that middle-way theorists abhor. But the common good’s commonness inheres in its political character; in ruling and being ruled, not everyone exhibits the same degree of practical wisdom. This is an ineluctable natural reality, not only an excrescence of unjust social institutions. “Aristotle’s ideas thus expose a conceptual difficulty at the core of theories of liberal constitutional democracy” (248)—or, at least, at the core of the theories of the theorists of the middle way.

Under liberal constitutions the laws protect and regulate private property as a means of the reciprocal rule of civil society and the central state. Jill Frank asks, “What form of private property might more successfully integrate private right and public good and so facilitate rather than obstruct the practices integral to liberal-democratic politics?” (259). Consulting Aristotle, she argues that private property has not only exchange value but also value in use. The ‘use value’ of private property can bind the individual and the family to “the practices of citizenship” (259).

As a thing to be exchanged, private property means “the power to hold, to withhold, and to exclude” (261). I hold my property against you, and against the state, limiting both social and bureaucratic-governmental encroachment. This might often be very good. But it might also “thwart rather than…enable common action and therefore…be inimical to the social coalition integral to the practices of democratic politics” (261). Private property might conduce to what Tocqueville calls individualism, a comfortable anti-civic isolation that invites the very overweening statism private property rights are intended to prevent by leaving government up to the officials.

Frank cites Thomas Jefferson’s phrase, “the earth belongs in usufruct to the living” (263). That is, the earth belongs to each living generation as a trust fund belongs to its trustees; the right to use comes with an obligation, “that the beneficiaries must hand the trust over to the next set of trustees” (263). Jeffersonian agrarianism rests upon this principle. Whereas feudal aristocracy consisted of the few ruling the many, who did not own the property they used, and modern commerce “allows for and encourages the accumulation of wealth unlimited by use,” fostering a new kind of “privilege and hierarchy,” agrarian property-owners are (now in Jefferson’s words again) “the most precious part of the state” because their property combines the stability and limitation of natural property in land with self-governing ownership of that property and the fruits thereof (264). “Their property, via its use, anchors their independence and freedom, and it allows them to cultivate the virtues necessary for self-governance, good citizenship, and the pursuit of the common good” (264). Jefferson’s friend James Madison broadens this understanding of property to include human nature; one’s property includes “a person’s opinions and faculties, his labor, leisure and time, and his liberty of conscience” (265). In this sense it helps to constitute our civic identity “insofar as the use of one’s faculties relates individual owners to society at large” (265).

Aristotle gives a fuller account of “the relation between property and virtue” (265). For example, he elaborates parallels between the rule of the household and the rule of the polis, both of which subordinate acquisition of property to the management of it for the good of the whole. As both private and public, property is “a site of the practice of virtue” (267). In this property instantiates virtue itself, which consists both of ‘holding’ (I might be said to ‘have’ certain virtues) and of ‘using’ (I act according to my virtues, strengthening or weakening my moral habits with practice and with disuse). “[G]ood habit, as a matter of holding [property] properly depends on using properly what is held, that is, acting well. And we can see that acting well, as a mode of proper use, depends on holding properly what one has as one’s own, hence ownership. As the practice of holding and using things properly, property, like any activity, already calls for good habit conjoined with acting well, that is, virtue. And, as the practice of holding and using habits properly, virtue calls for property. It is by understanding property as a verb and not strictly as a noun, as an activity of use and not strictly as a fungible thing, that property is bound to, is indeed a site of virtue.” (268)  Property “emerges in the presence of the proper ordering of the soul, even as the practice contributes to that proper ordering,” cultivating “the individual virtues associated with both self-government and the pursuit of the common good” (270). In so doing it not only resists the encroachments of the modern state but connects citizens to the state, interesting them in the common good as considered by their representatives ‘in’ the state.

Douglas J. Den Uyl and Douglas B. Rasmussen give Aristotle an (announced) ‘libertarian’ twist—doing with Aristotle what Aquinas does with him, but less elaborately, and on behalf of ‘classical liberalism’ not Christianity. Beginning with might be termed the Lysander Spooner thesis—that moral action requires freedom of the will, therefore the conditions of free willing must be secured first and foremost—they reconcile libertarianism with the Aristotelian esteem for “self-perfection” (280). “The single most common and threatening encroachment upon self-directedness and consequently self-perfection is the initiation of physical force by one person (or group) against another”; this in practice requires the establishment of “a sphere of freedom whereby self-directed activities can be exercised without being trampled by others or vice-versa” (281), to “structure a political principle that protects the condition for self-perfection rather than leading to self-perfection itself” (282-283).

Central to this sphere of freedom is the right to property. Because “human beings are material beings, not disembodied ghosts, and being self-directed is not merely some psychic state,” “human beings need to have property rights to things that are the result of their own productive efforts” (283). Property inheres primarily not in non-human nature but in “the intellectual and physical efforts of individual human beings,” who are “in a significant sense value creators” (284-285). Den Uyl and Rasmussen endorse the labor theory of value, first propounded by John Locke; “there is no such thing as pre-existing (in other words, pre-transformed) wealth” (286). Also like Locke, they regard the right to property as natural, and the indispensable precondition to the “human flourishing” sought by Aristotle (289).

On the economic side of the human ledger this of course leads to the free market. On the political side the right to property in this sense leads to civic friendship, an association for mutual advantage among citizens. Friendships founded upon mutual advantage are not “friendships of virtue,” which only “occur in circles must smaller than those that characterize a state” (299). “All highly pluralistic and commercial cultures fail to live up to this standard,” they rightly observe (300). At best, such large political societies can achieve the virtue of just rather than unjust mutual advantage, but they can never achieve an ethos of selflessness. In turn, this “confirms our view, not always or necessarily shared by Aristotle himself, that the attainment of the good life is an individual quest” (301). “The aim of politics is not virtue, but peace and order,” “the natural right to liberty” (301).

Aristotle might well regard the regime of commercial republicanism as the best practicable regime under the conditions of modernity. He would not defend it on the ‘voluntarist’ grounds libertarians defend, inasmuch as that would entail treating a means—personal property—as an end—human flourishing. He would therefore remain skeptical of the claim that the attainment of the good life is an individual quest primarily, recognizing the need for self-government and thus, realistically, the need for political life. If the aim of politics is not virtue but peace and order, do peace and order not aim at some virtue or human good? And are not peace and order likely in need of coercive defense and of at least mildly enforced cooperation?

It is to politics that the three final essays of the volume turn. Beyond the protection of property rights broadly understood, modern liberalism usually attempts to address the problem of how political life, understood as reciprocal ruling and being-ruled, can be sustained within the framework of the state, which centralizes authority and tends toward bureaucracy. Each author here addresses this problem.

Gerald M. Mara contributes an excellent discussion of Aristotle’s Regime of Athens. Mara praises John Rawls’s last book, Political Liberalism, for its attentiveness to the need for “political culture” (307)—roughly the equivalent of Aristotle’s notion of the ‘way of life’ of a political community. Noticing that in the tolerant regimes of modern liberalism many citizens pursue very different ways of life founded on different moral and religious principles, Rawls seeks an “overlapping consensus” among citizens—the ‘overlap’ consisting of all principles and practices consistent with liberal politics (308). As Jefferson remarked, it matters not whether my neighbor believes in one god or a thousand; this neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. Muslim and Hindu alike may agree that robbery and battery are wrong, and citizens who agree on such things may be able to live together in the same political community, so long as they ‘agree to disagree’ on their more strictly theological convictions. Mara notes that Rawlsian “liberal culture” is “possible only for those who already accept liberal principles as compelling” (308). An especially stern Muslim or Hindu (or Christian or Marxist) might require the justification of liberal principles themselves, and such justification cannot come from a culture that effectively commands ‘Be tolerant.’ But why should the liberal tolerate even himself? Cultural liberalism “sees practical rationality as a cultural or political, rather than a natural or anthropological possibility” (309) and thus collides with philosophic problems long associated with conventionalism.

Aristotle understands reason as a capacity of “cross-cultural validity” (310). He treats democratic Athens not as the political equivalent of a windowless monad but “as a striking example of the most radical and most dangerous democracy, a popular regime with a (relatively) urban base which exercises its rule not by law but by decree,” yet also a regime animated by “a gentleness or mildness that could be extended into a certain kind of moderation” (312). In Athens Aristotle saw more than Athens, but “simultaneously the most and the least typical, the worst and the best, of democracies” (312). His study of Athens presents three themes: He considers the regime’s “central principles,” freedom and equality, as they are institutionalized and not as they might be conceived ‘abstractly’; he considers the regime’s purposes and the dual temperament that strives for them, boldness and gentleness; he considers “models of democratic political activity” as seen particularly in prominent Athenian statesmen.

The many poor overthrew the oligarchs; the new rulers’ sense of freedom derived ‘negatively’ from their prior feeling of oppression. But of course a regime does require rule, rule now by the many poor, who might enslave the few, contradicting the principle of freedom. Aristotle suggests that a certain kind of institutionalized equality, equality before the law, can limit the rule of the many, as seen in the reforms of Solon. Equality before the law gives both the many poor and the few rich a kind of political equality, a capacity to rule and to be ruled: Aristotle’s definition of political rule simply. “Solon’s reforms do not much make Athens more democratic as make it more political” (315). Solon’s reforms opened some political institutions to every class of citizens and more generally made “the regime’s legal structures into frameworks that manage conflict, rather than into strategic weapons for use within power contests” (315). “Solon does not attempt to homogenize difference by creating a common civic ethos which would make social distinctions either irrelevant or pernicious. While the institution of legal equality makes the social differences between noble and base irrelevant from the point of view of justice, in another sense it maintains respect for differentiation among social classes since class positioning cannot justify social aggression.” (316)  This made Athenian democracy more like a ‘mixed regime’—the decent form of the rule of the many—than it otherwise would have been. But such institutional forms, however well designed, will not work without a certain way of life consonant with them.

Aristotle would move democracy away from the aggressive boldness displayed in revolution and toward “the peaceful virtues,” above all “a prudent gentleness” (320). hence his reservations about democratic imperialism. “He indicates that Athens’ boldness toward other cities and the demos‘ boldness within the politeia are reciprocally related,” a point illustrated by Pericles’ Funeral Oration. Democracy brings war; war feeds democratization. (And not only in Athens: See the account of America in the War of 1812 by Henry Adams and Henry Cabot Lodge, “Von Holst’s History of the United States,” North American Review, October 1876—an account brought to my attention by my colleague Robert Eden). “To the degree that boldness compromises prospects for regime gentleness, it threatens to undermine those activities that are most politically worthwhile” by hardening souls for combat not only against foreigners but against fellow-citizens at home (321). It damages “one of the central requirements for good citizenship”: “the ability to understand that what is good for the community as a whole is not simply reducible to the interests of any single economic, social, or cultural class” (323). Citizenship requires “a sort of rationality,” an ability to look at partisan concerns and not only to engage in struggles over them (323).

The Solonian founding failed not because its institutions failed but because subsequent Athenian statesmen misused them. Along with his policy of imperialism, Pericles democratized the regime by paying the poor to serve in the law courts, partly in order to compete with a political rival. Aristotle praises the contrasting policies of Theramenes, the founder of two moderate oligarchic regimes in Athens, policies that aimed at “mov[ing] democratic and oligarch regimes away from conditions of extremism” (329). In this Theramenes resembled Socrates: Both men attempted “to make the regimes in which they [found] themselves less unjust,” and both were “eventually executed at the hands of extremists” (330). They diverged in that the philosopher did not exercise rule or compete with others for public honor, whereas the political man’s “moral hardness” “ensnar[ed] him in political violence” (331).

What does Aristotle’s assessment of Athenian democracy teach moderns? He first teaches that modern liberals such as Rawls, Habermas, and Connally fail to see the “inherently strained and inconsistent” character of democratic politics—freedom and equality, boldness and gentleness, democrats and oligarchs competing for rule (332). “The present focus on liberal culture can be challenged for not taking cultural complexities seriously enough” (332). This means, secondly, that none of the principles advance by modern liberals—pluralism, proceduralism, and the like—will really serve as a guide for liberal democracy because those principles themselves result in “drawbacks” as well as “goods” (333). Precisely because any understanding of democracy that remains on the ‘cultural’ or conventional level involves us in such contradictions and difficulties, no purely cultural/conventional account of liberalism or of democracy will do. A “full consideration” of “the possibilities and dangers of the Athenian polity” will require “a rationality that is not culturally circumscribed”—an ascent form the cave, to coin a phrase (333). “The Regime of Athens‘ need for this sort of theoretical supplementation is signaled by its own incompleteness” (333).

Such supplementation need not involve us in that bugbear of modern philosophy, metaphysics. It emerges rather from the nature of politics itself, from the universal intention of citizens to identify “better and worse public choices” (333). This intention is not exhausted by what has come to be called ‘public choice theory.’ Citizens who reason with one another “practice substantive intellectual and moral virtues”; they do not merely practice “a conversation structured in a certain way” (333). They ruled and are ruled, willingly, and this points them not toward pure democracy or the unfettered rule of the many but to the mixed regime, that institutional embodiment of “political life itself” (334). Theory “should not be understood as a set of systematically related concepts, but as a kind of attentive regard which considers the full range of possibilities and problems facing people living together in a democratic regime”; “political theory is a resource for practical choices, rather than the derivation of political norms from abstract rational or moral principles” (335). For Aristotle, that is what natural right is. Under conditions of modernity, one “decent, flawed regime is liberal democracy,” and it is from there that we must proceed (335).

Stephen S. Salkever distinguishes Aristotelian deliberation from the neo-Kantian theory of ‘deliberative democracy’ advanced by Habermas and Rawls. Deliberative democracy opposes modern liberal contractarianism, liberal utilitarianism, the ‘participatory democracy’ advanced in the 1960s by the New Left, and the communitarianism of such writers as Charles Taylor and Robert Bellah. Deliberative democrats follow Rousseau and Kant in their identification of humanity as “the natural species whose dignity lies in its transcendence of mechanical nature, in moral freedom in obedience to laws its gives itself” (343). Unlike many contractarians and utilitarians, they prize reason as central to good citizenship. They do not, however, recur to reasoning as understood by Aristotle, as “the ability to discover true things about the world and our interests” (346). Rather, they regard public reason as the means by which human beings conquer their own ‘given’ natures as complex but ‘determined’ machines—even as scientific reason discovers and invents the means by which we conquer ‘external’ nature. The need for democratic deliberation comes from the moral requirement of universal consent to the laws formulated by the citizens within political societies: ‘no adult left behind’ might be its slogan.

The deliberation prized by deliberative democrats occurs only within the confines of the regime of democracy itself and only by means of a form of reason that does not question the wisdom of the modern project of the conquest of nature. That is to say, the public reason of deliberative democracy rests on a dogma. It demands that human self-legislation proceed without human self-knowledge or, at least, without reopening the question of human self-knowledge, regarding that question as settled. What it calls the triumph of reason rests on a triumph of the will. Deliberative democracy has decided once and for all on the truth of its own foundations.

“My central contention is that, for Aristotle, the core project of pre-philosophic moral education or character (ethos) development is not to instill duty or responsibility…but to develop a certain kind or practical rationality; and that the business of moral and political philosophy is not to anchor character in theoretical certainty, but to supply us with a set of questions and standards for examining our own characters and regimes and those of others” (354). Practical reason or phronesis aims at particular actions, but it “calls for the study” of political science, which aims at knowledge of human beings as political animals, neither beasts nor gods (355). Reciprocally, one cannot know human nature without the ability to reason about particulars, without the sort of character that has the presence of mind, so to speak to see particulars clearly before ‘generalizing’ from the particulars. Human beings who are fully human exercise prohairesis: “not merely ‘choice’ or ‘intentional choice,’ and certainly not ‘free will,’ but the ability and the inclination to think through the options available to us and then to act on the basis of those deliberations” (355). This is “very hard to do” (355). “We are to learn to treat ethical practices not simply as the endoxa [reputable opinions] that they are, but as if they were criticizable solutions to problems posed by our inherited biological nature under various distinct circumstances, problems concerning how the prohairetic life can best be realized” (356). Ehtics does not consist finally, either in learning rules or in legislating for ourselves. Ethics does not require us to dare to know but to want to know, for our own good.

‘Wanting’ does not oppose reasoning or knowing, Aristotle argues, because desire does not mean a passive response to external stimuli. Desire or eros animates all living beings; human beings differ from others in our capacity for deliberation and reflection upon our desires and their objects. But deliberation and reflection do not oppose the desires as such; therefore, Aristotle needs nothing that transcends the desires—a rational will or categorical imperative, for example. Ethical life instead requires character or ethos, the combination of “emotion, desire, and reason in summing up an individual’s ‘nature,’ an identity formed initially by habituation on the basis of biologically transmitted potentials, but gradually in the course of education becoming active, a motive force in an individual life” (359).

How exactly does character arise, and what has it to do with politics? Fred D. Miller concludes the volume (and continues Salkever’s task of distinguishing Aristotelian ethics from Kantian morality) with an essay distinguishing Aristotelian self-sufficiency or autarchia from modern autonomy, a distinction crucial to understanding the differences between ancient and modern political philosophy. Miller compares the account of education in the Nicomachean Ethics and the Politics with the account of the soul in De Anima, and finds that he has a lot of explaining to do. The moral and political books present the soul as educable for a life of reasonable citizenship, for “knowing both how to rule and how to be ruled on a basis of justice” (376). But in De Anima it seems that desire or orexis animates human beings; at best, then, reason would be a scout for the passions and education would consist of teaching the scout to see farther and more clearly.

But “a careful reading of De Anima reveals that Aristotle is really committed to the rule of reason in his theoretical psychology, so that his philosophy of education is after all supported by his psychology” (380). The reading that follows proves indeed both careful and persuasive. Over-simply put, desire has objects; objects move the soul via desire “but the way in which the object of desire plays this role depends on the cognitive condition of the agent” (382). The ‘I’ that desires the object knows or imagines things ‘about’ what is good for it. Whether I “do the right thing ultimately depends upon whether [I] seek a truly good end as opposed to a seemingly good end, and this depends upon how [I] exercise [my] thought and imagination” (384). This is where prohairesis comes in, as described also by Salkever; Miller identifies three forms of it: deliberative desire (bouleutike orexis); cognitive desire (orexis dianoetike); and desiderative thought (orektikos nous). “This characterization of choice as a commanding element is consistent with the thesis that reaons ultimately initiates action” inasmuch as “reasoning may lead a person to wish for an object” (385). With education, what I want will become more and more reasonable, more and more a reflection of what I should want as a human being living in my circumstances, not the least of which will be the regime of my city. “By revealing to agents their natural end, [reason] enables this end, which is as such unmoved, to become an object of action for the agent, and thereby to bring about desire, the movement or change in the soul which is the proximate cause of action” (385).

Autarchia means this rule of reason in the individual soul, which then recognizes that, as an individual, and even as a member of a family, village, or tribe, it cannot achieve all the goods that it should have. This is where autarchia (usually understood and translated as ‘self-sufficiency’ rather than more literally as ‘self-rule’) finds fulfillment rather than contradiction in the interdependence of political life. The city or polis enables human beings to develop their “natural potentials,” a task they cannot do “on their own” (386). “Hence, the city-state is one of the greatest human goods,” and “when Aristotle declares in De Anima that the faculty of desire is the moving principle in human beings as well as animals, he does not compromise his political ideal of reason’s rule in the human soul,” inasmuch as political ‘autonomy’ for Aristotle consists of “self-government of the citizens under law” (386).

Although Aristotle did not see the modern state, his political science speaks to those who engage in ‘state-building,” not to say regime change, in modernity: “A population fit for political rule satisfies three requirements,” Miller writes, summarizing Aristotle’s observations. “It is capable of defending the city-state, it possesses sufficient wealth, and it is capable of sharing in governance. Such a population must know how to rule as well as be ruled, or else they will only be capable of despotic rule. The hallmark of such a population is equality: ‘The city-state wishes to consist of equal and similar persons as far as possible….'” (387). Moreover, “Political rule requires that the citizens share in governance, taking turns in ruling and being ruled or holding different offices. Each person must be willing to rule with a view to the advantage of others and to yield up authority when it is another person’s turn. This requires that individuals abide by legal procedures governing their term of office, the selection of new officials, and the rights and duties associated with each office.” (387)  A political founder or law-giver must “prepare the citizens for rational self-rule” (390). “Political autonomy (political rule according to law) requires some measure, at least, of individual autonomy (self-governance of the soul): that is, a city-state is (politically) autonomous only if the citizens are (individually) autonomous to some degree” (390). the rule of law consists not of blind obedience but of the prudent and moral use of the law for the ends of the city, including justice.

Whereas modern or ‘Kantian’ autonomy splits reason fro desire and conceives of autonomy as freedom from desire or the conquest of desire by rational self-legislation, Aristotle ‘works with’ desire, seeing that desire pervades all animals, including human animals, and is not in itself bad. Reason is rightly neither the scout for the desires nor their stern ruler but their guide. The autarchic individual “is both ruled by reason and motivated by desire” (394).

This fine volume of essays suggests a concluding thought on what Aristotle might offer to those who think about modern politics. Any science classifies the objects it know; Aristotle’s political science classifies political communities according to their ‘regimes.’ Regimes consist of four elements: ruling persons, ruling structures, an overall end or purpose, and a characteristic way of life. Ruling structures and ends are impersonal; persons and ways of life are not. The ‘personalism’ of Aristotelian political science contrasts with the principled impersonality of the modern state, whether considered as a structure—a bureaucracy in which each employee directs his loyalty to his function in the apparatus, not toward some person—or as an expression of the General Will, impersonal because general. The impersonality of the modern state is one result of the impersonality of Machiavellianism; if the ruler or ‘prince’ means not to be good or evil, but to use good or evil, then ‘he’ is nothing more than a throbbing nerve of libido dominandi, one set against persons divine and human who have characters. Rule by persons distinguishes itself from rule by persons who want to remake themselves into forces by its origin in speech and deliberation, particularly speech and deliberation about what is good and how to attain that good. The conquest of nature commended by Machiavelli must finally require the conquest of human nature, embodied in persons who speak and deliberate.

Liberalism therefore seem un-modern in its commitment to freedom of speech. Modern liberals much esteem speech, so much so that they require toleration of all speech, marking off a sphere for talk within the modern state, the ruling apparatus of which wants above all to act. This great achievement of liberalism has moderated the Machiavellian project, which might otherwise have done even more to efface humanness from the world.

Chantal Delsol: Unjust Justice: Against the Tyranny of International Law. Paul Seaton translation. Wilmington: ISI Books, 2008.

Originally published in Social Science and Modern Society. Volume 45, Number 4, July/August 2009.

 

What certain European elites and their imitators call justice isn’t really just. According to them, justice consists of a set of legal rights enforced by the International Criminal Court in a world in which wars have become reclassified as ‘police actions.’ A world constabulary gathers up miscreants in order to bring them up on charges before said august tribunal of humane technocrats.

Chantal Delsol understands the attraction of this arrangement to her fellow Europeans. In the past century tyrants in Europe required of their subjects the sacrifice of Isaac, for isn’t the redemption of humanity in acts of class warfare or racial cleansing worth the blood? To prove one’s faith in Lenin or Hitler one needed only to violate moral law and the conscience that perceived it. “The murderous character of the twentieth century emerged from the contest between faith and morality, with faith winning out all too often” (xvi).

Under these circumstances, eliminated by mid-century but re-imagined for the remainder of it by those who lived in the shadow of nuclear weapons, Europeans understandably seek to “establish institutions of international justice” out of “a desire to make ethics or morality everywhere supreme over obedience to a leader or a system,” false gods who will not stay Abraham’s raised hand. Understandable, yes; coherent, no. Delsol unsparingly observes that rules imply ruling, and thus rulers. Permanent international courts and police forces require a de facto international government. The “new version of international law and justice” requires a world government enforcing the laws and saying what justice is. “But does universal justice exist? At what price does one establish it?” (xix)

Such philosophers as Grotius and Vattel presented the old version of international law and justice. This consisted partly of natural right—rights inhering in human beings as such—discovered and argued for by those philosophers; it also consisted partly of international customs and conventions asserted, negotiated, agreed upon by self-governed societies or states. The old international law resulted, therefore, from politics in the strict sense.

By politics in the strict sense Delsol has Aristotle in mind, and it is one of Delsol’s conspicuous merits as a political philosopher that Aristotle is never far from her mind. To see what she’s thinking, recall the account of the kinds of rule Aristotle describes at the beginning of the Politics. Human families exhibit three kinds of rule: the rule of masters over slaves; the rule of parents over children; and the mutual or reciprocal rule between husbands and wives. Although masterly and parental rule differ sharply because the first benefits ruler more than ruled, whereas the second properly benefits the children who are ruled, both center on command and obedience. Even in those benighted antique times before feminism’s blessed advent, marital rule proceeded by reciprocity, discussion, compromise—in “ruling and being ruled.” Among the several regime possibilities available to citizens in the polis, the politeia or “mixed regime” best addresses the political problem, as it takes this lesson from the family and brings it to public life. The mixed regime requires the few who are rich and the many who are poor to talk with one another before deciding on policy, to treat one another as human beings, as beings capable of reasoning and speech.

The old international law did this, too. Without establishing a world government or regime, international law established a civilized framework for talking and even for fighting. Each state retained its self-rule and therefore (so to speak) its moral integrity. The old international law provided some degree of justice—rough justice, to be sure, itself often violated. But its proponents understood politics and appreciated the place of political life as the architecture of any genuinely human life. The Bible teaches this, too; God lets His prophets talk back, and sometimes He changes His mind after they do.

The new international law, by contrast, finds its model not in the family or the polis or even in the ancient empires (which permitted, largely because they had to, considerable scope for provincial self-government). The new international law finds its model in the modern state. As conceived by Machiavelli, elaborated by Hobbes, and organized by the likes of Henry VIII and Cardinal Richelieu, the rulers of the state incline toward ‘commanding’ rule not political rule, administration not discussion. That the state is not entirely a bad thing may be seen in some societies where it does not exist—Iraq after the years right after the fall of Saddam Hussein, effected by the arrival of Americans who wanted to change the regime without quite appreciating what a regime is. That the state too often can be malign may be seen where it looms all too large—Iraq before Saddam fell, before Americans had arrived. The grandeur and misery of the modern state is the theme of Tocqueville, another of Delsol’s familiars. Tocqueville would preserve politics within statism, as did the American Founders before him; hence Tocqueville’s praise of the American solution, which he calls governmental centralization without administrative centralization, and which James Madison calls extended and federal republicanism.

Although it seems that any international law must cut across states, dilute their sovereignty, this does not necessarily mean that the ‘statist’ model disappears altogether. Advocates of the new international law would “establish a worldwide reign of justice by means of global tribunals, without any possibility of appeal” (5). These advocates prefer not to admit (perhaps even to themselves, although I doubt that) that their project does not transcend the perennial questions of states and regimes but reproduces it on a grand scale. To make this form of legalism work internationally, lawgivers and judges will be necessary. The new internationalists claim that the characteristic feature of modern statism, the princely executive, will no longer tyrannize. But while the rule of the few (namely the lawyers) worries one less than the rule of the tyrannical one, might it not institute the other kind of despotism Tocqueville fears, “soft” despotism? Soft despotism would relieve human beings of politics, relieve them not of their humanity, which endures, but of the exercise of their humanity, the full expression of our nature as homo rationalis et civilis. 

Political reason and civility differ from scientific reason and administration. To think again of the family, one ordinarily prefers the intimacy of talk between husband and wife to the therapeutic interventions of the marriage counselor; the counselor knows more about marriage, but the husband and wife know more about their marriage, about one another. In politics, “do we have to castigate the Cambodians, if they decide not to prosecute Pol Pot’s thugs?” (23). Maybe the larger justice of a reconciled society will benefit Cambodians more than exact justice done to each person. This is not moral relativism; it is prudence, and prudence serves justice at least as well as law, which characteristically requires that one size fits all Such unreasonable rationality obliges us to attempt unjust justice. “In order to make [the search for a world state] go away, human beings—all of them—will have to be truly reasonable, and not merely rational” (36).

“It is therefore rather curious to observe Europeans declaim against the Manicheanism of the United States” (41). Not only is the pot calling the kettle black, but the kettle, with its Wilsonian soot removed, turns out not to have been black. The Founders wrote, “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” They did not imagine that George III saw those truths so clearly; nor did they suppose that Europeans could exchange their kings and parliaments overnight. The Americans said that governments derived their just powers from the consent of those the laws govern. Delsol observes: “Every positive law is rooted in a culture. Therefore, in order to have a world law there must be a world culture. There is no such thing. (49)  By “world culture” internationalists mean the Davos culture, Samuel P. Huntington’s phrase for the mindset of the ‘globalist’ business executives, politicians, and academics convened annually by the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. The world is not ready for the rule of such men because the world has yet no taste for their wine, their brie. Delsol recalls Aristotle’s critique of Plato’s regime of philosophers; such a regime would reduce a theme to a single beat. One might add, George Soros is no philosopher-king.

This does not commit Delsol, foolishly, to a rejection of the idea of just war, or of the policy of regime change imposed a peace settlement after such a war. “Contrary to what one might first think, the Americans’ treatment of Iraq—their invasion of Iraq—is more defensible than what Westerners did to Serbia.” Americans judged the Iraqi regime dangerous to themselves. Europeans judged the Milosevic tyranny dangerous not to themselves but to Serbians, yet “conducted a police operation aimed at the elimination of a criminal” (69). Milosevic was a criminal amongst Serbians, not amongst Europeans generally.

In her preceding book, The Unlearned Lessons of the Twentieth Century, Delsol identified a contradiction at the core of contemporary European thought. Against genocide, tyranny, and war, Europeans wanted to uphold human dignity and rights. But against the hyper-Enlightenment ideologies of scientific socialism and race science they deployed a radical skepticism that denied the existence of the modern ‘self’ that had murdered, tyrannized, and made war. They denied the self without returning to the older notion of the soul. Without a soul, or at least a self, in what does human dignity and rights inhere? Europeans fell into soft nihilism, materialism, and pantheism—what Tocqueville had identified as the perils of social democracy when it abandons belief in anything above democrats. But, as she argues in Unjust Justice, “it really is great hubris to believe that a human law or institution”—particularly one constructed from such dispirited elements as the leveling impulse provides—”could be so universal and so perfect that no one confronted by it could appeal to a higher law” (95). Tocqueville predicted that social democracy could end in either of two regimes, republicanism or despotism. World government would be no republic but a vast web of administration, a “world moral authority,” a Sanhedrin without God or the laws of nature’s God, whose morality would incline toward the low but whose power would brook no contradiction.

Let us say, mirabile dictu, that Europeans converted to Christianity or (in a sense more ambitiously still) to Stoicism. St. Paul and Seneca agree that the human race is one thing, not a set of different species. This ontological unity did not imply political unity—except, in Paul’s understanding under the rule of Jesus Christ under a new heaven and on a new earth. Those who would transform ontological unity into political unity on this old earth commit a category mistake, Delsol argues. To “immanentize a spiritual good” (105) is to replace the Holy Spirit with the Absolute Spirit, as Hegel does; contemporary ‘post-moderns’ would do so even while rejecting the high modernism Hegel exemplifies. And even Hegel, it should be noted, has the sense to see that his world eschaton will never be immanentized through courts, but only on history’s slaughter-bench, war. Today’s internationalists want a peaceful, deductive immanence instead of the dialectical immanence Hegel (and before him, Kant) expected. They hope that humanity has already survived the Kantian/Hegelian slaughter-bench, so active in the first half of the twentieth century. This speaks well for their humanitarianism; it may speak more of their sentimentality.

And if they are right about the slaughter-bench, if the wars of the previous century somehow have already brought us to history’s much-anticipated end? If the world state is just around the corner, anticipated by the current congeries of international institutions, whether economic or civil-social? “We no longer have the excuse of ignorance to think that because it embodies the highest morality a world government will produce a miraculous synthesis of total power and good government” (128).