The Problems of a Political Animal: Community, Justice, and Conflict in Aristotelian Political Thought

The Problems of a Political Animal

The Problems of a Political Animal

Community, Justice, and Conflict in Aristotelian Political Thought

Bernard Yack

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley • Los Angeles ■ London

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

© 1993 by

The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Yack, Bernard, 1952-

The problems of a political animal: community, justice, and conflict in Aristotelian political thought / Bernard Yack.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-520-08166-8 (alk. paper). — ISBN 0-520-08167-6 (pbk.: alk. paper)

1. Aristotle—Contributions in political science. 2. Community. 3. Justice.

4. Social conflict. I. Title.

JC71.A7Y34 1993

320’.01'l—dc20 92-23296

CIP

Printed in the United States of America

987654321

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. ®

In memory of Judith Nisse Shklar (1929—1992)

Contents

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

POLITICAL COMMUNITY AS A TERM OF DISTINCTION

DISTORTED IMAGES OF ARISTOTELIAN POLITICS

INTERPRETIVE APPROACHES

CHAPTER ONE Community

THE COMMUNAL ANIMAL

THE FORMS OF FRIENDSHIP AND JUSTICE

ARISTOTELIAN COMMUNITY AND MODERN SOCIAL THEORY

CHAPTER TWO Political Community

THE DEFINING CHARACTERISTICS OF POLITICAL COMMUNITY

THE POLITICAL ANIMAL

THE ANCIENT POLIS AND MODERN POLITICAL COMMUNITIES

APPENDIX. MONARCHY AND POLITICAL COMMUNITY

CHAPTER THREE Political Teleology

THE NATURALNESS OF THE POLIS

POLITICS AND THE GOOD LIFE

AN ANTHROPOCENTRIC UNIVERSE?

THE GOOD LIFE IN IMPERFECT POLITICAL COMMUNITIES

CHAPTER FOUR Political Friendship

NEITHER BROTHERS NOR COMRADES

THE DANGERS OF POLITICAL INTIMACY

POLITICAL FRIENDSHIP AND THE INCONVENIENCES OF POLITICAL LIFE

CHAPTER FIVE Political Justice

POLITICAL JUSTICE AND RECIPROCITY

NATURAL AND CONVENTIONAL RIGHT

THE SUBJECT OF JUSTICE

GENERAL AND DISTRIBUTIVE JUSTICE

A POLITICAL CONCEPTION OF THE COMMON GOOD

CHAPTER SIX The Rule of Law

WHAT IS LAW?

ADJUDICATION

A POLITICAL CONCEPTION OF THE RULE OF LAW

CHAPTER SEVEN Class Conflict and the Mixed Regime

CLASS CONFLICT IN ANCIENT GREECE

A POLITICAL UNDERSTANDING OF CLASS CONFLICT

PERCEIVED INJUSTICE AND CLASS INTERESTS

POLITICAL FRIENDS, CLASS ENEMIES

THE MIXED REGIME AND POLITICAL JUSTICE

APPENDIX. POLITICAL REVOLUTION: A MISSING ARISTOTELIAN CATEGORY

CHAPTER EIGHT The Good Life in Political Context

MORAL CHARACTER IN POLITICAL CONTEXT

MISFORTUNE AND THE ASYMMETRY BETWEEN PRAISE AND BLAME

MORAL CONFLICT IN POLITICAL CONTEXT

CHAPTER NINE The Good Life in Extrapolitical Context

HOW GOOD IS THE ARISTOTELIAN GOOD LIFE?

THE TENSIONS WITHIN A GOOD HUMAN LIFE

Conclusion

Bibliography

Index of Citations from Aristotle’s Works

General Index

Acknowledgments

Earlier versions of arguments presented in chapters 2, 3, 5, 8, and 9 have appeared in articles published in The Review of Politics 47, no. 1 (Jan. 1985): 92-112; History of Political Thought 12 (1991): 15-34; Political Theory 18 (May 1990): 16-37; and Soundings 72, no. 4 (Winter 1989): 607—29. I’d like to thank these journals for allowing me to alter and reprint portions of these articles.

I owe a great debt to all those friends and colleagues who read parts of this book as it developed over the years and who shared their insights with me. I’d especially like to thank Peter Euben, William Galston, Harvey Goldman, Jack Gunnell, Don Herzog, Stephen Holmes, Bernard Manin, Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr., Martha Nussbaum, Stephen Salkever, Arlene Saxonhouse, Lauren Schulz, Gary Shiffman, Judith Shklar, and Jeffrey Stout.

It has been my great good fortune in life to be able to share my ideas with Marion Smiley. In good times and bad, her extraordinary intelligence and intellectual honesty have been my constant inspiration.

Introduction

The shared sentiments and commitments that constitute a community are often the source of its deepest conflicts. Anyone who has lived in a family rather than merely longed for a home knows that all too well. Strangers may cheat you, but only brothers or sisters, comrades or colleagues can betray you. In the end, intense and ugly forms of distrust and conflict are part of the price we pay for the pleasures of communal life.

Aristotle, unlike many of his contemporary followers, is deeply aware of the special conflicts associated with human communities. The intensity of our conflicts, he notes, increases with the closeness of our relationships. Anger is something that individuals express more strongly against their companions, when they think they have been treated unjustly. … Hence the sayings ‘Cruel are the wars of brothers’ and ‘Those who love extravagantly will hate extravagantly as well.’… And it is reasonable, Aristotle concludes, that this should happen. For, in addition to the injury, they also consider themselves robbed of this [companionship] (Politics [hereafter Po/.] IßZSalO).1

Critics of modern liberal democracies often invoke Aristotle’s understanding of political community when they complain that our political life is nothing but civil war carried on by other means, a war of all against all… we make for ourselves, not out of whole cloth but out of an intentional distortion of our social natures.2 But for Aristotle political community signifies a conflict-ridden reality rather than a vision of lost or future harmony. It is the scene of political conflict rather than its remedy. All the cruel, mindless, and selfish actions that we, sadly, associate with ordinary political life are included prominently among the political things (ta politiko) that Aristotle sets out to study; he does not restrict his study to just the occasional moments of warmth and heroism. 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. Accordingly, an Aristotelian account of politics must explain the problems of political life as well as its proudest achievements. And it must, as I try to show, use the bonds created by political community to help explain these problems rather than treat them as a consequence of the absence or weakening of communal bonds themselves. In other words, Aristotle insists on what we might call a communitarian account of political conflict and competition.

The very idea of a communitarian account of political conflict and competition may seem strange or paradoxical, given the general association of the term communitarian with aspirations toward social harmony and integration. Most contemporary communitarians see political community as a remedy for political conflict rather than one of its sources. But if, as communitarians insist, our shared practices and sentiments largely constitute our identity and character, then it seems sensible to look, as I suggest Aristotle does, to the way in which we share things in order to help explain our continuing social and political conflicts.

Aristotle also insists that a proper understanding of the achievements and opportunities made possible by political community must take due note of the imperfect and conflict-ridden conditions in which those achievements arise. He argues that although the political community comes into being for the sake of survival and comfort, its highest and final purpose is to enable us to lead the good life of rational and virtuous behavior. In particular, the political community provides us with the laws that help us acquire the virtues and the shared practices that allow us to exercise and perfect them. Without it the Aristotelian good life is impossible.

Nevertheless, the political communities that enable us to lead the good life are the same imperfect and conflict-ridden communities described above. No actual political community has ever approached the requirements of the ideal regime outlined in book 7 of the Politics.3 Aristotle cannot even cite an example of one that meets the less exacting standards of the correct (orthos)—or unqualifiedly just—regimes laid down in book 3. Hence, if we insist, as some do, that without the ideal city, there will be no good men,4 then we must conclude that there have never have been and most likely never will be any virtuous individuals in this world. That cannot, of course, be Aristotle’s conclusion.5 But it is an unavoidable conclusion unless we can identify, as I try to do in this book, the ways in which ordinary, imperfect political communities can enable us to lead a good life.6

Unlike the majority of modern moral philosophers, Aristotle has a profound sense of the social and political constraints that condition ethical behavior. The Aristotelian good life is built on highly contingent and fragile foundations.7 Unfavorable conditions can keep us from ever achieving it; unforeseen and uncontrollable circumstances can steal part or all of it away from us.

Such is the world in which the Aristotelian good life develops, a world in which nature gives us the tools—reasoning, speech, and the political community—with which to build the good life but, at the same time, erects innumerable and often overwhelming obstacles to realizing it. The problems and the opportunities of ordinary political life are thus inseparable for Aristotle. We need to understand political community in order to explain political conflict, and we need to understand political conflicts in order to identify and explain the nature of the good life as actually led.

Unfortunately, the modern division of politics and ethics into separate disciplines makes it difficult to recognize this Aristotelian approach to the study of political conflict and human flourishing. Moral philosophers devote the bulk of their attention to the analysis and evaluation of concepts, leaving the study of social structures and contingencies to social and political theorists. They usually take note of the social contexts of ethical actions only when they talk of applying their conclusions to specific situations, as in the field of applied ethics. As a result, they tend, unlike Aristotle, to see social structures and contingencies as factors that constrain the application of ethical concepts rather than as partly constitutive of these concepts. Even when contemporary commentators insist on the unity of Aristotelian ethical and political philosophy, they usually subordinate politics to ethics and underestimate the extent to which political contingencies constrain ethical choices and development.8

In this study I attempt to reconstruct Aristotle’s understanding of the characteristic mixture of problems and opportunities created by life in ordinary political communities. I explore Aristotle’s account of life in imperfect and conflict-ridden political communities—the only kind of political life that human beings have ever known. I try to show that we can gain new and interesting insights into the structure, constraints, and possibilities of ordinary political life by viewing them, as Aristotle does, as a mixture of inconveniences and opportunities that follow from our political nature.

My aim is to identify and explore the most interesting of these insights rather than offer a comprehensive commentary on or sustained defense of Aristotle’s political philosophy. In the first part of the book (chapters 1—4) I consider a number of basic concepts in Aristotelian political philosophy: community, political community, political teleology, and political friendship. I try to show that these concepts are geared to explaining the nature of everyday political life rather than, as most commentators assume, the moral achievements of Aristotle’s best regime. Viewed in this way, Aristotelian concepts such as community and political friendship suggest some new and interesting ideas about the nature of social cooperation and conflict, ideas that are far more relevant to contemporary social life than Aristotelian political thought has been generally thought to be.

In the second part of the book (chapters 5-7) I discuss the key concepts that Aristotle uses to evaluate everyday political life: justice, the rule of law, and the mixed regime. I offer reinterpretations of each of these Aristotelian concepts that emphasizes the political problems that they are designed to explain and challenge. (In the case of the mixed regime examined in chapter 7, my reinterpretation requires an extended discussion of Aristotle’s understanding of class conflict, the problem that the mixed regime is designed to address.) The key to these reinterpretations is my emphasis on the way in which the shared expectations of members of political communities shape and constrain concepts, such as justice and the rule of law, that are most often treated as having independent moral foundations. Much of my effort in these chapters is devoted to reasserting the political context in which Aristotle presents these concepts, a context that most interpreters ignore in order to integrate Aristotelian ideas into contemporary debates about justice and law.

Finally, in the third part of the book I discuss the constraints that our political nature puts on the achievement and enjoyment of the Aristotelian good life. In chapter 8 I explore the moral conflicts that arise for creatures that depend, as we do according to Aristotle, on our political communities for the moral training that makes the good life possible. In chapter 9 I discuss the limitations that Aristotle sees in a life that depends on the fragile and unreliable foundation of human politics.

I repeat that my aim is to identify and explore the most interesting of Aristotle’s insights rather than offer a general commentary on his political work. I deal with specific concepts or problems concerning which Aristotle has some insight worth exploring, rather than with specific sections of his works. To highlight these insights, I devote considerable space in each chapter to showing how they can help us recognize limitations in the most influential approaches to a variety of issues in moral and political philosophy. Thus, although I hope that my efforts will alter the general image of Aristotle’s political thought, I offer a series of explorations of related issues rather than a comprehensive reinterpretation of his political philosophy.

POLITICAL COMMUNITY AS A TERM OF DISTINCTION

Scholars have paid relatively little attention to the elements of Aristotelian political philosophy reconstructed in this study. The widespread association of Aristotle’s conception of community with contemporary longings for communal integration and harmony has led most contemporary commentators to minimize the significance of conflict and competition in his political philosophy.9 Even Alisdair MacIntyre, one of Aristotle’s most enthusiastic contemporary partisans, chides Aristotle for ignoring the centrality of opposition and conflict in human life.10 Despite the fact that Aristotle devotes the core of the Politics, books 3—6, to an extended analysis of political conflict and competition, most contemporary scholars would probably agree with MacIntyre.

This widespread misimpression grows out of, among other things, a relatively narrow and superficial understanding of Aristotle’s claim about the naturalness of the political community. In the textbook accounts, this claim makes Aristotle a defender of the naturalness of cooperation among human beings and an opponent of those, like Hobbes, who insist that natural impulses drive human beings into conflict with each other. 11 Because Aristotle’s claim about the naturalness of political community contrasts so much more sharply with widespread modern opinions than does anything he has to say about political conflict, his understanding of the nature—indeed, the naturalness—of political conflict is often ignored by modern scholars.

Aristotle does, of course, insist that human beings are by nature political animals. In doing so, he asserts that the way the Greeks live, engaged in the new and peculiar kind of activity we call politics, develops naturally out of human needs and inclinations and, more significantly, represents the only way in which human beings can fully develop their highest natural capacities. But this assertion has an important implication that, in spite of all the commentary and controversy it has inspired, has escaped most of Aristotle’s commentators:12 nature seems to have chosen a most imperfect and inconvenient way for human beings to develop and perfect their characteristic capacities. For no actual political community is well-ordered according to Aristotle; consequently, "human affairs [pragmaton] most often work out badly" (Pol. 1260b35; Rhetoric [hereafter Rhet.] 1389bl6). All actual political regimes fall short of unqualified justice, and Aristotle’s recommendations for improvement would still leave them short of the mark. Even Sparta, one of the only regimes in which Aristotle can find something to praise, pursues virtue for the sake of a dangerous and incorrect end: military power (Pol. 1271bl, 1333b-34b). One of the few actual regimes that Aristotle praises thus treats the virtues as if they exist for the sake of success at war, a view that he does not hesitate to condemn as absolutely murderous (Nicomachean Ethics [hereafter NE] 1177bl0).

Aristotle concludes that living together and sharing any human concern is always difficult (Pol. 1263al5), and he recognizes that this difficulty increases in proportion to the extent and importance of what we share. In the political community human beings share something of the greatest importance: the endeavor to make possible the good life in which human beings most fully develop and perfect their natural capacities. Living together in political communities is thus especially difficult. If we need the political community to develop and perfect our nature, then nature has thrust us into a most problematic and precarious position. We are not, of course, the only social species. But we are, it seems, the only social species that depends for its development on a form of community so internally unstable and unreliable.

The concept of political community thus provides the key to Aristotle’s understanding of ordinary political life. It is the first concept that Aristotle examines in the Politics, and it helps him define and explain all of the social phenomena he examines there. A political community is, according to Aristotle, a self-sufficient group of free and relatively equal individuals who have the opportunity to engage in regular and public discussion about which laws and policies should direct their activities and who take turns, according to regular and recognized rules, in ruling and being ruled.13 Politics, as Aristotle understands it, concerns only the actions and interactions of members of such communities. Few nations and societies have participated in it, since the great majority of societies have been ruled by monarchs, emperors, dictators, and priests.

Aristotle would probably agree with Moses Finley’s description of politics as practiced by ancient Greeks as one of the rarer of human activities.14 Since the demise of the Greek polis, political activity, as Aristotle understands it, has frequently disappeared, reappearing occasionally among medieval and Renaissance city-states and more extensively among the liberal democratic republics of the modern world. Political community has sometimes emerged suddenly, with great noise and fanfare, as in France in 1789 or in Eastern Europe two hundred years later. Just as frequently it has died a violent death. Aristotle’s concept of political community, I argue, can help us understand the structure of shared dispositions and expectations that shapes communal life in all places where political community has emerged and survived.15

The political things (ta politika) represent for Aristotle, as for most Greeks, the things that are associated with the Greek polis. But the Greek polis represents only one instance of the concept of political community that Aristotle constructs. It is the only instance with which Aristotle is himself familiar; but merely because he abstracts from the polis certain characteristics of a political community, there is no reason to assume that no other forms of political community are possible. Indeed, I argue in the final section of chapter 2 that the majority of modern republican nation-states share these characteristics and thus would be described by Aristotle as political communities. Smallness of size and population, which is often assumed to be an essential characteristic of Aristotelian political community, is only an essential feature of the best political community, the one sketched in book 7 of the Politics.

Nevertheless, Aristotle’s relatively exclusive definition of politics is far narrower than those definitions popular among most contemporary students of politics.16 Most of these students agree that politics is a universal activity, an activity that has a prominent place in every age and every independent community. The major debate among them is about whether or not politics plays a part in the organization of every group and society within an independent community. Some follow Max Weber in associating politics primarily with the state and its monopoly on the legitimate use of violent force. Others speak of the politics of nonstate organizations, from families and unions to corporations and football teams.¹⁷ Neither group follows Aristotle in treating politics as a term of distinction among the ways in which authority is exercised in autonomous communities.

Among twentieth-century political theorists, especially among those who are dissatisfied with liberal political theory and practice, there has been some resistance to the extremely broad understanding of politics favored by contemporary political scientists. Some political theorists, sometimes relying on Aristotelian ideas, have offered even more exclusive definitions of politics and the public realm than Aristotle’s. Most often these definitions reserve the term political for actions that in some way transcend the special selfish interests of individuals and groups. According to these definitions, it is a mistake to describe contemporary liberal democracies as political communities or to expect to find any genuine political activity within them.

Hannah Arendt developed the most famous and influential of these definitions in The Human Condition, She argues there that politics is an activity in which we seek to overcome the biological constraints that in other activities tie us to narrower family and economic interests. For Arendt the public realm is a common space in which we express our freedom from biological and economic necessity.¹⁸ The prevalence of a pluralist form of politics in which different groups determine public policy by balancing their economic and personal interests represents, from this point of view, the elimination of true political activity from modern life. In recent years an increasing number of political theorists have invoked republican or civic humanist rhetoric to make similar claims about the ways in which individualism and interest group politics have destroyed the public realm. In these criticisms, the defining feature of true public activity is discussion of and devotion to a truly common good.¹⁹

The existence of this countercurrent has, as Hanna Pitkin notes, introduced two very different ways of talking about politics into contemporary scholarly discourse. In one, politics describes one ordinary empirical feature of every independent community, if not of every form of human association. In the other, politics describes a substantive moral standard of behavior, a standard that contemporary political behavior clearly fails to meet.20

Because the advocates of the more exclusive moral conception of politics often build their arguments on Aristotelian ideas, most contemporary readers associate Aristotle’s relatively exclusive understanding of politics with theirs. One of my major goals in the following chapters is to dissolve that association. Aristotle has a much more exclusive definition of politics than most contemporary social scientists do. Politics, as he conceives of it, occurs only in a relatively small portion of human social groups. Nevertheless, Aristotelian political community is not an ideal that we approach the more we eliminate the influence of selfish individual interests. Self-serving actions, just as much as self-sacrificing actions, can express the shared expectations and identity introduced by this form of communal life.21

A reconstruction of Aristotle’s account of ordinary political life can improve our understanding of politics in at least two ways. Negatively, it might help undermine the recurring temptation to dismiss the imperfect politics of everyday life in the name of romantic and moralistic images of political community. More positively, however, it might encourage us to take imperfect politics far more seriously than we may now be inclined to do. By showing how even the imperfect politics of actual political communities can make human flourishing possible, it encourages us to use our understanding of the problems of a political community to identify the real possibilities for a good human life.

DISTORTED IMAGES OF ARISTOTELIAN POLITICS

Despite the considerable space that Aristotle devotes to the study of actual Greek politics, most scholars view him as too much the teleological moralist to be a trustworthy guide to the structure and conflicts of ordinary political life. As noted earlier, even a contemporary champion of Aristotelian ethics such as Alisdair MacIntyre complains that Aristotle has too elevated and harmonious an understanding of political life.22 Hence, before proceeding with my reconstruction of Aristotle’s understanding of the problems of ordinary political life, I need to identify and challenge the various sources of this widely shared image of Aristotelian political philosophy.

Many contemporary scholars believe that it was Hannah Arendt’s great achievement to recover and restore the ancient conception of the public realm.23 Her views have, accordingly, played a very large role in shaping contemporary images of ancient politics, images that often reflect her overly heroic view of both Aristotelian political theory and ancient Greek political practice.

Although Arendt does not eliminate conflict from her account of political life, political conflict, as she understands it, takes place on a very elevated plain where men and women break free of concerns about biological and economic necessity in order to compete for eternal fame. The Greeks, she claims, recognized that debates about the distribution of goods are not, properly speaking, political subjects. In the modern world, in contrast, we have allowed these social concerns, with their degrading ties to natural necessities, to pollute the free air of public discourse. As a result, both politics and the public realm have virtually disappeared from the modern world.24

What all Greek philosophers, no matter how opposed to polis life, took for granted is that freedom is exclusively located in the political realm, that necessity is primarily a prepolitical phenomenon, characteristic of the private household organization…. The good life, as Aristotle called the life of the citizen, was not merely better, more carefree or nobler than ordinary life, but of an altogether different quality. It was good to the extent that by having mastered the necessities of sheer life, by being freed from labour and work, and by overcoming the innate urge of all living creatures for their own survival, it was no longer bound to the biological life process.25

In this passage Arendt attributes to Aristotle and the Greeks a dichotomy between politics, freedom, and humanity on the one hand and social needs, biological necessity, and nature on the other. This dichotomy has become so influential that descriptions of Aristotelian and ancient Greek politics as an effort to transcend nature and biological necessity have become commonplace among contemporary scholars.²⁶

Unfortunately, few dichotomies could be more foreign to the letter or spirit of Aristotelian philosophy. Aristotle does distinguish between the household (oikos or oikia) and the polis. But Arendt’s parallel distinctions between humanity and nature and between the good life of politics and the biological life-process directly contradict Aristotle’s understanding of nature and humanity. Aristotle clearly states in the opening book of the Politics that both our distinctiveness as human beings and our attachment to political life grow out of our biological nature. We are by nature political creatures because we are naturally inclined to live in communities and because our natural capacity for speech and argument lead us to form specifically political communities.27 Although we need to assist nature to establish political communities and promote moral virtue, in doing so we work with our natural capacities rather than against them. A life in which we somehow succeeded in overcoming the innate urge of all living for their own survival, a life in which we were no longer bound to the biological life process, might be divine or beastly, according to Aristotle. But it would not be a human, let alone a political, life.

Arendt’s dichotomies have a far greater affinity to post-Kantian German philosophy, from which they were drawn, than to Aristotelian political philosophy, let alone Greek political practice.28 Ever since Kant drew his famous distinction between a phenomenal world of nature governed by necessary causal laws and a noumenal world of human reason governed by self-imposed moral laws, German philosophers have tended to see humanity as an achievement to be won against nature.

One problem they wrestle with again and again is how to realize our humanity and freedom in a world that seems to be dominated by nature and necessity.29 Arendt’s conception of politics represents another attempt to describe a way in which we can realize our humanity in a natural world that resists our efforts. Whatever its virtues, it has little to do with Aristotle’s understanding of political life or with ancient Greek political life itself.

The central focus of political conflict in Aristotle’s Politics, as in Athenian political life itself, is disagreement about the distribution of goods and power. Yet this is precisely the kind of activity that Arendt insists has no place in the public realm. As Pitkin has noted, Arendtian politics replaces debate about distributive justice with a kind of schoolboy competition about who has more contempt for degrading natural necessities.30 Aristotelian politics, in contrast, never severs its roots in nature and natural necessity and the debates about distributive justice that those roots nourish. For Aristotle, our political virtues reflect our natural capacities and our political problems reflect our natural needs and limitations.

If Arendt’s conception of politics is so foreign to Aristotle’s conceptual vocabulary, what accounts for the widespread acceptance of her image of Aristotelian political philosophy? The main reason, I suggest, is that her claims are read within the context of an older and broader controversy about the nature of political community, a controversy that inclines modern scholars to exaggerate the nobility and harmony of Aristotelian politics. I am referring here to the debates that have grown up around communitarian critiques of liberal individualism.

When one reads the Politics with these debates in mind, Aristotle’s statements about the priority of the political community to the individual seem the most striking and important. Hence, Aristotle’s interpreters often identify his arguments with the numerous objections that political philosophers have raised against liberal individualism. Since these philosophers often make their complaints in the name of lost ancient political theories and practices, opponents and proponents of liberal individualism often identify Aristotle with these complaints. Eric Havelock, a defender of liberal individualism, goes so far in his identification of Aristotle’s arguments with those of contemporary anti-individualists that he assumes that Aristotle must have been directing his arguments against a vigorous tradition of liberal individualism among the ancient Greeks. That tradition, Havelock suggests, disappeared from the written record due, in no small part, to Aristotle’s efforts to conceal it.31

Rousseau was the first and certainly the most influential of the social critics to invoke ancient theory and practice against liberal individualism. Building on Montesquieu’s reinterpretation of republican virtue, he constructed a vision of ancient citizenship and public education in which the political community’s laws denature man by replacing the independence of the natural man with the human freedom and generalized social dependence of the citizen.32 That vision continues to shape the way in which scholars understand ancient political theory and practice, even when they do not explicitly invoke Rousseau and the general will. Defenders of the civic republican tradition may trace the origins of that tradition back to Aristotle. But when they describe republican politics as a collective enterprise in self-transformation, 33 they are using a Rousseauian political vocabulary that is completely out of place in the Aristotelian understanding of politics.

Aristotle, unlike Rousseau, did not believe that human beings need the denaturing exercise in self-transformation that Rousseau and civic republicans celebrate. We certainly need law and moral education in order to live a fully human life, according to Aristotle. Without them we are unlikely to develop the virtues that are the foundation of a good life (NE 1103a—b, 1179b—80a). But the training of the virtues is not for Aristotle a fight against nature, and certainly not a struggle to transform naturally self-regarding beings into other-regarding citizens. It is instead a process in which we draw out and build on human beings’ natural capacities and natural impulses for communal living.34

As already noted, it is not surprising that Aristotle’s political thought is often associated with modern critiques of liberal individualism, given his claims about the priority of the community to the individual as well as the extensive criticism that many liberal theorists direct at these claims. But this association misleads many scholars into exaggerating Aristotle’s hostility to social conflict and social differentiation. Aristotle does not develop his conception of political community as an answer to the celebrations of social differentiation and competition found in the writings of modern liberal individualists. If anything, he writes to counter the extreme communitarianism of Plato’s Republic, a book that, he complains, makes social unity the measure of political health (Poi 1261—62).35 Aristotle argues against Plato that the elimination of social heterogeneity threatens to eliminate political community itself; community signifies for Aristotle a combination of sharing and differentiation rather than social unity (Pol. 1261al4-1261bl5).36 Aristotle’s conception of political community seeks to explain rather than eliminate social differentiation and the conflicts that arise therefrom. As long as we identify his communitarianism with contemporary assaults on individualism and social differentiation, we will seriously misunderstand his account of political life.

I am not, however, insisting on removing the layers of communitarian interpretation that have settled on Aristotelian ideas solely in the name of textual fidelity. After all, one may prefer creative distortions to more faithful readings of texts, especially when one challenges, as do so many contemporary readers, the very notion of more or less authentic interpretations. I attempt to dig beneath overly communitarian readings because I believe that what we find there can help us analyze and resolve conceptual and theoretical difficulties that are, in large part, a legacy of the polemics between individualists and their communitarian critics.

Aristotle built his understanding of ordinary political life on the soundest of communitarian premises: the social construction of individual identities and aspirations. But unlike contemporary communitarians, he had no need to enlist this premise in a polemical war against advocates of liberal individualism. As a result, his communitarian conception of politics has none of the exaggerated hopes for moral harmony and elevated behavior associated with contemporary communitarianism. If one is seeking to construct an adequate communitarian understanding of ordinary political life, or even if one is interested only in seeing what might be learned from such an understanding, then one could do no better than to start with Aristotle.

Another, more textually based reason for the general assumption that Aristotle downplays the significance of political conflict is a widespread misunderstanding of his understanding of political teleology. According to Aristotle’s teleological understanding of nature, it is the completed and perfected form of a species that accurately displays its nature. If, as Aristotle asserts, the polis is natural, then, most commentators conclude, the true political community must be its best and most perfect form: the best regime described by Aristotle in books 7 and 8 of Politics. We must deny, according to this understanding of Aristotelian political teleology, that actual political regimes, all of which fall short of this standard, are properly described as political communities at all, since they fail to grow into their complete and natural form. Instead of teaching us about a genuine political community, they merely manifest, as it were, the diseases and defects that prevent most political communities from maturing into healthy and fully functioning members of their species. From this perspective, the problems of ordinary political life tell us no more about a truly human life than a severely retarded child and a rotten acorn tell us about the inherent capacities of human beings and oaks.

In the third chapter of this book I try to demonstrate that this widely shared view represents a misunderstanding of Aristotle’s political teleology. The polis itself, I argue, does not have a nature, according to Aristotle, and thus does not have its own natural end as a completed and perfected form. The polis derives its naturalness, instead, from properties of human nature. The end of the polis is thus not to develop itself into a complete and perfected form but rather to contribute to the development and perfection of human beings into their complete and natural form. Aristotle makes this end clear with his repeated claim that the polis exists for the sake of the good life. Unlike natural species, the political community exists for the sake of something else, not for the sake of its own development. It measures up to its natural form as long as it makes the contribution to human development without which human beings cannot complete themselves. Showing that the imperfect and conflict-ridden regimes of ordinary political life can make this contribution—though not, of course, as well as the best regime could dois one of the primary aims of this book.

There is also a widely held view, developed first by Werner Jaeger, that Aristotle’s theory of the good life and his empirical approach to the study of actual political life represent inconsistent strands in his political philosophy, strands written at different periods of his philosophical development.37 But this view rests less on any historical evidence of Aristotle’s development than on the assumption that the two approaches are as inconsistent as Platonic idealism and modern scientific empiricism. The acceptance of this assumption has contributed greatly to the paucity of theoretically interesting commentary on Aristotle’s political thought in this century. In the middle years of this century, most scholars were more concerned with identifying when and in what order Aristotle expressed his thoughts about politics than with what we might learn from them.38 By ascribing the most unexpected combinations of ideas in his political works to different periods in his development, they stripped his texts of some of their most interesting insights and thoughtprovoking problems. My reinterpretation of Aristotle’s political teleology should diminish the need for this theoretically uninteresting genetic approach by minimizing the appearance of inconsistency that originally inspired it.39

Finally, the tendency of most contemporary scholars to treat politics and ethics as separate disciplines also poses an obstacle to an appreciation of the relationship between Aristotle’s theory of the good life and the imperfections of ordinary political life. With the notable exception of the final pages of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle’s so-called ethical writings contain few direct references to the conflicts and constraints of ordinary political life. If one treats these writings as the foundation of a separate science of ethics, then it is easy to get the impression that the imperfections and untidiness of ordinary political life have little to do with Aristotle’s understanding of ethical action. This is especially true if, like most English-speaking scholars, one is far more interested in the ideas expressed in the ethical writings than in those found in the so-called political writings.40

But Aristotle, unlike the majority of his contemporary interpreters, never distinguishes a science of ethics from a science of politics, nor does he treat ethics and politics as subdivisions of a more comprehensive science.41 He states plainly in the opening pages of the Nicoma- chean Ethics