Politics: A Treatise on Government

The Politics of Aristotle is the second part of a treatise of which the Ethics is the first part.  It looks back to the Ethics as the Ethics looks forward to the Politics.  For Aristotle did not separate, as we are inclined to do, the spheres of the statesman and the moralist.  In the Ethics he has described the character necessary for the good life, but that life is for him essentially to be lived in society, and when in the last chapters of the Ethics he comes to the practical application of his inquiries, that finds expression not in moral exhortations addressed to the individual but in a description of the legislative opportunities of the statesman.  It is the legislator’s task to frame a society which shall make the good life possible.  Politics for Aristotle is not a struggle between individuals or classes for power, nor a device for getting done such elementary tasks as the maintenance of order and security without too great encroachments on individual liberty.  The state is “a community of well-being in families and aggregations of families for the sake of a perfect and self-sufficing life.”  The legislator is a craftsman whose material is society and whose aim is the good life.

In an early dialogue of Plato’s, the Protagoras, Socrates asks Protagoras why it is not as easy to find teachers of virtue as it is to find teachers of swordsmanship, riding, or any other art.  Protagoras’ answer is that there are no special teachers of virtue, because virtue is taught by the whole community.  Plato and Aristotle both accept the view of moral education implied in this answer.  In a passage of the Republic (492 b) Plato repudiates the notion that the sophists have a corrupting moral influence upon young men.  The public themselves, he says, are the real sophists and the most complete and thorough educators.  No private education can hold out against the irresistible force of public opinion and the ordinary moral standards of society.  But that makes it all the more essential that public opinion and social environment should not be left to grow up at haphazard as they ordinarily do, but should be made by the wise legislator the expression of the good and be informed in all their details by his knowledge.  The legislator is the only possible teacher of virtue.

Such a programme for a treatise on government might lead us to expect in the Politics mainly a description of a Utopia or ideal state which might inspire poets or philosophers but have little direct effect upon political institutions.  Plato’s Republic is obviously impracticable, for its author had turned away in despair from existing politics.  He has no proposals, in that dialogue at least, for making the best of things as they are.  The first lesson his philosopher has to learn is to turn away from this world of becoming and decay, and to look upon the unchanging eternal world of ideas.  Thus his ideal city is, as he says, a pattern laid up in heaven by which the just man may rule his life, a pattern therefore in the meantime for the individual and not for the statesman.  It is a city, he admits in the Laws, for gods or the children of gods, not for men as they are.

Aristotle has none of the high enthusiasm or poetic imagination of Plato.  He is even unduly impatient of Plato’s idealism, as is shown by the criticisms in the second book.  But he has a power to see the possibilities of good in things that are imperfect, and the patience of the true politician who has learned that if he would make men what they ought to be, he must take them as he finds them.  His ideal is constructed not of pure reason or poetry, but from careful and sympathetic study of a wide range of facts.  His criticism of Plato in the light of history, in Book ii. chap, v., though as a criticism it is curiously inept, reveals his own attitude admirably:  “Let us remember that we should not disregard the experience of ages; in the multitude of years, these things, if they were good, would certainly not have been unknown; for almost everything has been found out, although sometimes they are not put together; in other cases men do not use the knowledge which they have.”  Aristotle in his Constitutions had made a study of one hundred and fifty-eight constitutions of the states of his day, and the fruits of that study are seen in the continual reference to concrete political experience, which makes the Politics in some respects a critical history of the workings of the institutions of the Greek city state.  In Books iv., V., and VI. the ideal state seems far away, and we find a dispassionate survey of imperfect states, the best ways of preserving them, and an analysis of the causes of their instability.  It is as though Aristotle were saying:  “I have shown you the proper and normal type of constitution, but if you will not have it and insist on living under a perverted form, you may as well know how to make the best of it.”  In this way the Politics, though it defines the state in the light of its ideal, discusses states and institutions as they are.  Ostensibly it is merely a continuation of the Ethics, but it comes to treat political questions from a purely political standpoint.

This combination of idealism and respect for the teachings of experience constitutes in some ways the strength and value of the Politics, but it also makes it harder to follow.  The large nation states to which we are accustomed make it difficult for us to think that the state could be constructed and modelled to express the good life.  We can appreciate Aristotle’s critical analysis of constitutions, but find it hard to take seriously his advice to the legislator.  Moreover, the idealism and the empiricism of the Politics are never really reconciled by Aristotle himself.

It may help to an understanding of the Politics if something is said on those two points.

We are accustomed since the growth of the historical method to the belief that states are “not made but grow,” and are apt to be impatient with the belief which Aristotle and Plato show in the powers of the lawgiver.  But however true the maxim may be of the modern nation state, it was not true of the much smaller and more self-conscious Greek city.  When Aristotle talks of the legislator, he is not talking in the air.  Students of the Academy had been actually called on to give new constitutions to Greek states.  For the Greeks the constitution was not merely as it is so often with us, a matter of political machinery.  It was regarded as a way of life.  Further, the constitution within the framework of which the ordinary process of administration and passing of decrees went on, was always regarded as the work of a special man or body of men, the lawgivers.  If we study Greek history, we find that the position of the legislator corresponds to that assigned to him by Plato and Aristotle.  All Greek states, except those perversions which Aristotle criticises as being “above law,” worked under rigid constitutions, and the constitution was only changed when the whole people gave a commission to a lawgiver to draw up a new one.  Such was the position of the AEsumnetes, whom Aristotle describes in Book iii. chap, xiv., in earlier times, and of the pupils of the Academy in the fourth century.  The lawgiver was not an ordinary politician.  He was a state doctor, called in to prescribe for an ailing constitution.  So Herodotus recounts that when the people of Cyrene asked the oracle of Delphi to help them in their dissensions, the oracle told them to go to Mantinea, and the Mantineans lent them Demonax, who acted as a “setter straight” and drew up a new constitution for Cyrene.  So again the Milesians, Herodotus tells us, were long troubled by civil discord, till they asked help from Paros, and the Parians sent ten commissioners who gave Miletus a new constitution.  So the Athenians, when they were founding their model new colony at Thurii, employed Hippodamus of Miletus, whom Aristotle mentions in Book ii, as the best expert in town-planning, to plan the streets of the city, and Protagoras as the best expert in law-making, to give the city its laws.  In the Laws Plato represents one of the persons of the dialogue as having been asked by the people of Gortyna to draw up laws for a colony which they were founding.  The situation described must have occurred frequently in actual life.  The Greeks thought administration should be democratic and law-making the work of experts.  We think more naturally of law-making as the special right of the people and administration as necessarily confined to experts.

Aristotle’s Politics, then, is a handbook for the legislator, the expert who is to be called in when a state wants help.  We have called him a state doctor.  It is one of the most marked characteristics of Greek political theory that Plato and Aristotle think of the statesman as one who has knowledge of what ought to be done, and can help those who call him in to prescribe for them, rather than one who has power to control the forces of society.  The desire of society for the statesman’s advice is taken for granted, Plato in the Republic says that a good constitution is only possible when the ruler does not want to rule; where men contend for power, where they have not learnt to distinguish between the art of getting hold of the helm of state and the art of steering, which alone is statesmanship, true politics is impossible.

With this position much that Aristotle has to say about government is in agreement.  He assumes the characteristic Platonic view that all men seek the good, and go wrong through ignorance, not through evil will, and so he naturally regards the state as a community which exists for the sake of the good life.  It is in the state that that common seeking after the good which is the profoundest truth about men and nature becomes explicit and knows itself.  The state is for Aristotle prior to the family and the village, although it succeeds them in time, for only when the state with its conscious organisation is reached can man understand the secret of his past struggles after something he knew not what.  If primitive society is understood in the light of the state, the state is understood in the light of its most perfect form, when the good after which all societies are seeking is realised in its perfection.  Hence for Aristotle as for Plato, the natural state or the state as such is the ideal state, and the ideal state is the starting-point of political inquiry.

In accordance with the same line of thought, imperfect states, although called perversions, are regarded by Aristotle as the result rather of misconception and ignorance than of perverse will.  They all represent, he says, some kind of justice.  Oligarchs and democrats go wrong in their conception of the good.  They have come short of the perfect state through misunderstanding of the end or through ignorance of the proper means to the end.  But if they are states at all, they embody some common conception of the good, some common aspirations of all their members.

The Greek doctrine that the essence of the state consists in community of purpose is the counterpart of the notion often held in modern times that the essence of the state is force.  The existence of force is for Plato and Aristotle a sign not of the state but of the state’s failure.  It comes from the struggle between conflicting misconceptions of the good.  In so far as men conceive the good rightly they are united.  The state represents their common agreement, force their failure to make that agreement complete.  The cure, therefore, of political ills is knowledge of the good life, and the statesman is he who has such knowledge, for that alone can give men what they are always seeking.

If the state is the organisation of men seeking a common good, power and political position must be given to those who can forward this end.  This is the principle expressed in Aristotle’s account of political justice, the principle of “tools to those who can use them.”  As the aim of the state is differently conceived, the qualifications for government will vary.  In the ideal state power will be given to the man with most knowledge of the good; in other states to the men who are most truly capable of achieving that end which the citizens have set themselves to pursue.  The justest distribution of political power is that in which there is least waste of political ability.

Further, the belief that the constitution of a state is only the outward expression of the common aspirations and beliefs of its members, explains the paramount political importance which Aristotle assigns to education.  It is the great instrument by which the legislator can ensure that the future citizens of his state will share those common beliefs which make the state possible.  The Greeks with their small states had a far clearer apprehension than we can have of the dependence of a constitution upon the people who have to work it.

Such is in brief the attitude in which Aristotle approaches political problems, but in working out its application to men and institutions as they are, Aristotle admits certain compromises which are not really consistent with it.

1.  Aristotle thinks of membership of a state as community in pursuit of the good.  He wishes to confine membership in it to those who are capable of that pursuit in the highest and most explicit manner.  His citizens, therefore, must be men of leisure, capable of rational thought upon the end of life.  He does not recognise the significance of that less conscious but deep-seated membership of the state which finds its expression in loyalty and patriotism.  His definition of citizen includes only a small part of the population of any Greek city.  He is forced to admit that the state is not possible without the co-operation of men whom he will not admit to membership in it, either because they are not capable of sufficient rational appreciation of political ends, like the barbarians whom he thought were natural slaves, or because the leisure necessary for citizenship can only be gained by the work of the artisans who by that very work make themselves incapable of the life which they make possible for others.  “The artisan only attains excellence in proportion as he becomes a slave,” and the slave is only a living instrument of the good life.  He exists for the state, but the state does not exist for him.

2.  Aristotle in his account of the ideal state seems to waver between two ideals.  There is the ideal of an aristocracy and the ideal of what he calls constitutional government, a mixed constitution.  The principle of “tools to those who can use them” ought to lead him, as it does Plato, to an aristocracy.  Those who have complete knowledge of the good must be few, and therefore Plato gave entire power in his state into the hands of the small minority of philosopher guardians.  It is in accordance with this principle that Aristotle holds that kingship is the proper form of government when there is in the state one man of transcendent virtue.  At the same time, Aristotle always holds that absolute government is not properly political, that government is not like the rule of a shepherd over his sheep, but the rule of equals over equals.  He admits that the democrats are right in insisting that equality is a necessary element in the state, though he thinks they do not admit the importance of other equally necessary elements.  Hence he comes to say that ruling and being ruled over by turns is an essential feature of constitutional government, which he admits as an alternative to aristocracy.  The end of the state, which is to be the standard of the distribution of political power, is conceived sometimes as a good for the apprehension and attainment of which “virtue” is necessary and sufficient (this is the principle of aristocracy), and sometimes as a more complex good, which needs for its attainment not only “virtue” but wealth and equality.  This latter conception is the principle on which the mixed constitution is based.  This in its distribution of political power gives some weight to “virtue,” some to wealth, and some to mere number.  But the principle of “ruling and being ruled by turns” is not really compatible with an unmodified principle of “tools to those who can use them.”  Aristotle is right in seeing that political government demands equality, not in the sense that all members of the state should be equal in ability or should have equal power, but in the sense that none of them can properly be regarded simply as tools with which the legislator works, that each has a right to say what will be made of his own life.  The analogy between the legislator and the craftsman on which Plato insists, breaks down because the legislator is dealing with men like himself, men who can to some extent conceive their own end in life and cannot be treated merely as means to the end of the legislator.  The sense of the value of “ruling and being ruled in turn” is derived from the experience that the ruler may use his power to subordinate the lives of the citizens of the state not to the common good but to his own private purposes.  In modern terms, it is a simple, rough-and-ready attempt to solve that constant problem of politics, how efficient government is to be combined with popular control.  This problem arises from the imperfection of human nature, apparent in rulers as well as in ruled, and if the principle which attempts to solve it be admitted as a principle of importance in the formation of the best constitution, then the starting-point of politics will be man’s actual imperfection, not his ideal nature.  Instead, then, of beginning with a state which would express man’s ideal nature, and adapting it as well as may be to man’s actual shortcomings from that ideal, we must recognise that the state and all political machinery are as much the expression of man’s weakness as of his ideal possibilities.  The state is possible only because men have common aspirations, but government, and political power, the existence of officials who are given authority to act in the name of the whole state, are necessary because men’s community is imperfect, because man’s social nature expresses itself in conflicting ways, in the clash of interests, the rivalry of parties, and the struggle of classes, instead of in the united seeking after a common good.  Plato and Aristotle were familiar with the legislator who was called in by the whole people, and they tended therefore to take the general will or common consent of the people for granted.  Most political questions are concerned with the construction and expression of the general will, and with attempts to ensure that the political machinery made to express the general will shall not be exploited for private or sectional ends.

Aristotle’s mixed constitution springs from a recognition of sectional interests in the state.  For the proper relation between the claims of “virtue,” wealth, and numbers is to be based not upon their relative importance in the good life, but upon the strength of the parties which they represent.  The mixed constitution is practicable in a state where the middle class is strong, as only the middle class can mediate between the rich and the poor.  The mixed constitution will be stable if it represents the actual balance of power between different classes in the state.  When we come to Aristotle’s analysis of existing constitutions, we find that while he regards them as imperfect approximations to the ideal, he also thinks of them as the result of the struggle between classes.  Democracy, he explains, is the government not of the many but of the poor; oligarchy a government not of the few but of the rich.  And each class is thought of, not as trying to express an ideal, but as struggling to acquire power or maintain its position.  If ever the class existed in unredeemed nakedness, it was in the Greek cities of the fourth century, and its existence is abundantly recognised by Aristotle.  His account of the causes of revolutions in Book V. shows how far were the existing states of Greece from the ideal with which he starts.  His analysis of the facts forces him to look upon them as the scene of struggling factions.  The causes of revolutions are not described as primarily changes in the conception of the common good, but changes in the military or economic power of the several classes in the state.  The aim which he sets before oligarchs or democracies is not the good life, but simple stability or permanence of the existing constitution.

With this spirit of realism which pervades Books iv., V., and VI. the idealism of Books I., II., VII., and VIII. is never reconciled.  Aristotle is content to call existing constitutions perversions of the true form.  But we cannot read the Politics without recognising and profiting from the insight into the nature of the state which is revealed throughout.  Aristotle’s failure does not lie in this, that he is both idealist and realist, but that he keeps these two tendencies too far apart.  He thinks too much of his ideal state, as something to be reached once for all by knowledge, as a fixed type to which actual states approximate or from which they are perversions.  But if we are to think of actual politics as intelligible in the light of the ideal, we must think of that ideal as progressively revealed in history, not as something to be discovered by turning our back on experience and having recourse to abstract reasoning.  If we stretch forward from what exists to an ideal, it is to a better which may be in its turn transcended, not to a single immutable best.  Aristotle found in the society of his time men who were not capable of political reflection, and who, as he thought, did their best work under superintendence.  He therefore called them natural slaves.  For, according to Aristotle, that is a man’s natural condition in which he does his best work.  But Aristotle also thinks of nature as something fixed and immutable; and therefore sanctions the institution of slavery, which assumes that what men are that they will always be, and sets up an artificial barrier to their ever becoming anything else.  We see in Aristotle’s defence of slavery how the conception of nature as the ideal can have a debasing influence upon views of practical politics.  His high ideal of citizenship offers to those who can satisfy its claims the prospect of a fair life; those who fall short are deemed to be different in nature and shut out entirely from approach to the ideal.

A. D.
LINDSAY.