Cynthia Farrar

The Origins of Democratic Thinking

The exclusion of the 'necessary and the useful' from the life of the best polis or the best man is both a reflection of fourth-century developments in the condition of the city state and a rejection of the implications of those developments. It was becoming increasingly obvious that some of the men now indispensable to the polis—not just slaves, but wealthy metics and, of course, mercenaries—were not part of it politically. It is, I think, no accident that Aristotle was the first political theorist, so far as we know, explicitly to defend the institution of slavery, and in terms that justify the exclusion of slaves from political life. It is significant that these same criteria, namely the ability to act according to virtue and practical reason, associated with leisure and liberal pursuits, are invoked to exclude men whose services to the state—military and other—would traditionally have entitled them to a civic function. Aristotle was also the first to identify peace as the end appropriate to the polis, indeed as analogous in relations with other nations to the good of the contemplative man.

These features of Aristotelian theory suggest that political categories were blurring and that Aristotle was responding to what he took to be a breakdown in the integrity of the political community by seeking to specify and to shore up the concept of the polis. Aristotle argues, against some of his contemporaries, that if the polls were viewed simply as a grouping designed to ensure 'security from injustice' or 'for the sake of exchange and mutual intercourse,' then 'all who have commercial treaties with one another would be the citizens of one state' (Pol. 1280a35). In the absence of a strong sense of community and of communal power to transform man's understanding of his good, the criteria of survival and material need seem degenerate, and are associated in Aristotle's mind not with man's political nature or good but with the distasteful mentality of the wage-earner or the participant in commerce.

Aristotle's attempt to rescue the political from the effects of the disintegration of community and social change, and from Plato's drastic solution, is itself a retreat from politics. Aristotle does not rely on politics to create community or transcend narrow self-interest. In his theory politics does no work; it simply serves as the context for the exercise of practical excellence by men autonomously capable of such excellence. The polis no longer expresses, reconciles and transforms the beliefs and desires of ordinary men, promoting the well-being of all by enabling each to exercise the political virtues. What appears to be a formulation of the contemporary view of citizenship at Athens—citizens rule and are ruled—is in fact a rejection of Athenian practice. In all but the ideal state, there is a division of function between rulers and subjects. Citizens of the ideal state are able to rule and be ruled because they are not merely relatively equal but identical, and equally capable, qua men, of practical wisdom. Aristotle's teleological conception of the good centers on the good man, not the good citizen; the two are not equivalent, nor even concomitant. Only in the ideal state, composed of men endowed with practical wisdom, is the good citizen also a good man: 'The arete of the good man is necessarily the same as the arete of the citizen of the perfect state' (Pol. 1288a38; cf. 1277a13, 1177b25). Good men in imperfect societies will not be good citizens, nor will good citizens of imperfect societies qualify as good men.

Unlike Plato, Aristotle recognizes two sets of standards, or two levels of order, one of which is relative to circumstances: it is coherent to speak of being a good citizen of a democratic or oligarchic state, and to establish corresponding guidelines. Thus in Aristotle's theory the concepts of 'good man' and 'good citizen' have come apart, and it is the concept of the good man that is basic, stable and compelling. This concept is defined in terms of character and intellect, which together constitute the capacity for self-realization (i.e. realization of the good for man, not some purely subjective aspiration). Neither the highest nor the lowest condition of human existence is characterized politically, but rather in terms of intrinsic qualities. Slavery is not a conventional or institutional category, but a natural condition, the state proper to those who 'participate in the rational principle enough to apprehend but not to have such a principle' (Pol. 1154b10). And the summit of self-realization is the condition in which man is free of what is merely necessary and useful for life, and practices the highest virtue of which man as a species is capable, namely the activity of contemplation (EN 1177a10-1179a30). Man's telos is to be in the best polis but not of it, to engage in the exercise of abstract reason, not civic virtue.

Both Plato and Aristotle sought to bind individual and society together, to demonstrate that civic order was a constitutive, not an instrumental, feature of human well-being. Plato serves to remind modern political thinkers of, among other things, the importance of taking seriously the differences as well as the similarities among individuals when constructing a vision of the social order. Justice must be tied to desert as well as equality, that is to the idea of contributing to a shared, mutually beneficial order. Aristotle reveals the virtue of
placing practical judgment, character and self-realization, founded on a conception of man as having a nature, a fundamentally social nature, at the center of ethical and political thought. Both theorists attempted to reconcile internal and external, freedom and order, via a reconstrual of what it is to lead a fully human life and what is good for man. The task of providing a stable, objective basis for such an account seemed imperative in the face of an apparent disintegration of communal life. In the search for stability, Plato and Aristotle both, from different directions, violated the fragile equilibrium of autonomy and order at the heart of a community that risks disintegration but is also, for that very reason, capable of achieving genuine reflective stability. At bottom, Plato and Aristotle base their conceptions of order on society and on man, respectively; they are unwilling to rely on the interaction of the two.