Aristotle did cover this ground; no one is lying to you. But perhaps the problem lies in the ways in which textbooks condense Aristotle’s study of politics to a framework centered upon the citizen of the polis. It goes something like this: the lawmaker crafts legislation, especially a constitution that preserves order over the various inhabitants of the polis; politicians govern through the laws, customs and educational institutions that uphold the constitution; and, in pursuit of the good life, citizens hold a right to participate in political deliberation.
To be fair, textbooks will often mention along the way the inadequacies of Athenian justice when it came to women, slaves, and barbarians. Sometimes a note of caution might be struck over Aristotle’s apparent disdain for barbarians, his claim that some people are “natural slaves,” and that women are inferior to men. But textbooks will still tend to separate Aristotle’s “ideal” model from its “real” politics.
By the “ideal” I mean a framework that focuses on the citizen in relation to the polis, such that the logic of this relationship is self-sufficient and exclusive of imperial entanglements. By the “real,” I mean the wider imperial and colonial contexts in and through which the very practice of citizenship gained meaning for Aristotle. Does this separation of the “ideal” and the “real” quell that unsettled feeling? Does it make Aristotle comfortably familiar again? I hope not.
Because in light of the contextualization we just undertook it seems conceptually inadequate to separate the polis from empire, and the non-citizen from citizen. The logic that Aristotle used to bind the citizen to the polis is not self-sufficient and exclusive of imperial entanglements. What if we started from the premises that Aristotle’s polis was intractably modeled on the small settler-colony of his birth, and that his focus on democratic deliberation was at root an attempt to redress the harms of imperial expansion? (see Dietz 2012).
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not claiming that Aristotle was what we nowadays call a “decolonizer” of political science. He wasn’t even a revolutionary. He was conservative in the literal sense. That is, Aristotle wished to conserve the possibility of living in a just polis, but one that for him was modelled on the small settler-colony of his birth. Crucially, Aristotle believed that imperial expansion and the wars that served such expansion had radically curtailed that possibility. This was not only the case when it came to evaluating the barbarians of the Persian empire but also with regard to the trajectory of the Greek city leagues under the ambitions of both Athens and Macedonia (see, in general, Tuplin 1985). For Aristotle, empires by and large produced despots; and even citizens had to slavishly serve despots.
Aristotle’s position could not have been a comfortable one from which to write a treatise on politics: he sought to dialogue with Athenian citizens, living among them, but not as one of them. Aristotle’s philosophical provocation to them was something like this: “here is what you believe and practice; here is the logic to it; knowing this, do you think you should reappraise your beliefs and practices?” Indeed, his conception of politics itself was designed to address precisely such an intimately unsettling question.
Let’s start with Aristotle’s most famous statement: “a human is by nature a political animal” (Aristotle 2017, 4). But what does he mean by nature? As Jill Frank (2004) explains, nature for Aristotle signals “what happens usually and for the most part.” The nature of humans can neither be accidental – which would make that nature inexplicable – nor defined in terms of necessities – which would make that nature unchangeable. Rather, nature is stable enough to be studied, but variable enough such that any study will be imperfect.
Naturally (usually and for the most part) we humans care for each other, whether that be through friendships or families (Salkever 2014, 71). What’s more, says Aristotle, like most animals we are endowed with voluntary action, that is, we can choose to act. However, our capability to choose is a unique one. Unlike animals we can make choices by first using reason to evaluate all the possible courses of action (Aristotle 2014, 38–40).
If we put these concerns for sociability, agency, and reason together, then human nature can be explained in Aristotelian terms as a collective deliberation toward choosing the best course of action by which to attain the good life. Of course, such deliberation involves judgment. And for this reason, judgment is more of an art than a science, requiring practical wisdom, that is, insight applied to particular situations. For Aristotle (2014, 105–106), then, the study of politics cannot be simply the scientific analysis of universal laws but must always be a deliberative discussion about what might be best for the polity in any given time and place.
Still, deliberation requires leisure time and therein lies the rub. Those who plant the fields, raise children, clean households, and manufacture goods do not have any spare time. Therefore, politics can only be undertaken by virtue of a hierarchical division of labor that enfranchises some men as active citizens over and against other people in their household such as women, workers, slaves etc. Here we return to face Aristotle’s conservatism, but in a different light: he wishes to preserve the hierarchical order of settler-colonies that makes politics, and thus the good life, possible.
Recall, though, Aristotle’s understanding of nature as a condition that usually and in the main attains, and is neither random nor necessary. This understanding affects how he conceives of hierarchy. There is a subtle but important distinction between arguing that (a) hierarchy is usual and claiming that (b) certain peoples by necessity and essence occupy certain places in that hierarchy.
And think of all the paths that Aristotle has traveled in his life by the time he writes his Politics. He has moved from a citizen of a colony-city to a resident alien of another city, to a barbarian-sympathizer, to an asylum seeker, to an academic in the court of empire, and back to a resident alien again. All his life he has moved into and through different hierarchies. Given this lived experience of politics, it is reasonable to suppose that Aristotle is trying to sensitize Athenian citizens to the fact that the hierarchical world they live in is changeable. Citizens, too, might not be essentially superior to anyone else. The great can also degenerate.
Take, for instance, one of Aristotle’s most infamous discussions concerning the “natural slave.” As scholars such as Michael Heath (2008) have argued, what distinguishes the citizen from the slave for Aristotle is a very distinct and exacting condition: the practical inability to take part in deliberating on predetermined ends. Aristotle does not mean to imply that the slave is incapable of deliberation, which for him would be the case with a child. Rather, for most of the time and in most cases the slave cannot practically enter into deliberation with others in an independent manner.
Basically, the definition of a natural slave is what the citizen categorically is not. This is no surprise, given the fact that Aristotle’s ideal for the household is a division between citizens and slaves. So long as that division enables citizens to take part actively in politics, that is, deliberation toward the good life, then slavery is ultimately a good thing. The peace and prosperity enjoyed by the master even trickles down to benefit his slave.
We’ll return to these assumptions shortly. But why might Aristotle be making such an argument in his own context? If we refuted the assumption that certain people are essentially born slaves, then anyone might become a slave if the political system they inhabit practically forbids deliberation for the sake of the good life. And Aristotle defines slavery, you’ll recall, as the opposite of citizenship. Consequently, imperial ambition, whether homegrown in Athens or imposed by Macedonia or Persia, might corrupt the polity, foreclose independent deliberation, and produce slavish citizens who must serve despots.
We can also think about the distinction between citizen and barbarian in like manner. Aristotle is influenced by earlier work that attributed the diversity of human capabilities to the effect upon semen production caused by climactic conditions. Yes, it is that graphic. In this model, as Julie Ward (2002) shows, the mild climate in Asia produces gentle, timid folk, while the
