A Democracy of Distinction: Aristotle and the Work of Politics / Edition 2

by Jill Frank

Overview

Offering an ancient education for our times, Jill Frank's A Democracy of Distinction interprets Aristotle's writings in a way that reimagines the foundations, aims, and practices of politics, ancient and modern. Concerned especially with the work of making a democracy of distinction, Frank shows that such a democracy requires freedom and equality achieved through the exercise of virtue.

Moving back and forth between Aristotle's writings and contemporary legal and political theory, Frank breathes new life into our conceptions of property, justice, and law by viewing them not only as institutions but as dynamic activities as well. Frank's innovative approach to Aristotle stresses his appreciation of the tensions and complexities of politics so that we might rethink and reorganize our own political ideas and practices. A Democracy of Distinction will be of enormous value to classicists, political scientists, and anyone interested in revitalizing democratic theory and practice.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226260181
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	01/05/2005
Edition description:	1
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Jill Frank is assistant professor of political science at the University of South Carolina, Columbia.

Read an Excerpt

A DEMOCRACY OF DISTINCTION
Aristotle and the Work of Politics

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By JILL FRANK
The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2005 The University of Chicago
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-26019-8

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Chapter One
The Nature of Identity

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This is a matter of nature: what a thing is potentially, that its work reveals in actuality. ARISTOTLE, Nicomachean Ethics Man is by nature a political being. ARISTOTLE, Politics

To most readers, Aristotle's introduction of natural slavery, along with his many references to "nature," phusis, throughout Politics I implies a foundational role for nature outside and prior to politics. Politics I is important, they say, because it pairs nature with necessity and sets nature, including human nature, as a standard that fixes the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion in a political life. Among these readers, some find Aristotle's science of nature, which they take to underpin his ethics and politics, to be outdated, discredited, and altogether unacceptable and so reject his account of nature and the politics and ethics to which it is linked. Others reject Aristotle's science of nature but remain committed to his ethics and politics, severing the latter from the former. Still others see in it rich resources for his political and ethical philosophy. Of these, some endorse what they take to be his elitist exclusion of all but a few aristocratic men from participation in a political life. Others argue the opposite, namely, that Aristotle's understanding of human nature is less hostile than is generally thought to women or slaves. Yet others split the difference, endorsing his philosophical account of human nature while deploring some of his political applications of it.

These are not merely abstract arguments about nature and politics. One reading justifies elite social hierarchy formation and its perpetuation on the ground that some people are inferior by nature and therefore should be excluded from the practices of citizenship and from the distribution of political goods. Other readings call for expansive political distribution on the ground that human nature yields a set of basic needs and desires, essential to well-being, that any good polity must meet. The differences among these interpretations are deep, and it is no small wonder that Aristotle's texts invite all of them. Despite their differences, these interpretations all claim that human nature determines the ends and purposes of politics. With Politics I thus devoted to establishing the boundaries of politics, Aristotle can move on, in the rest of the Politics, to engage the real business of politics, including citizenship, regime formation and change, and revolution. Where nature appears later in the work, as it does, for example, in Aristotle's identification of certain foreigners as natural slaves (Pol. 1285a19-24, 1327b27-28), it simply serves to confirm the lesson of book I, namely, that nature secures the distinction between free and unfree. This reading of Politics I is powerful. It explains why Aristotle begins his treatise on politics with an account of nature, and it vests nature with a normative force that justifies the political exclusions that follow.

By understanding Aristotle's account of nature in this way, however, Aristotle's readers assimilate his appreciation of the relation between nature and politics to that of the moderns. Modern political philosophers tend to treat nature as a mark of the absence of political life and, simultaneously, as a threat to it. They see nature as the domain of necessity; politics, the domain of freedom. Political life, they argue, requires leaving states of nature behind, and political agency calls for man's mastery of nature (his own or that of the natural world) as necessary to personal identity formation, the first step toward political life. Although they oppose nature to politics in these ways, modern political theorists also take nature, specifically human nature, to fix the boundaries and content of a political life. It is because Hobbes takes the state of nature to be a state of war among beings who are by nature solitary, mean, nasty, brutish, short(-lived), (and not sufficiently fearful) that the Leviathan must be a punishing and terrorizing artifice. It is because Locke takes the state of nature to be more or less peaceable, peopled by human beings who are more or less trustworthy and naturally disposed not only to preserve themselves but to preserve others as well (except when self- and mutual preservation conflict), that Locke's legislature holds and exercises the powers given to it by the people in trust for them. Both thinkers set up regimes to fit their presuppositions about human nature. Sharing their methodological assumptions but thinking poorly of their execution, Rousseau criticizes Hobbes and Locke for producing beings who are not natural enough but already too political. Rousseau's natural beings-without language, morality, law, property, and so forth-are, by contrast, designed to be so truly natural that they will be able, unlike the political beings described by Hobbes and Locke, to set the appropriate hypothetical standard for actual political institutions to meet.

I read Aristotle's account of nature differently. Unlike the moderns, Aristotle, in my view, does not use nature to establish the pre-political and necessary conditions of politics. He treats human nature, instead, as both a measure of polity and as itself a question for politics. He thereby divests nature of the moral authority usually granted to it, subjects to scrutiny the exclusions said to be secured by that authority, and, placing authority in those who establish the hierarchies of politics, namely, rulers and citizens, renders them accountable for those hierarchies. To see this, consider that in Politics I, Aristotle uses language that works not only to secure nature's ability to underwrite politics but also, simultaneously, to call this ability into question: what nature wants, he says at least twice in the course of his discussion of slavery, it may fail to achieve (Pol. 1254b26-32, 1255b3). Nature, Aristotle implies, cannot stand as a guarantee. This is because nature as phusis, how a thing grows, unlike nature from natura, how a thing is born, connotes no prior determination, fixed destiny, or even congenital tendency. Not already there from birth and unable to sustain itself, nature, phusis, must be sustained instead by something else. In the case of human beings, this something else, as the context of Aristotle's discussion suggests, is politics. This is not to make politics prior to or more fundamental than nature or to say that nature is wholly political. It is, rather, to call attention to the complex relation Aristotle sets up between politics and nature. Human nature may be a measure of politics, but the fact that we are, in Aristotle's terminology, naturally political beings (NE 1097b12, 1169b20; Pol. 1253a2, 1253a7-8, 1278b19) suggests that human nature is also, at least in part, constituted politically. Nature is, thus, not immutable but changeable, and this means that the boundaries it underwrites and the hierarchies it secures, although necessary to politics, will be changeable, too.

That hierarchy is necessary to politics is clear enough. Politics depends on rule, arche, which is to say, on ruling and being ruled. Without hierarchy, there can be no political association. Political association also depends on the freedom of its members, and so a second hierarchy is necessary, one that distinguishes free from unfree (Pol. 1255b18-19). In Aristotle's account, this second hierarchy is secured by slavery, which is necessary to free masters from meeting their daily needs so that they can, as rulers or citizens, practice politics (and philosophy) (Pol. 1255b35-38). To those who pair nature with necessity, Politics I is about this second hierarchy only; the rest of the Politics is concerned with the first hierarchy, the one within a political association, between rulers and ruled. A brief look at the dangers of hierarchy, brought to light in Aristotle's discussion of slavery, suggests a more complex picture. That hierarchy can be dangerous to slaves goes without saying. This is why Aristotle is centrally concerned in Politics I with the justice of slavery (Pol. I.5-6). At least as important to Aristotle, however, is that slavery can also be dangerous to those who stand most to benefit from it: rulers and citizens. When rulers or citizens act only as masters, Aristotle notes, hierarchy ceases to be properly political and becomes, instead, despotic (Pol. 1292a14-38, 1295b20-24). This is why Aristotle makes a point of distinguishing the rule of masters from political rule (Pol. 1252a7-17). Dangerous, too, is when rulers or citizens act as slaves, for then there ceases to be a distinction between free and unfree, and hierarchy collapses (Pol. 1277b5-7). Where there is no hierarchy, as where hierarchy is all and only despotic, political association ceases. This suggests that Aristotle's account of slavery is not only about the necessity of slavery, nor only about securing the hierarchy between slaves and masters. It is also about the dangers of slavery to citizens and rulers, that is, about the dangers of a politics of slavery.

Politics I, concerned with the nature of hierarchy and its justice is, then, hardly a false start to Aristotle's engagement with politics. On the contrary, he raises fundamental questions of politics in his discussions of nature. Against those who take Aristotle's account of nature in his ethical and political writings to be static and straightforward, and also against those who take it to be equivocal and questionable, I demonstrate that it is, rather, dynamic and complex, unified, and continuous with his scientific, metaphysical, and psychological writings about nature. Aristotle's discussion of the nature of slaves may be filled with inconsistencies but, as we will see, this is no reason to dismiss it as incoherent or to resolve it into "clear and uncontroversial" propositions. His imprecisions there as elsewhere in his ethical, political, and natural scientific writings are, I argue, better read as accurate reflections of the nature of beings who act in and change over time. What is the nature of these beings? To explore this question, I turn first to Aristotle's discussions of citizenship and slavery and then to his philosophical treatment of nature itself.

The Force of Nature

CITIZENS

To ask who is a citizen, as Aristotle does at the start of Politics III, is to ask about the identity or nature of a citizen. In Aristotle's hands, this is to ask who deserves to be a citizen or who merits the political good of citizenship. He answers by saying what will not qualify someone for citizenship: not place, location, or the capacity to sue and be sued (Pol. 1275a7-11); not birth, ancestry, or blood (Pol. 1275b23-34). Rather, a citizen is one who participates in ruling and judging (Pol. 1275a22-23); one who rules and is ruled in turn (Pol. 1277b13-16); one who shares in the judicial and deliberative offices of a polity (Pol. 1275b18-20). Place, legal capacity, birth, and parentage-as static qualities or markers of status-do not demonstrate merit, in Aristotle's view. Although there may be subtle differences among the formulations Aristotle approves, they share an emphasis on activity: "sharing in a constitution," in Malcolm Schofield's phrase, qualifies one for citizenship.

Aristotle's emphasis on activity has a curiously tautological or self-contained quality. Practicing citizenship, Aristotle seems to be saying, makes someone a citizen: a "citizen is a citizen in being a citizen." This circularity is a feature not only of Aristotle's understanding of citizenship but of all human activity. In doing, he says, "the end cannot be other than the act itself" (NE 1140b6). Activity, energeia or entelecheia, is that which has, echei, what is aimed at-an end, or telos-in, en, itself (Meta. 1050a23-24). Although self-contained, human activity is not invulnerable to external influences. There is no carrying out one's citizenship in a vacuum. Indeed, there can be no citizen qua citizen prior to the regime of which that citizen is a part (Pol. 1275b4-5). For this reason, Aristotle pursues his investigation of citizenship by asking who is a citizen of a democracy or of an oligarchy (Pol. III.3). Being a citizen is regime-dependent not least because what it means to share in a constitution largely depends on the laws, education, and other social and political institutions of that particular constitution. These institutions all contribute to the making of citizens. This suggests that being a citizen is a combination of doing on the part of citizen practitioners and making on the part of social and political institutions.

At the start of his inquiry into citizenship, however, Aristotle says that it is important to leave to one side "those who have been made citizens and those who have obtained the name citizen in any other accidental way" (Pol. 1275a5-7). This sentence is key. It carves out what, for philosophical reasons, Aristotle thinks ought not to be included in an inquiry into the identity or nature of a citizen. To be excluded, as already noted, are those who are "made" citizens by the accidents of birth, ancestry, parentage, or location. That is clear enough. But, against the backdrop of Aristotle's ready acknowledgment of the role of social and political institutions in the making of citizens, how are we to understand his apparently sweeping exclusion of all "made citizens"? He offers the following examples. To be excluded from consideration of the nature of a citizen are those who have been made citizens "by the magistrates," a kind of making he analogizes to the production of artefacts, specifically, kettles (Pol. 1275b29-30), and those who have been made citizens "after a revolution" (Pol. 1275b35-36). As with the granting of legal rights under a treaty, these are examples of citizens having been made citizens, one might say, ex nihilo: by being so named by a magistrate, by fiat after a revolution, or by the force of legal treaty alone. Aristotle does not identify those who are made citizens in any of these ways as citizens for the same reason he excludes those who are made citizens by accident: their citizenship does not come about by virtue of their own activity. It is, rather, granted to them.

Aristotle includes laws, education, and other social and political institutions in the proper making of citizens because, unlike treaty, revolution, or magisterial edict, which, like accident or force, make irrelevant the activity of a citizen, a polity's institutions do not make that activity irrelevant but rather supervene upon or guide it (Pol. 1258a22-23). Indeed, it is impossible to understand a citizen's identity without taking into account the ways in which it has been shaped by these institutions. Citizen identity is, then, a product of making and doing, where doing is a kind of self-making (by sharing in the constitution, I make myself a citizen) and making, as guided shaping by laws, education, and other institutions, entails citizen doing. Accident and force must be pushed to one side when investigating the nature of the citizen because they make irrelevant what is at the heart of both formations of citizen identity: the dynamic and reciprocal relation between identity and action, between doers and their deeds.

Citizens are made not only by their particular or individual activities but also by sharing in a constitution, in other words, by their collective activity (Pol. 1275b4-6). At the same time, collective activity produces the social and political institutions that contribute to the making of citizens in the first place. If, to be citizens, citizens must act as such, they do so not only individually but also in the collective action by which they make for themselves the social and political institutions that also help make them. There is an interdependence between polity and citizen identity. Aristotle models this interdependence on the relation between a whole and its parts (Pol. 1274b39-40). A polity, as a unity, is a whole; a whole, to be a whole, must consist of parts; a part, to be a part, must be a part of something other than itself to which it belongs. Parts presuppose the whole of which they are parts, and the whole presupposes the parts that constitute it. Unlike contemporary liberal and communitarian writers for whom either the individual citizen or the political community must be prior and foundational (at least in principle), Aristotle denies to either the polity or the individual citizen a foundational status. It is because he analyzes the polity and its citizens in terms of the relation between a whole and its parts that he unpacks the identity of the polity by reference to the identity of citizens, and citizen identity by reference to the polity. Against this backdrop we can make sense of Aristotle's otherwise confusing claims. He says that, in order to answer the question "what is a polity," it is "evident that we must begin by asking who is the citizen and what is the meaning of the term" (Pol. 1274b32-1275a3). He calls the question of citizen identity the first question of politics (Pol. 1274b42), for, as we have just seen, it is citizens who, in carrying out their citizenship, make the social and political institutions that determine the identity of the polity. At the same time, Aristotle can insist that it is the polity that takes precedence (Pol. 1253a19-27) because it is the polity, via its institutions, that produces citizens as the citizens they are.

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
1. The Nature of Identity
The Force of Nature
The Nature of Nature
The Work of Man
2. The Use of Property
The Activity of Use
The Virtue of Property
The Politics of Property
3. The Virtue of Justice
Reciprocity
Good Judgment
Justice and Virtue
4. The Rule of Law
The Laws of Citizens
The Laws of Polities
Constitution
5. The Polity of Friendship
Unity and Difference
Friendship and Faction
The Middle Class
The Work of Politics
Works Cited
Index

Editorial Reviews

"Jill Frank's Aristotle is not the natural law moralist or the dry, positivist scientist you might remember from school. More Nietzschean than Straussian, Frank's Aristotle is alive with insight, paradox, and, yes, sometimes even wit. Frank rethinks all of democracy's basic institutions-membership, property, justice, the rule of law, and constitutionalism—and forces our habits of linear thinking to yield to dizzying circularities that are incredibly productive. This remarkable achievement is a must read not just for classicists but also for anyone interested in contemporary political theory."

Bonnie Honig

"Jill Frank has written a very important book arguing that Aristotle's framework for social inquiry can enhance our understanding and appreciation of democratic institutions and practices. She develops an innovative, sophisticated, and persuasive interpretation of how Aristotle's understanding of nature reveals an emphasis on the centrality of human and civic agency. Frank combines a keen interpretive eye that respects the intricacies of Aristotle's texts with a sharp analytic sense that appreciates the resources of social theory. The result is a remarkably clear and extraordinarily valuable contribution to a variety of discussions in political theory and beyond."

Gerald Mara

"I have not read a better account of the pluralism in Aristotle's Politics
than the account I find in Jill Frank's book. I have not read a more
convincing explication of Aristotle's view that property should be held in
private hands for common use, nor a deeper reconciliation of the themes of
legality and virtue in The Politics. This is a subtle, graceful, and
impressive piece of work."

Jeremy Waldron

"One of the best studies of Aristotle to appear in a long time, wide ranging yet still clearly focused-a truly distinctive and consistently thought-provoking approach to his political philosophy. Frank develops a variety of promising new ways of approaching the most persistent problems of modern democratic politics."

Stephen Salkever

"Jill Frank elucidates the substantive arguments in what have looked like paradoxes in Aristotle's thought. She excels at connecting Aristotle's political arguments to current discussions in political theory. Best of all, she elegantly moves beyond the liberal-communitarian debate with an Aristotelian account of politics that not only recognizes the interdependence of individual identity and civic institutions but also respects the human activity of self-creation."
—Danielle Allen, University of Chicago

Danielle Allen

"Frank's thesis is novel and controversial, adn will, doubtless, spark renewed study and engagement of Aristotle's relevance for contemporary political thought."

Review of Metaphysics - Eric Thomas Weber