Aristotle's Teaching in the Politics

Thomas L. Pangle is the Joe R. Long Chair in Democratic Studies in the Department of Government at the University of Texas at Austin.

He is the author or editor of numerous books, including The Theological Basis of Liberal Modernity in Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

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Pangle, Thomas L., author.

Aristotle’s teaching in the Politics / Thomas L. Pangle.

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Aristotle’s Teaching in the Politics

THOMAS L. PANGLE

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago & London

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

The Rhetorical Strategy Governing Aristotle’s Teaching

The Challenge of Interpreting Aristotle’s Lectures

Aristotle’s Relation to His Historical Context

The Hazard Theorizing Poses to the Rule of Law

Classical vs. Modern Republicanism

The Deficiency of Actual Legislation

The Philosopher’s Trans-Civic Virtue

CHAPTER ONE

Book One: The Distinctiveness and Supremacy of the Political

Aristotle’s Polemical Procedure

The Switch in Method

The Naturalness of the City

Introducing the Problematic of Property

The Natural Basis of Slavery

The Critique of Greek and Lawful Slavery

The Natural Art of Acquisition vs. the Unnatural

The Political and the Kingly Art, in the Family

Retrospect and Prospect

CHAPTER TWO

Book Two: Previous Conceptions of the Best Regime

The Critique of Plato

The Critique of Phaleas

The Critique of Hippodamus

Assessing the Most Respectable Greek Regimes

The African Peak of Previous Political Life

Solon’s Athenian Democracy

CHAPTER THREE

Book Three: The Debate over Justice among the Regimes

The Quarrel over Citizenship

The Criterion of the Common Good

How Important Is the Regime?

The Good Man vs. the Serious Citizen

The Impracticality of the Republic of the Virtuous

The Problematic of Humanity’s Political Nature

The Debate over Distributive Justice

Making a Case for Democracy

Political Philosophy Comes to the Fore

Absolute Kingship as the Best Regime?

Another Surprising Transition

CHAPTER FOUR

Books Four through Six: Ameliorating Actual Regimes

The New Perspective on the Classification of Regimes

A Revealing Experimental Failure

The Varieties of Democracy and of Oligarchy

The Basic Norm Guiding Statesmen in Democracy and Oligarchy

Actual Aristocracy, Polity, and Tyranny

The Best Practicable Republic

Organizing the Three Governmental Functions

The Destruction and Preservation of Republics

The Destruction and Preservation of Monarchies

The Reconsideration of Democracy and Oligarchy

CHAPTER FIVE

Books Seven and Eight: The Simply Best Republic

The Most Choiceworthy Way of Life

The Preconditions of the Best Republic

The Regime Itself

Education

Notes

References

Index of Names

INTRODUCTION*

The Rhetorical Strategy Governing Aristotle’s Teaching

Aristotle’s Teaching in the Politics: this title announces, in a fuller way than at first appears, the present book’s distinctive approach. For teaching is meant in a twofold sense. This study’s leitmotif is that the political-philosophic substance about which Aristotle seeks to educate us cannot be disentwined from the artfully educative activity in which Aristotle is engaged, and into which he seeks to draw us, throughout—an enactment which he presents as a model of how a political philosopher ought to teach, in lecturing and in writing. In other words, Aristotle’s public theorizing about political practice is a highly self-conscious form of political practice, of intervention in political life. We cannot learn the most important lessons the philosopher seeks to teach, about both political theory and political practice, and about the fraught relation between theory and practice, unless we maintain a constant attentiveness to the politic and exemplary manner in which he reaches out to, and enters into dialogue with, potential students—who he knows to be of varying abilities and needs, and embedded in or contending with divergent and clashing regime-contexts. Previous modern scholarship has for the most part failed to understand the sinuously instructive path of the Politics because interpretation, with rare exceptions, has not recognized nor risen to the challenge of the philosopher’s psychologically subtle and multi-level, playfully serious and civically responsible mode of educative communication.

THE CHALLENGE OF INTERPRETING ARISTOTLE’S LECTURES

The rhetorical form that Aristotle chose to employ for his written communication, in that portion of his writings that has come down to us in nonfragmentary condition, was the lecture (akroasis), revised for publication as a treatise¹ but with occasional explicit reminders of the original oratorical presentation—to a group of gentlemanly listeners (akroatai) at leisure or in school.² In contrast to the Platonic or Xenophontic dialogues, and to the dramas of the poets and the narratives of the historians, this form of writing gives an impression of delivering answers to the basic questions under discussion. Aristotle’s lecture-treatises, for all their exploratory character and avoidance of pontification, have been famous since antiquity for their apparent doctrinalism—an impression strengthened in different ways by the Thomistic tradition and by many contemporary commentators.³ It is certainly the case that the Peripatetic’s moral-political treatises strongly endorse, after enlarging, and thus reinforcing, the serious outlook of gentlemen (spoudaioi, kaloikagathoi), who are in the best case community leaders and the consciences of their societies. Only gradually, and especially under the guidance of Socratic-inspired questions and questioning, may a reader discern the incompleteness of this deliberate primary impression. Then one discovers the way in which the edifying surface has been designed to veil, but simultaneously to lure one toward, a much more troubling but also liberating dialectical ascent. This upclimb is not altogether easy or safe to follow. Some profound interpreters who have recognized the intensity of Aristotle’s underlying provocation to questioning (skepsis) have responded by attributing to him a covert, radical skepticism. Thus Descartes contrasts Aristotle with Plato in the following terms: There is no difference between them except that Plato, following the footsteps of his master Socrates, ingenuously confessed that he had never yet been able to discover anything certain, and was content to write what seemed to him to be probable; Aristotle was less candid, and although he had been Plato’s disciple for twenty years, and possessed no principles apart from those of Plato, he completely changed the method of stating them and put them forward as true and sure, though it does not at all seem that he ever judged them to be so (Principles of Philosophy, Letter of the Author). Montaigne goes further. Summarizing the fruit of his own long experience of studying Aristotle, Montaigne indites (1967, 211; Essays, 2.12), Aristotle is the prince of the dogmatists;⁴ and yet, we learn from him that knowing much gives occasion for doubting more. One sees him often deliberately covering himself with such thick and inextricable obscurity that one cannot pick out anything of his opinion. It is in fact a Pyrrhonism under an affirmative form (cf. Robinson 1995, 70). Pascal, in his assessment of Aristotle’s political writings, was not so extreme. But in the course of rightly insisting that scholars tend to be blind to Aristotle’s (and Plato’s) subtly and richly comic turn, at least in their political-philosophic writings, Pascal was led to suggest that Aristotle (as well as Plato) had in the end no serious political theory: "When Plato and Aristotle amused themselves by composing their Laws and Politics they did it for fun. It was the least philosophical and least serious part of their life. Indeed, it was as if to lay down rules for a madhouse. And if they pretended to speak of it as if of a great thing, it was because they knew that the madmen they were talking to believed themselves to be kings and emperors. They entered into their principles in order to moderate their madness so as to make it as little harmful as possible" (Pensées no. 533, in Pascal 1963).

These characterizations of Aristotle’s manner of writing by thinkers and writers of the first rank provide a much-needed corrective to a great deal of contemporary scholarly interpretation.⁵ Yet these appraisals are, in my judgment, (deliberately?) one-sided. Aristotle, I mean to show, has constructed his text in such a way that—if the puzzles he has placed on the surface are taken seriously and then wrestled with, in good-humored doggedness, so that we become his partners in the dialogue that Aristotle means to draw us into—we are put on a trail that leads away from skepticism. The path leads to an eventually purified knowledge of the nature of politics as shaped by the aspiration to virtue (the originary social science that was called for by Husserl 1965, 93). And that knowledge, for all its jocosity, has implications of the utmost seriousness for human existence.

The methodological digressions that Aristotle has inserted in the first few pages of his Nicomachean Ethics provide illuminating, if somewhat Delphic, clues as to the didactic nature of his lectures—and as to the multilevel audience he conceives as the intended or envisioned recipient. His first digression on method⁶ begins by explaining the clarity in speech which the subject matter allows. "The noble and the just matters, into which the science of politics inquires, contain such disagreement [diaphora] and variability [plane] that they seem to exist only by lawful convention, and not by nature. To our disappointment, our teacher does not promise that he will dispose of this troubling appearance.⁷ Instead, he adds that the good things also have some such variability (he does not say the good things elicit any such disagreement as do the just and noble, nor that the good things seem to exist only by convention and not by nature). The variability in the good things that he has in mind he specifies as follows: Harms to many people result from the good things: for some have been destroyed on account of wealth, and others on account of courage. Therefore, two things are very desirable. First, in speaking about such things and on the basis of such things, to show the truth [only] roughly and in outline" (the exact truth, as a good thing—the exact truth about the just and the noble, perhaps especially the exact truth that emerges from an investigation into the great disagreement the just and noble contain—may be harmful to some or to many). Second, in speaking about things that apply only mostly, and on the basis of such things, to draw conclusions of that [same] sort. The philosopher goes on to indicate that in speaking thus he will offer something closer to the persuasive speech one accepts from an artful rhetorician than to the demonstrations one requires from a mathematician: such a very imperfect degree of precision is what the peculiar "nature of the business [pragma] displays. In a subsequent explicit repetition (NE 1098a26–31), the philosopher characterizes his writing on morals by comparing it to what is of moment to a carpenter, in contrast with a mathematician: both seek what is right" [orthen], but the former to the extent useful for the task, while the latter seeks what it is; or what sort of thing it is—because he is a contemplator of the truth. Aristotle thus prods us to see that in his moral and political writings his concern to be a contemplator of the truth must be considerably alloyed by practical concerns.

The other major point that Aristotle makes in his first methodological digression is an admonition (which is not without its comic aspect) concerning the audience whom he has in view first and foremost. He in effect sets the scene in which we must imagine the succeeding lectures taking place. A young man, he declares, does not belong in this audience. Young men should leave, or should read no further. The proper audience comprises those among their elders who will judge nobly because—unlike some of their peers, as well as the young—they have the kind of unscientific knowledge (gnwsis) that comes from the education that consists in practical experience and in submission of the emotions to the rule of practical reason. Or as Aristotle indicates in a subsequent repetition (1098b3–4), the first principles of moral virtue are "contemplated by a certain habituation." Aristotle clarifies further what is implied by this severe restriction of his audience in his second methodological digression (NE 1095a30–b13). There he says that since he will proceed on the basis of, or by taking as his first principles, what is seen to be manifestly the case (to hoti) by those who are nobly habituated, concerning noble things and just things and the political things generally, there will be no need to ask why? or, on account of what it is so? (to dioti). The removal of the younger from the audience certainly facilitates this avoidance of questions that would require an explanation of why it is that the habitually engrained opinions are in fact true. Yet Aristotle in the next breath acknowledges that there may be someone out there in his audience who does not agree with this limitation: Aristotle momentarily spotlights such a demanding auditor. It turns out that the lecturer cannot confine his audience as narrowly as he has demanded. The professor asks such a troublemaker to listen to some famous lines of Hesiod, whom he proceeds to quote somewhat inaccurately (Works and Days, 293, 295–97; line 294 is skipped). Through his emphatic endorsement of these lines, Aristotle indicates the enormous inequality among the levels into which his (and the poet’s) audience falls (Lindsay 2000, 442–43). For the lines quoted distribute humanity into three major ranks: "This one is altogether best, who uses intelligence (nous) to think through everything for himself; noble (but second in rank) is that one who is persuaded by another who speaks well; third and lowest in rank is the worthless man, who neither himself thinks, nor, after listening to another, stores [what he has heard] in his passionate part (thumos). Aristotle’s primary audience is evidently the second ranked type, men who are moved by the sort of reasoning Aristotle christens, in his treatise on rhetoric, the enthymeme—what appeals to the passionate part (thumos). But the philosopher here makes it apparent that he will never lose sight of the one who is altogether best," who uses intelligence (nous) to think through everything for himself, who takes nothing on authority—and who therefore always demands the why?

The way in which his lectures must be understood as communicating on different levels simultaneously, on account of the divergent psychological expectations or demands of the different levels of his audience, is also a major aspect of the short thematic treatment of lecturing that Aristotle has placed in the second book of his Metaphysics (994b32ff.—and we see here that there is not so great a difference as one might at first suppose between the audience envisioned for the ethical lectures and that envisioned for the metaphysical lectures). Lectures, Aristotle points out, have their effect in accordance with the settled moral habituation [of the listeners];⁸ we demand to be spoken to in accordance with what we are accustomed; and the things contrary to this are more unknowable and more alien. For it is the familiar that is knowable. And it is "the laws⁹ that make clear the strength of what is long established: in what pertains to the laws, the mythic things and the things belonging to childhood have greater strength than our knowledge about those very things—on account of our settled moral characteristics. Thus there are some who will not receive the things spoken, if one does not speak in a mathematical manner; and then some who will not receive them, if one does not speak by way of examples; and then some who demand that a poet be adduced as a witness. In other words, one group demands that all things be presented with precision; while others are pained by precision—either because they are incapable of understanding, or because they see it as petty speech; for precision has this effect, that in the opinion of some it is lacking in freedom/liberality" (see also Politics 1337b15–17). Therefore, our lecturing philosopher concludes, "it is necessary to be already educated in how each of these [dimensions] is to be received, since it is out of place to seek at the same time science and the characteristic way of science—and yet neither of these two is easy to grasp."

The last remark makes clear how important it is, if we are to grasp the full message of Aristotle, that we strive to become educated in his rhetorical strategy (cf. Bodéüs 1993, 97–100, 114). This requires keeping firmly in mind two massively distinct levels of his audience and thus of his communication: those, on the one hand, who at least begin by being governed by lawful habituation in the mythic things learned from the poets in childhood, and who are pained by precise analysis, on account of incapacity to follow it, or noble disgust at it; and those, on the other hand, whose character has come to demand scientific precision, perhaps along with concrete examples (where such are appropriate to clarifying the subject). Aristotle’s concern for this latter audience is repeatedly hinted at in his methodological digressions when he makes reference to mathematicians. But while he evinces great intellectual respect for these mathematical listeners, the philosopher simultaneously underlines their need to learn not only the art, but the reasons for the art, of the philosopher’s didactic rhetoric. Until the scientifically trained undertake this learning, they will not only find the lectures displeasing, they will miss the philosopher’s most serious teaching. The scientifically trained in the audience must learn to recognize the power, even or especially in their own hearts, of the mythic things and the things belonging to childhood that are long established in and by the laws. Only on the basis of such recognition of the psychological power of the laws—the unwritten laws as much, if not more than, the written—can the scientifically trained begin serious, critical reflection on what moves their own hearts. Coming to awareness of this, and how and why it dictates Aristotle’s rich rhetorical strategy, provides the key to true self-knowledge—which is available to humans only through civic knowledge. For the human is by nature a political animal.

ARISTOTLE’S RELATION TO HIS HISTORICAL CONTEXT

The Politics elaborates our fullest available analysis of that form of social existence in and through which humans can most completely develop and reveal their nature as political—i.e., as self-governing, republican—animals. The key preconditions for such social existence concern the quantity, sophistication, and urban concentration of the citizenry. Independence of course demands numbers sufficient for military defense. But what is much more telling is the need to be able to pass collective judgment on the just distribution of offices and honors (and dishonors) in accordance with merit. This requires that citizens be in a position to ascertain reliably what one another are like in their character (which does not, however, necessarily mean that citizens need to know one another intimately, or live face to face).¹⁰ These key conditions were fruitfully met by the hundreds of cities or poleis that spread over the Mediterranean littoral for a number of generations up through the time in which the Stagirite lived (384–322 BC). Aristotle therefore focused his scientific analysis on political life in this region, in this epoch—which had the additional great advantages of being close to him, and thus readily accessible to his scientific investigations.

This gives the philosophic explanation why we find no important reference in the Politics to the most dramatic political developments in Aristotle’s own immediate historical-political context—a fact that has deeply puzzled modern scholars.¹¹ The Stagirite wrote his treatise in the wake of the defeat of the Greeks by the Macedonians at the battle of Chaeroneia (338 BC), which tolled the knell of doom for the true independence of the Greek cities. This did not extinguish autonomous civic life in the poleis, but it was the beginning of the end.¹² Not long afterwards, Alexander the Great subordinated the Greeks to his empire; and there is strong evidence indicating that Aristotle was involved in the Macedonian court that was at the center of the new hegemonic order.¹³ Yet one would never guess any of this from the Politics.¹⁴ However much he may have been involved in contemporary diplomacy and in various political maneuverings (Chroust 1973, 1.155–76), the Stagirite’s preoccupation as a political philosopher and theorist is not with his decadent political surroundings. His concern is rather the critical investigation of fully self-conscious civic expression and aspiration under the conditions in which humanity’s permanent political nature can disclose itself most completely in speech and deed. It is only on the basis of such study that the vast varieties of political life in less favored times and places (such as our own) can be adequately evaluated, and thus properly comprehended.¹⁵

From this trans-historical perspective, Aristotle discerns with lucidity the following most important, abiding and universal, feature of philosophy’s relation to its political context: the liberation that philosophic questioning brings is unavoidably attended by grave risks of undermining beliefs that are the essential foundations of healthy civil society. And the fate of Socrates vividly illustrates that the political community, becoming aware of this threat, is likely to overreact in deploying its coercive forces defensively, thus posing a menace to political philosophers.¹⁶ It is the responsibility of the political philosophers—who alone can fully grasp the complexity of this ubiquitous political tension—to mitigate, while navigating, the antagonism and the complementarity between dedicated civic virtue and virtuous philosophic skepticism. The political philosophers meet this responsibility by crafting modes of communication, of speaking and of writing, that give safe and beneficial public expression to their critical inquiry.

THE HAZARD THEORIZING POSES TO THE RULE OF LAW

The primary danger that political philosophizing poses is delineated in a key portion of Aristotle’s critique of history’s first known political theorist, Hippodamus of Miletus.¹⁷ It was this thinker’s ambition, Aristotle reports, to be one who reasons about the whole of nature, and, on that basis, to win fame, not as a practicing statesman-citizen, but as a theoretician guiding political innovation. Among other things, Hippodamus proposed to make it the law that those who discovered something advantageous for the city would incur honor. Aristotle declares that this proposal is not only unsafe, but that it introduces another problem and inquiry which involves perplexity. Aristotle focuses on the implied encouragement of proposals for improvements in the laws. The rule of law, obedience to law, takes its strength, Aristotle insists, entirely from tradition-bred, firmly settled habituation: "The law has no strength, as regards being obeyed, except habit; and this does not come into being except through length of time.¹⁸ Long-standing tradition needs to inculcate a communal piety that reveres the laws as not only ancient, but ancestral." This essential spiritual habituation in reverence is inevitably shaken by public questioning of the justice and wisdom of existing laws, especially if that questioning promotes changes in the laws, and, still more grave, change in the constitutional regime.

Yet on the other hand, as is also made clear in this crucial passage, civic health requires the cultivation of wisdom regarding law, with the attendant possibility of prudent reform, even far-reaching reform, as well as intelligent and not merely habitual conservation. None of this is possible without critical, probing reflection on the traditional laws and existing regime. This is true not only because, as Aristotle puts it here, some of the ancient laws are too simple, even barbaric, and simple-minded. More generally and deeply, all seek not the ancestral/paternal, but the good (see also Cicero Laws 2.40).

So civic life, as the life of rational political animals, has a high need for political and legal theorizing, even as civic life is imperiled in its very foundation by the same theorizing.¹⁹ A genuine political philosopher, who grasps this fundamental truth about the social context of political theorizing, must recognize that while some of the laws sometimes ought to be changed, still, for one inquiring in another way there would seem to be much caution involved (1269a14). Each society will have its own distinctive traditions that need preserving, but all healthy republics share certain crucial, universal opinions—about morality, divinity, and civic duty—that the responsible philosopher in his publications must venerate, even while delicately undertaking a critical inquiry into their basis in truth.

But to begin to appreciate the full dimensions of the problem as Aristotle sees it, we must strive to grasp sympathetically the extensive moral function of law in Aristotle’s conception of the aspirations that animate sound civic life. In order to do so, we have to try to liberate ourselves from unquestioning acceptance of the ethos of liberal republicanism that primarily shapes our spirits. We have to open ourselves to the challenge of classical republicanism. We have to bring to the fore the contrast between Aristotle’s thinking and that of the philosophers who guided the eighteenth century Enlightenment that laid the grounding of our liberal constitutional culture.²⁰

CLASSICAL VS. MODERN REPUBLICANISM

In their soberest moments the political theorists of the Enlightenment express muted echoes of Aristotle’s strictures on the threat to law-abidingness posed by openly critical political theorizing.²¹ But the modern rationalists’ animadversions are issued in the name of progressive ambitions to reform, even to revolutionize, civic existence as previously known. The moderns are much more hopeful than is Aristotle—or the classical rationalists generally—regarding the possibility of harmonizing critical philosophic inquiry with the rule of constitutional law. At the deepest moral level, this is due to a profound disagreement with classical political philosophy over the nature of the virtue to which healthy civil society aspires, and hence over the law enforcement required to cultivate such virtue.

Modern liberalism, even or especially at its most idealistic (Kant 1970, 74, 112–13; 133–35), attempts to reduce civic virtue and justice to those rules and behavioral characteristics that are obviously necessary means to collective preservation in freedom and prosperity. Civic virtue and justice are thus conceived as being close, if not equivalent, to what is manifestly required to achieve the most basic meaning of collective self-interest. Communal moral education needs to do no more than bring about an ordered expression of the passions such as is embraceable and achievable by almost any sensible person. Education of the soul in self-overcoming or self-transcendence is not a necessary or prudent goal of public policy.²² As Kant famously asseverated, a just constitutional order can be established and maintained by a society of devils, so long as they are shrewd.²³

From the classical perspective, this approach in all its varieties demeans and does violence to the reality of civic justice and virtue—which are experienced not only or mainly as means, but far more as ends, as chief constituents of the good life. Conversely, collective preservation in freedom and prosperity are most authentically characterized not as constituting the end, for which virtue is the means; instead, security in freedom finds its supreme value through providing the opportunity for a just life of virtue, understood primarily as the fulfilling excellence and flourishing felicity that entails active participation in communal self-government.

Moral and civic virtue in this true sense may be characterized as self-interested only in a deeply ambiguous way. Virtue is indeed constitutive of happiness: but the individual achieves happiness as a contributor to the happiness of the whole community. We call just in the fullest and highest sense, Aristotle avers, things that produce and preserve happiness and its parts for the political community; and justice, as dedication to happiness in this communal sense, is perfect virtue, because the one possessing it is able to use virtue in relation to another, rather than only by himself; on this very account justice alone of the virtues seems to be the good of another, because it is in relation to another. Since he who rules is the guardian of the just, he therefore labors for another; and on this account they say justice is the good of another (NE 1129b17–19, 31–33, 1130a4–9). Justice so conceived requires a hard-won spiritual mastery of the powerful primary and common passions that express individualistic self-love and narrow self-concern. The pull of the latter tends strongly to outweigh admiring attraction to the virtuous civic life that expresses the passions coordinated with and obedient to practical reason, moral and civic.

As Aristotle stresses at the start of his elaboration of the moral virtues in book 2 of the Ethics (1103a14ff.), this coordination is not natural, in the sense that it arises or can be maintained spontaneously, in the unimpeded course of maturation and subsequent mature activity. Nor can this virtuous coordination spring into being by some act of will. Rather, the acquisition and maintenance of moral virtue, just like the acquisition and maintenance of the ability to play the harp well, require a severe, protracted, and continual discipline, involving constant practice in overcoming the powerful inner, as well as external, natural temptations to self-indulgence. Conversely, practice in self-indulgence inculcates vice: just as it is by building houses well, that good house-builders come into being, and by building badly, that bad ones come into being; so it holds in the virtues: it is by actively engaging in transactions with humans that some of us become just and others unjust, and it is by engaging in dangerous actions that we become habituated to feel fear and daring in such a way that some become courageous and some cowards; and similarly with the desires and angers. It makes no small difference, then, how we are habituated, beginning immediately from childhood; rather it makes an enormous difference: nay, it is everything (NE 1103b7–25). Human beings suppose that it is up to them whether they are unjust, and therefore that being just is easy; but this is not so. Similarly they suppose that it takes no wisdom to know the just things and the unjust; but in fact, to know how things just are done, and how just distributions made, is a greater task than knowing how health comes about (NE 1137a4–14). Not only in youth, but throughout one’s entire lifetime, regular exercise, day after day and year after year, is needed to maintain the spiritual dispositions in action that constitute moral virtue—or that constitute at least the self-restraint that is mainly the effectual truth of virtue (see book 7 of the Ethics).

This kind of practical moral education will not disappear, but it will be severely curtailed and hampered if, or to the extent that, it is not imposed and backed up by coercive law. It is the lawgivers²⁴ who make the citizens good by habituating them, and this is the guiding wish of every lawgiver; and as many lawgivers as do not succeed well in this making go astray.²⁵ A fuller restatement of this teaching is the primary message conveyed by the passage at the end of the Ethics, in which Aristotle effects a transition to the Politics. Reasoned speech or writing about virtue, Aristotle declares (NE 1179b4–9, 23–31), can have a major effect on the spirits of only a few generous youths. In general, emotion does not seem to yield to reason, but to force. Therefore laws must command the upbringing and the exercises. And it is probably not sufficient to hit upon correct upbringing and supervision when we are young; also when we have reached manhood we need to practice and to habituate ourselves in the same things: and with regard to these matters we need laws.²⁶ The chief reason why law is so important for moral education, of young and old, is then the psychological force of its fearsome punishments, incorporating but going beyond communal honor and shame: for the many obey constraint rather than reasoned speech, and punishments rather than the noble (NE 1180a4–5). It is the nature of the many not to obey awe, but fear; nor to shun base things on account of shame, but on account of the punishments (NE 1179b11–15).

How is this stress on fear of legal punishment as a key motivation for moral habituation to be put together with the passage in the Politics that we focused on a moment ago, in which Aristotle stresses that habituation is the sole strength of law, and thus of legal punishment? What we have here is a virtuous rather than a vicious circle. Taken together, the two passages may be said to indicate the dialectical interdependence and interplay, especially within healthy republican law-abidingness, between fear and habituation: fear of lawful punishment is a key ingredient, as well as cause, of the habituation that animates enforcement of the legal punishment that causes the fear. To put it another way, the citizenry, led by its most virtuous (best habituated) members, must threaten and impose punishments upon itself—most pointedly upon its less mature and less virtuous majority. Each citizen must participate in threatening his fellows with the sanctions which he himself feels threatened by.

Since this original republican outlook has become so dim in our civic culture, it calls for some further specification. Aristotle’s own elaboration of such legislation has come down to us only in the truncated account of the best regime in the seventh and eighth books of the Politics, and so we need to supplement that with Plato’s Laws, along with Plutarch’s Lycurgus, in order to gain vivid, concrete portraits of how law may function to inculcate virtue (see also Ath. Const. 42 and Bradley 1991, 39–40, 55–56).

First and foremost, law can habituate adult citizens to public service by requiring their regular participation in deliberative, administrative, and judicial councils. Those gatherings, including electoral proceedings, can be legally regulated and policed so as to cultivate fairness, truthfulness, and the proper expression of anger, pride, and ambition. Again, legally enforced participation in militia exercise can instill habits of courage as well as discipline, loyalty, and firm civic friendship. Legally required participation in religious festivities that include competitive artistic displays can foster habits of mutual friendliness and fraternity between families, while cultivating appreciation for thought-provoking works of art and graceful wit; by compelling the wealthier to patronize these public events, the law can stimulate in the rich, and in the rest through their example, not only generosity but also tasteful magnificence. Sumptuary laws can habituate citizens in the proper disposition toward the private luxurious temptations that wealth makes possible—and so on.

Law and lawfulness are not only productive of virtue, they are supreme expressions of virtue. When Aristotle observes, as we noted earlier, that we call just the things that produce and preserve happiness and its parts for the political community, the things to which he is referring are chiefly the laws; and he therefore identifies the man who is just in this richest sense as the lawfully just man: such a person lives guided and animated by the laws, and also helps enforce the laws (see also Plato Laws 730d). The laws pronounce about all things (for whatever things the law does not command, it forbids); "the law commands that one live according to each virtue and forbids that one live according to each vice; and the things that make the whole of virtue are as many of the lawful things as have been legislated concerning education with a view to the community: the law commands the doing of the deeds of a courageous man, and the deeds of a moderate man, and the deeds of a man who is gentle, and similarly in accordance with the other virtues and vices, commanding the former and forbidding the latter—correctly if it is laid down correctly, worse if laid down hastily."²⁷

All this means that the morally educative function of law is much more substantial—that there is a more intense and comprehensive need for lawful moral habituation rooted in strongly held, shared traditional beliefs—than is admitted in modern constitutional thinking.²⁸ The danger posed by public questioning of the laws in a vigorous civil society is proportionately greater; and the philosopher has a much graver responsibility to pursue his critical theorizing by way of a cautiously discreet rhetoric (see Plato Laws 634d and context).

THE DEFICIENCY OF ACTUAL LEGISLATION

But Aristotle’s brief allusion to the fact that law can fulfill its high function poorly if it is laid down hastily turns out to be pregnant with disconcerting complication. For at the end of the Ethics, after he has laid out, in the passages that we have quoted, the crucial moral mission of the legislative art, Aristotle startles us by expressing grave doubts as to how rarely the mission is very seriously pursued. Only in the city of the Spartans, along with a few others, he ruefully observes, does the lawgiver seem to have made the upbringing and the exercises his care. In most of the cities, by contrast, there is "carelessness about such matters, and each lives as he wishes, in the fashion of the Cyclopes, ‘giving the sacred law [themisteuwn] to his children and wife.’"²⁹

Through this passage we encounter our first example of Aristotle’s provocative grinding of gears. In the midst of transitioning to the Politics, or the full elaboration of his education in lawgiving and the political art, Aristotle abruptly confronts his readers with the gap between the noble calling of the legislative art and the nigh-universal disappointing answer to that call. What is more, in doing so he exaggerates (cf. NE 1102a8–12) with a comic dyspepsia: as if most urban households are anything like Homer’s scattered, primitive, and brutally cannibalistic—though fervently pious—Cyclopes!³⁰ Aristotle thus for a moment whips the veil from a subversive truth about law, by going to the opposite extreme from the reverent statements on law that adorn most of his discussion of law, and especially his earlier thematic treatment, back in book 5, of lawful justice as perfect virtue. Back then, he proclaimed that pretty much most of the lawful things are commandments taken from virtue as a whole, and "it is clear that all the lawful things are in a way [pws] just" (NE 1130b22–23 and 1129b12—we now discover the weight of that little qualifier pws—in a way). A few pages thereafter, while admitting that there is a perplexity caused by the fact that equity must correct law in its application to particular cases, Aristotle solemnly assured us that, though law always speaks universally, doing so even where it is not possible to do so correctly, law is not thereby ignorant of the error; and the law is no less correct—for the error is not in the law, nor in the lawgiver (NE 1137b16–18). We further recall that at the beginning of the elaboration of the virtues, Aristotle claimed that "it is the guiding wish of every lawgiver to make the citizens good through habituation" (NE 1103b4–5). By contradicting, here at the end of the Ethics—in the prelude to the Politics—his earlier, repeated praise and defense of all law and lawgivers, Aristotle intensifies the perplexity that he is arousing. What is our instructor up to, and where is he taking us? What is he trying to get us to think about? What do we learn about Aristotle’s didactic rhetoric from this striking example of it? And what does this say about how our perspective on political life and law is going to have to change as we deepen our education by moving from the Ethics to the Politics?

We now see, in retrospect, that in his thematic discussion of justice as lawfulness in book 5 of the Ethics Aristotle was paying homage to the highest aspirations of law, in its majesty. We may justly surmise that Aristotle’s true view of actual legislation in the classical republics lies somewhere between the two extremes—between his usual fulsome praise of laws and lawgivers, and his fleeting, comically sour identification, here, of most actual legal systems with cannibalistic, Cyclopian, pious patriarchy. Certainly our teacher does not for a moment suggest that the failure of law to live up to its high moral vocation requires or justifies giving up on that vocation. He draws a complex and puzzling practical conclusion, beginning as follows: While it would be best if this care were communal, as well as correct, still, it would seem that it is fitting for each to promote virtue in his own children and friends. But, Aristotle immediately adds, from what has been said, it would seem rather that one would be able to do this by becoming skilled in the art of lawgiving. For it is evident that the communal concerns are effected through laws, and that people become decent through morally serious laws—written or unwritten, it would seem to make no difference, nor [Aristotle adds, to our growing confoundment] whether a single individual or many will be educated, any more than this makes a difference in music, or gymnastic, or the other pursuits (NE 1180a30–b3).

The art of lawgiving in its highest dimension, as the art of educating in virtue, is suddenly being assimilated to other instructional arts that an expert can readily employ on a single person, in private. Accordingly, Aristotle proceeds to speak of putting into practice the legislative art, not by becoming a civic lawgiver, but rather by being a good paternal household manager—who, by his pursuit of the lawgiving art in the private sphere, has even a distinct advantage over the public practitioner:³¹ "for even as, in the cities, the lawful customs and mores have force, so also do the paternal speeches and habits in households—and yet more so, on account of kinship and the practice of good deeds, for by nature they [family members] have from the beginning affection and obedience." Aristotle does not say a word, however, about the importance of traditional religious instruction in household moral education. (A father’s giving the sacred law to his children and wife is here associated with quasi-primitive, Cyclopian perversion of the legislative art.) But Aristotle adduces yet a further very considerable advantage of the private practice of the lawgiver’s art: Educations adapted to individuals are distinguished from those which are common/public, even as in the medical art; and so it would seem that there would be greater precision if the care were exercised individually, in private—for then each obtains what is appropriate. Still, Aristotle makes it clear that he is not valuing paternal emotional ties, or even individual attention in and by itself, higher than expertise in the legislative-educative art. It is the latter that is alone essential (and Aristotle thus opens the door to the possibility that the father may not be the best educator of his own children, but that a tutor, wiser in the legislative art, might well be superior—cf. Plato Apol. Soc. 20a–b, 24d–25c): "He, however, who would exercise care best for each person would be the doctor and the gymnast and in every case the one who is a knower of the universal, what is suitable for all or for those of a certain type (for the sciences are said to be, and are, of what is common); and so, probably one wishing to take care to make others better, whether many or few, ought to try to become skilled in the lawgiver’s art, if it is through laws that we would become good. For to put whomever is set before one into noble condition does not belong to just anybody, but, if to anyone, then, to the expert" (NE 1180b3–28).

Aristotle goes on to emphasize the importance of paying close attention to the experience and testimony of statesmen who are actively engaged in politics, and he severely criticizes the sophists for their ignoring of this experience and testimony. But he spotlights the lamentable fact that the statesmen, for their part, seem incapable of writing or speaking about their experience in a manner that succeeds in educating others. Their incapacity is glaringly evident in their failure to educate successfully their own sons and close friends—which, Aristotle submits, is a sign that the statesmen seem to accomplish their action by a certain capacity and experience rather than by thought (NE 1181a1–2; see Plato Meno 92e–94e). Aristotle concludes by proposing to fill the gap, by himself providing the missing articulation of the legislative and political art, rooted in sustained analysis of the experience, both in words and deeds, of actual statesmen.

What is the complex overall suggestion Aristotle is implicitly advancing, as to the practical aims he has in view as he conducts us to the Politics and to the completion of his own public teaching of the art of lawgiving? If we bear in mind what has preceded in the Ethics, and eye what is to follow in the Politics, we find that the answer would seem to unfold in the following terms.

The massive foreground reason for teaching the art of lawmaking is to help bring about and maintain civic legislation that effectively promotes the moral virtues and thus fulfills law’s high educative function. But the moral laxness of most actual legal systems forces this ambition to remain satisfied with a degree of success that falls far short of aspiration. We soon begin to learn, starting in the second book of the Politics, that we need to visualize in our mind’s eye an imaginary best regime in order to think through what would be required for the realization of a truly virtuous communal way of life. It will be this imagined regime (which was barely, if significantly, mentioned in the Ethics: 1135a5, 1160a35–36) that provides the aim or standard that guides politics—from a distant height. For, as we have seen above, it is also in the second book of the Politics that we learn (through the critical discussion of Hippodamus) that it would be the height of imprudence to seek to change existing legal regimes for the sake of a quixotic attempt to establish a version of the truly best regime. As a consequence, we see, we need to resign ourselves to a much more modest practical agenda, for our private as well as public lives.

Given most lawgivers’ failure to meet adequately their responsibility for moral education through law, fathers in their homes and with their friends must take up the slack.³² What this requires is not, however, chiefly traditional patriarchal religious education—or giving sacred law (Oncken 1964, 2.1.1–2; Dobbs 1996, 76–77). Instead, one ought to be guided by the political philosopher’s portrait of the virtues, whose inculcation should be the goal of the private educational legislation and rule that must in some measure substitute for the missing, truly skilled, political legislation and rule (with household rule having the two added benefits of being able more easily to tailor the legislative art to the diverse, unique individualities of children and cherished ones, and being able to rely on the pupils’ affection as a basis for parental teaching authority).

No doubt many gentlemanly readers, who will have found in the Ethics a gratifying mirror, will accept this domestic commission with aplomb (especially if they overlook the remarkable implications regarding traditional religious education). But a few in the audience (young and old), who have noticed some of the discomfiting features in the mirror held up to the traditional gentleman in the Ethics, and who are thus primed to begin to puzzle over what Aristotle teaches in the Politics about the relation of the household to the specific regimes that give each city its distinctive way of life, may well come to recognize that Aristotle is here issuing a considerably more sinuous assignment than at first meets the eye. For, as Aristotle will say in concluding his study of the household, "concerning husband and wife and children and father, and