NOTES

Unless otherwise noted, translations are my own. Many of these are adapted from Lord 1984.

In my view this is the best English translation currently available. Where I adopt Lord’s

Rendering in toto I cite him.

1  I am using the term liberal in its foundational nineteenth century sense. It refers to a politics built on equal access to the laws, universal voting rights, laissez-faire economics, and freedom to behave as one wants in private. Twentieth century conservatives and liberals are both liberal in this sense, even though their stresses differ.

2  It is sometimes said that humans who exceed political life by engaging in the theoretical life proper to gods are solitary animals as well. For reasons against this, see Depew 1995: 176-7.

3  For Aristotle a species-specific capacity (dunamis), once taken up by an individual’s ontogeny (first nature) and habituation (second nature), is no longer available for any further actualization. Its potentiality has become the capacity to continue to be its substantial self, as it were. See Kosman 1984; 1987: 366. Thus barbarians, having come to be the individual human beings they are by internalizing the dispositions, behaviors, and ways of life of their cultures have no remaining capacity for polis life either as heads of households or citizens. Accordingly, from the fact that ‘‘political animal’’ refers paradigmatically to capacities for life in a polis household and active engagement in political life it by no means follows that every real human being has an accessible capacity for such a life. Inside most human beings there does not lurk a frustrated citizen just dying to get out - any more than there exists the rational economic man that for the last three centuries has been Europe’s replacement for this mythical being.

4  The technical reason is that complete substances cannot be parts of complete substances.

5  Chappell, this volume, chapter 25, uses the ‘‘material needs’’ sense of autarkeia to gloss Aristotle’s ‘‘natural’’ as ‘‘based on needs, desires, and urges.’’ Through this lens, he sees Aristotle as less subtle, if more empirical, than Plato. This analysis does not recognize that Aristotle follows Plato in tracing the genesis of the polis to a point where the satisfaction of material needs dialectically reverses itself, although, in contrast to Plato, he takes the family rather than the exchange economy as the locus of differentiation and self-limitation. Chappell’s approach finds self-sufficiency (autarkeia) in the philosopher’s rejection of bodily needs, but not in the nonslavish freedom from needs possessed by political communities that consciously limit the pursuit of mere life to what is needed for leading the good life.

6  The addition of constitutional art to the social polis poses difficult questions for the natural status ofindividual poleis. See Keyt 1991a and F. Miller 1995 for statements of the problem and possible solutions.

7  That Hannah Arendt (1958) makes much of these differentiations is not odd; Aristotle was her source. But she exaggerates the difference between the citizenly sphere and the household, conceiving the former as permeated by friendship (philia) and the latter by violence (bia). The issue turns on the status of household slavery, which Arendt believes undermines the very possibility of friendship in the household. It is difficult to find in Aristotle a claim anything like this. The issue was first posed by Hegel.

8

9

Aristotle argues that the definition of a citizen (politls) is best realized in a democracy (Pol. 3.1.1275b4-5). That is not because he favors democracy, but because even kingship of an absolute sort logically depends on judgments of relative merit that are conceptually available only on the assumption of citizenly deliberation. Just as the concept of citizen emerges from the concept of householder (oikonomikos), so the concept of ruler (archontos) emerges from that of citizen (politics) (Pol. 3.4.1277a20-3). Aristotle makes Plato’s inadequate differentiation of these differences a guiding theme of his entire political theory (Pol. 1.1.1252a7-17).

The assumption that all normal humans are born with a more or less equal and equally accessible capacity for rational deliberation and can flourish as soon as they are placed in an appropriate environment has generated the notion that human rationality is simply the generic calculative capacity we call IQ. This assumption dominates the literature on Aristotle’s natural slaves. Garver (1994) has shown that Aristotle’s natural slaves are not especially deficient in calculative intelligence; their incapacity for deliberation and choice derives from affective weaknesses that are endemic according to Aristotle in many societies.