Like Plato, Aristotle was concerned with the emergence of communities, the challenge of cooperation, and the tendency of communities to devolve into mistrustful factions each strategically seeking its own partisan advantage. Aristotle’s Politics book 1 explains the emergence of the polis as a natural phenomenon (see further, Depew, this volume, chapter 26). In moving from the choice-making individual to the complex political community, Aristotle describes a series of developmental steps: First is the family as a natural unit for biological reproduction: the baseline Tellus-like human concern for posterity makes the family a rational as well as natural unit. Next comes the village, as families choose to join forces in order to gain two basic goods: better security against hostile natural forces and the conditions of justice. By conditions of justice, Aristotle means the benefits of social cooperation: Aristotle’s two primary definitions of justice in the Politics are ‘‘acting in the common interest’’ and ‘‘acting fairly in respect to the distribution of goods.’’ Yet, like the simple ‘‘first polis’’ in Plato’s Republic, the Aristotelian village proves unable to secure for its residents material goods adequate to assure their autarkic existence as an independent community. The final developmental stage is the polis, which conjoins villages into a political whole. Aristotle’s natural polis represents balances of extremes of scale: It is the smallest community capable of gaining autarky and the largest community capable of maintaining an adequate level of mutual moral knowledge among its citizens.
These considerations lead directly to Aristotle’s famous claim that humans are political animals. As David Depew’s chapter demonstrates, the distinctive feature of Aristotle’s argument is its naturalism: Humans are, for Aristotle, characterized by a natural tendency to live in groups. Moreover, humans are among the ‘‘political’’ subset of group-dwelling animals - that is to say creatures that, by their nature, are prone to work cooperatively toward common ends. This active work for the good of the whole is in contrast to the passive advantages attributable to baseline coordination (e. g. better chances of noticing the presence of predators) experienced by apolitical herd animals, like schooling fish. Aristotle recognizes that humans are not the only animals whose sociability leads them to act cooperatively in seeking common ends, but as group members, humans act somewhat differently from other political animals (such as bees), inter alia because humans can identify individual as well as collective interests. Humans are, according to Aristotle, more political than bees, indeed ‘‘the most political’’ of animals (Pol. 1253a). If we were to take ‘‘being political’’ to mean simply ‘‘working cooperatively for the good of the whole,’’ and thus ‘‘most political’’ as ‘‘most inherently cooperative,’’ we would have to suppose, counterfactually, that Aristotle’s political theory broke radically with earlier Greek writers who, as we have seen, accepted individuals as rationally self-interested and were therefore concerned with incentive problems and public action. In fact, ‘‘being most political’’ means, for Aristotle, something quite different from ‘‘being most cooperative.’’
Aristotle associates the hypertrophy of human ‘‘political nature’’ directly with our linguistic ability: Being ‘‘most political’’ is correlated with our distinctively human capacity to communicate effectively with one another about what is advantageous and harmful, right and wrong, good and evil. Humans are unique among the ‘‘political animals’’ in that we use speech to communicate complex information and seek our ends. Speech furthers the potential for high returns to cooperation through exchange of information regarding what is jointly or severally advantageous. Moreover, by enabling us to deliberate about justice, it potentially furthers the ultimate human end of moral flourishing under conditions of justice. Yet Aristotle knew that speech could also be used deceptively, to further individual ends that were contrary to common ends, as he demonstrates repeatedly in his Rhetoric. By describing humans as especially political and capable of cooperation, Aristotle was not seeking to paper over problems of public action.
In his discussion of what makes humans the most political of animals, Aristotle suggests that communication about advantage, relevant to joint and several material flourishing, cannot be separated from moral considerations relevant to justice. The arguments developed in Aristotle’s Politics seek to demonstrate that the genuinely flourishing human community will be one that is strong in a material sense and moral: well supplied with the practical means to survival and with the conditions of justice. The flip side of this assumption is, however, that every human community contains the seeds of its own potential failure. Aristotle’s humans are ‘‘the most political’’ of animals not because they invariably act most justly and thus cooperatively in sharing knowledge but because they have the greatest range of possible choices. They may choose to use speech strategically, to advance plans that are unjust: against the common interest or unfair in respect to distribution. The potential for strategic manipulation is built into the base of Aristotle’s conception of human beings as especially political animals. Much of the Politics (notably book 5) is devoted to analyzing how things go wrong in polis communities. Aristotle proposes institutional incentives and sanctions that might counteract the tendency of individuals and subgroups to act in their own selfish advantage in ways that lowered returns to social cooperation and thereby undermined the moral end of living the best possible life: mutatis mutandis, Aristotle’s concerns map those of Herodotus’ Solon in the story of Tellus.
According to the logic of Aristotle’s argument in the Politics, all ‘‘complete humans’’ (i. e. adult males who are not slaves by nature: see again, Depew, chapter 26) are ‘‘political animals’’ possessing an innate impulse (1253a30: phusei... he horme) to form a community, in order to achieve the material and moral ends that can only be realized via political communication. In terms of governance, this means that each citizen should not only be willing to, but should want to participate in governance. The proper form of this participation is ‘‘ruling over others and being ruled by them, in turn.’’ In Aristotle’s theory all adult males are, in the first instance, left in the picture as participants in the work of politics, work that is predicated, as we have seen, on inherent capacity and the material value of mutual instruction: Human nature includes an innate predisposition to deliberate with one another on how best to achieve ends. That disposition is, as Aristotle makes clear in his treatment of civil conflict arising from disenfranchisement of free natives (in tyrannies and narrow oligarchies), grounded in baseline assumptions about utility: For Aristotle, complete humans naturally take political participation, in the sense of‘‘association in decision,’’ as an intrinsic part of their utility.9
In order to achieve (or even pursue) eudaimonia, people require an adequacy of both material and political goods. Different people may value the political good of association in decision differently, but those with ‘‘healthy souls’’ will assign deliberation a relatively high value.10 Justice, as fair distribution, requires that participation rights, as well as material goods, be fairly distributed. Yet there are many forms of participatory turn-taking. Aristotle has no need of the implausible notions that everyone should take a turn at every political role or that all need to be associated in every decision. Aristotle’s conception of human nature allows for a wide range of individual human characters and their associated behaviors (detailed in Nicomachean Ethics and Rhetoric, and see Ludwig, this volume, chapter 19). In any regime, some ambitious individuals will seek positions of leadership. Others will require only that leaders gain their positions legitimately, consult with others appropriately before making decisions, announce decisions publicly, and remain appropriately accountable. The scope of participation is broad, but given the prominence of political activity in Aristotelian utility, not infinitely so.
Among the notable aspects of Aristotle’s rational naturalism is the expansiveness of the body of citizens it implies. Unlike quotidian Greek aristocratic assumptions about intrinsic human worth, or Callipolis’ foundational ‘‘noble lie,’’ Aristotle’s initial description of human capacity and motivation offers no intrinsic grounds for excluding any ‘‘complete human’’ from ruling in his turn - indeed exclusions come at a high cost, since they necessarily reduce the utility of those excluded and lead to concerted efforts to change the regime in the direction of inclusiveness. Aristotle’s ‘‘natural polls’’ is congruent with (although certainly not identical to) Thucydides’ Pericles’ vision of democratic Athens as a society whose success emerges from an equality of participatory opportunity. Aristotle is, however, far from a Periclean democrat: as Depew shows, the ‘‘polis of our prayers’’ adds special features, to ensure that the native adult male population (the demos) is also a leisured elite.
By budding an inherent and rational desire for association in decision into baseline human utility, Aristotle diverged not only from his successors: the early modern social contract theorists - but also from his predecessors: earlier Greek political theorists. Aristotle’s naturalism enabled rational choice-making by utility-maximizing individuals to be a motor for cooperative political action, as well as (via free riding) a threat to cooperation. I have argued elsewhere that one implication of Aristotle’s argument about political animals (although he never states it in these terms) is that deliberative, participatory democracy emerges as the best form of governance for the human community. If this argument is right, Aristotle unexpectedly provides a perfectionist explanation for democratic flourishing: Democracy leverages our innate human capacities by enabling each of us to do certain things that we naturally want to do. But unlike overoptimistic modern communitarians, Aristotle recognized that in the real world, aligning rational self-interest with natural sociability required considerable institutional machinery. As a result, the middle books of the Politics are devoted to complex incentive schemes meant to give people good reasons for choosing to act in cooperative ways that were in fact in their own deepest interests.1
World History
