Private and Public

Individuals, Households, and Body Politic in Locke and Hutcheson

Daniela Gobetti

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000103939
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Originally published in 1992. This arresting and innovative book combines political theory with the history of political thought to question the conceptual conventions and tacit assumptions which surround the concepts of private and public. In seeking the foundations of the modern liberal conception of private and public, she traces it to modern Natural Law thinkers, in particular Locke and Hutcheson. By developing a revised interpretation of seventeenth-century natural jurisprudence, which recognizes that every adult controls an individual or private domain, as well as engaging in political, community or public interaction, Gobetti raises interesting questions about the politics of participation in modern society.

1 Domestic society/political
society

Toward the rejection of the Aristotelian model

BOOK ONE OF ARISTOTLE’S POLITICS

The contemporary political arena is, at least in principle, open to all adults.¹ Widespread agreement on this principle has been achieved only recently, and its practical implementation is by no means universal, as we may see in the ongoing struggles of women and of non-white groups. The philosophical seeds of universal equality were planted by seventeenth-century Natural Law theorists. In the name of reason, they waged a war against tradition and received wisdom, a war which took the philosophy of Aristotle and his late epigones as its polemical target. Hobbes stated clearly in his Leviathan that a thorough elimination of Aristotelian errors would lead to a new political science.

While Aristotle underwent profound criticism, two other classical traditions were central to natural jurisprudence: Stoic philosophy and Roman civil law. Throughout the Middle Ages, Roman legal concepts were employed to analyze the social and political realities of medieval Europe. The fortune of Roman legal terminology went through ebbs and flows, but it gained particular force in the seventeenth century, in a process which led to the elaboration of the jus publicum europaeum, on one side, and the vocabulary of Natural Law thinkers, on the other. The latter adopted concepts of Roman private law to conceptualize the relationships between citizen and state, church and state, nation and nation. They also adopted the formal definition of private and public offered by the Corpus juris, and they used it to discuss the limits of the legitimate spheres of competence – or jurisdictions² – of the citizen/subject and the state.

The adoption of a juridical vocabulary for constructing a political philosophy is of consequence for what can and what cannot be expressed through the medium of that specific vocabulary. As Pocock has remarked, the political philosophy which takes Roman civil law as its starting point frames questions in a different manner from that of Aristotelian republicanism.³ The latter focuses on the participation in office by equal males prompted by their nature to engage in political activity; on the virtue requisite for being a good citizen, capable of preferring the common good over private interest; and on the maintenance of freedom in the community as the main objective of political life.⁴ Natural Law theory, on the other hand, draws attention to pre-political relations among free and equal human beings, who resort to politics in order to pacify social relations which are endangered by conflicts about equally legitimate claims over scarce resources.

Pocock is indeed correct in seeing the vocabulary of the Aristotelian–Machiavellian republican tradition as antithetical to the vocabulary of Natural Law. But in analyzing the private/public distinction, one soon discovers that the antithesis does not hold absolutely. By way of Stoic, Roman, and medieval readings, elements of the Aristotelian paradigm filtered through the conceptual framework of Natural Law theory. As we shall see, Aristotle was reinterpreted, and often misinterpreted,⁵ by later thinkers. But we cannot understand the seventeenth-century conceptualization of the distinction between private and public, which culminated in the work of Locke, unless we acknowledge the Aristotelian frame of reference which was, at first, uncritically accepted, and eventually dismantled and rejected.

Aristotle’s main legacy to subsequent thinking about private and public takes the form of a rhetorical strategy, a way of arguing about domestic and political society as the two fundamental institutions of the community, considered, respectively, as the private and the public domain. Aristotle, like other Greek thinkers, was not particularly interested in the jurisdictional aspect of the distinction between private and public. But his way of framing questions about household and body politic could be adopted for discussing jurisdictional issues. Aristotle employs a three-step strategy: the identification of household and body politic as, respectively, the private and public domains; a comparison of the domestic and political associations on the basis of the types of power exercised in each; and a distinction between domestic and political power derived from his conception of politics. In so doing, he establishes a relation of reciprocal implication between two themes: the distinction between private and public power, and the conception of the nature and tasks of politics. The Aristotelian comparative strategy, and its implications for a theory of politics, were accepted and reproduced even by seventeenth-century Natural Law theorists, until Locke offered an alternative approach.

Aristotle introduces the discussion of the relationship between private and public sphere in Book Two of the Politics, while criticizing Plato’s ideal state as presented in the Republic. Aristotle rejects Plato’s proposals to eliminate private property and families among the members of the guardian class, and analyzes less extreme versions of the community of goods, to which he is not, however, completely opposed.⁶ From Aristotle’s discussion of Plato’s ideas it can be inferred that family and property are the two main elements composing the private sphere. These are, in Aristotle’s language, the “things” of which a man can say: “they are mine,” thus excluding others from enjoying them. On the other hand, citizens share in common the political community itself, that is, the system of relations and exchanges among persons of different kinds which enables the community to attain self-sufficiency.⁷

The theme of ruling and being ruled in turn is central to Aristotle’s discussion of the household and the body politic in Book One, which is devoted to identifying the specific nature of political rule in contrast with other types of rule, and especially the domestic one.

According to Aristotle, what transforms a group of scattered human beings into an association is sharing a common purpose, and the means by which that purpose can be attained. But no group can act in coordination without a ruling principle, a source of authority, which organizes the performance of various functions, and regulates interaction among the members. The exercise of power, without which no ordered social life is possible, is the thread running through all types of associations, and is a fundamental analytical element around which the comparison of domestic and political society revolves. In an association, power must belong to one or more individuals, since

in all cases where there is a compound – constituted of more than one part but forming one entity whether the parts be continuous (as in the body of one man) or discrete (as in the relation of master and slave) – a ruling element and a ruled can always be traced.⁸

Although power permeates all aspects of life, not all hierarchical orderings are identical, and one of the tasks of political philosophy is to discover the best one for the body politic.

In comparing household and body politic, Aristotle has a clear polemical target in mind: those (read Plato) who see in the polis merely a great household, and who therefore assimilate the statesman to “the monarch of a kingdom, or the manager of a household, or the master of a number of slaves.”⁹ It is not merely size, and the number of people over whom one rules, which distinguish various associations, and particularly the domestic from the political community, but rather a difference in “kind.” From the point of view of the type of authority exercised in each, the political association is set apart from all others by the fact that its component members are (relatively) equal free men, as they are not slaves, and share the leisure provided by the household, over which they exercise control. This similarity of condition explains why “the members of a political association aim by their very nature at being equal and differing in nothing.”¹⁰ Equality makes it problematic to ascertain what criteria should be used in assigning power, for nature does not provide any guide for ascertaining who may exercise authority, and who must be subject to it.¹¹ Aristotle’s solution is, as is well known, that political rule will consist in “ruling and being ruled in turn,”¹² allowing all active citizens full participation in political activity.

In the household, on the contrary, the head exercises different types of rule, but his power is unquestioned, because grounded in nature. The free adult male rules, not because of acquired skills, or because of choice on the part of his dependents, but rather because of innate superior capacities. According to Aristotle, “masters are not so termed in virtue of any science they have acquired, but in virtue of their own endowment.”¹³ Even in the case of the rule over the wife, which is “like that of a statesman over fellow citizens,”¹⁴ the natural superiority of the male makes his entitlement to power self-evident, and rotation between him and the woman inconceivable.

Aristotle’s comparison of domestic with political society can be used to ground a distinction between private and public domain on three accounts.

First, there is the contrast between a domestic world, characterized by a natural and unquestioned hierarchy, and a public world in which equal free men express their political nature. The separation of private and public spheres is grounded on the rationale that only human beings capable of sharing both ruling and being ruled are entitled to a public life.¹⁵ The natural subordination of household dependents to the adult free man justifies granting him control over them as parts of his private sphere. As partially impaired human beings, women, children, and slaves are entrusted to the man, who takes care of their welfare while taking care of his own.¹⁶ Their lives and their possessions, if they have any, are managed by the head of household, and even in the case of adult free persons, such as women are, their capacity for autonomous agency is drastically curtailed. The condition of natural inferiority of household dependents, even when they are free, as in the case of women, thus bars them without appeal from enjoying full citizenship.

The second criterion of distinction between private and public consists in the different handling of personal and common good. The head of household is entitled to treat his dependents’ good as his own. But the condition of relative equality enjoyed by free men in the public sphere entails a more complex and problematic relationship between individual and common good. There does indeed exist a good of the community which is greater than the sum of the good of its members, and for the sake of which each citizen will have to sacrifice his own selfish inclinations. But individual good, and last but not least, individual properties, will remain distinct from what is shared, so that only on certain terms will the public be justified in crossing the boundaries that fence off private endowments. Ignorance of these boundaries, and a tendency to treat citizens and their property as if they were part of the ruler’s property, are symptoms that despotism has set in. A body politic managed by a ruler who treats it as if it were his own household is no longer a political association, capable of attaining the good life. It has become a big family, and the power relations within it will resemble those obtaining between the free man and his dependents, in the worst case, his slaves.

The third criterion of distinction is a piece of Aristotelian metaphysics, and it is the one that the subsequent tradition will soon reinterpret. Aristotle contends that each being or human association aims at some good, the highest of which it is capable. Among humans, only adult free men are endowed with the capacities to attain the highest practical good, which consists, as remarked, of being alternately a ruler and a subject. The practice of rotation in power allows the members of the community to express all the virtues of which they are capable, in particular, justice. But the household does not provide the arena in which such a high level of virtue can be practiced. The free man is destined to rule, for no other member of the group can compete with him in virtue. Politics, as a mode of being and acting, are forever banned from the domestic association.

It is this third and, for Aristotle, crucial factor that later thinkers, especially Christian ones, will abandon. The natural inferiority of the members of the household will be maintained, but the term “inferiority” will acquire a new meaning. In a culture shaped by the Christian tenets about the universal equality of all humans before God, and about the universal capacity to attain the good, that is, eternal salvation, Aristotle’s metaphysical/ethical differentiations become problematic. The inferiority of women, children, and servants is recast in the much more mundane language of material dependence. Inferiors are less able, less intelligent, less strong, less autonomous. They cannot survive without being directed by an adult free male. But the innate superiority of the male is reflected in, and slowly confused with, greater access to material resources. Access to the public arena remains a prerogative of heads of households, and it is still maintained that only the political association can reach self-sufficiency.¹⁷ But this is reinterpreted as control over the resources that allow the community to live in peace, to prosper, and to remain independent from neighboring communities.¹⁸

This profound change in metaphysical assumptions does not prevent writers from adopting Aristotle’s general argument, and in particular Aristotle’s comparative strategy. His basic question: is political rule different from domestic rule? – with its corollaries: how do family and body politic differ, and what are the implications for the distinction between the private and public domains? – becomes a recurrent theme in subsequent thinkers. But before turning to the Natural Law theorists who are the focus of this inquiry, a few remarks about the Aristotelian procedure are in order. For ultimately, it is a modification of these basic assumptions which will prompt thinkers to abandon the Aristotelian approach.

We have reconstructed Aristotle’s criteria of distinction between private and public by interpreting his inquiry into the nature of political rule. To understand what activities are proper to politics, and how human beings relate to one another when engaged in them, Aristotle turns for comparison and clarification to the household. The comparison takes the form of a game of mirrors, in which household and body politic are set one before the other, in order to identify common features and elements of differentiation. The game can of course start with either of the two, but Aristotle starts with the family, for its structure is unquestioned and seemingly unproblematic. The household thus provides the background against which the features typical of the body politic are supposed to emerge more clearly.

This argumentative strategy remains plausible as long as thinkers share with Aristotle the belief that the political association is an aggregation of families. Families are...