America, Aristotle, and the Politics of a Middle Class

Leslie G. Rubin

• Publisher: Baylor University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781481300568
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Democracy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Aristotle's political imagination capitalizes on the virtues of a middle-class republic. America's experiment in republican liberty bears striking similarities to Aristotle's best political regime—especially at the point of the middling class and its public role. Author Leslie Rubin, by holding America up to the mirror of Aristotle, explores these correspondences and their many implications for contemporary political life. Rubin begins with the Politics, in which Aristotle asserts the best political regime maintains stability by balancing oligarchic and democratic tendencies, and by treating free and relatively equal people as capable of a good life within a law-governed community that practices modest virtues. The second part of the book focuses upon America, showing how its founding opinion leaders prioritized the virtues of the middle in myriad ways. Rubin uncovers a surprising range of evidence, from moderate property holding by a large majority of the populace to citizen experience of both ruling and being ruled. She singles out the importance of the respect for the middle-class virtues of industriousness, sobriety, frugality, honesty, public spirit, and reasonable compromise. Rubin also highlights the educational institutions that foster the middle class—public education affords literacy, numeracy, and job skills, while civic education provides the history and principles of the nation as well as the rights and duties of all its citizens. Wise voices from the past, both of ancient Greece and postcolonial America, commend the middle class. The erosion of a middle class and the descent of political debate into polarized hysteria threaten a democratic republic. If the rule of the people is not to fall into demagoguery, then the body politic must remind itself of the requirements—both political and personal—of free, stable, and fair political life.

Part I

Aristotle’s Republic

1

A Practical Republic

Aristotle’s Real-World Politics

Aristotle will recommend the polity or republic as the “best” regime for “most cities and most human beings,” suggesting that it is a goal that can be appreciated rationally and a goal to which most political communities can reasonably aspire. He proffers no guarantees of its success. Some populations are not characterized by the equality that a republic requires; chance or the wrong choices made at crucial times could derail the most prudent plans. In his analysis of real political experience in Sparta, Crete, and Carthage, Aristotle presents a case against the best intentions in politics, a case that modest aspirations are more likely to combine with most people’s modest virtues to produce livable cities, while high aspirations will very likely end in rule of the few that is indistinguishable from tyranny. Beginning, as Aristotle does, with the fundamental principle that a just political order must recognize the equality and liberty of its members, the American founders used the improved “science of politics” to negotiate a constitutional structure that held out modest, attainable aspirations for their republic as well.

Lest he appear a mere sophist playing with the notion of the best regime, Aristotle insists he must dispose of the regimes, both actual and speculative, called noble by others before he describes his own “best regime.” Only if these other regimes are “in fact not in a fine condition” can his enterprise be genuine and not sophistical.1 Aristotle’s discussions of Sparta, Crete, and Carthage prepare the rationale for pursuing a middling regime, rather than the rule of the best. He demonstrates that the painstaking lawgivers of these admired communities could not engineer a situation in which the citizens would be virtuous and the city stable. On the other hand, when these regimes did achieve some good political effects in terms of stability, they were not those at which the lawgivers originally aimed. Aristotle thus suggests that, as important as the initial lawgiver is for establishing the way of life of a regime, he cannot take all contingencies into account, and he cannot rely on future statesmen to maintain a truly aristocratic way of life against all odds. If chance must complicate human affairs, then certain characteristics of a political order will render it more able to weather the storm. The examination of these regimes reveals characteristics that the citizens must embody and the regime entail to guard the basic arrangements against inevitable decay: the institutional arrangements of a republic, which mixes the influence of the rich and the poor to create a regime that is admittedly not an aristocracy, but aims at a certain virtue. The Spartan, Cretan, and Carthaginian regimes mixed some democratic elements with quite a few oligarchic elements yet still failed. More, and more explicit, efforts at balance might have been beneficial.

The Republic Emerges from the Definition of Politics

Throughout the Politics, Aristotle examines the historically new phenomenon of politics, both defining it strictly and defending it as a human activity. Before the regime (politeia) called “republic” (politeia)2 is defined in Book III of the Politics and examined in depth in Book IV, the republic as a standard for a good regime and “political” as a standard for rule are mentioned in a number of contexts, most extensively in the assessments of highly regarded regimes in Book II. Aristotle first makes use of the term politeia in reference to a particular regime, rather than to regimes in general, in II.6, when he examines Plato’s Laws and then again in describing the regimes of Crete and Carthage. He criticizes these regimes, as well as that of the Lacedaemonians, with reference both to the standards of the simply best regime (described in Books VII and VIII) and those of the republic. They clearly fail in Aristotle’s eyes to achieve the simply best, but aspects that resemble the republic receive his praise. In the descriptions and criticisms of these regimes, Aristotle gives some indications of what is good in and what is required by the politically best, as opposed to the simply best, regime.3 The best political association provides the best support for the flourishing of the political animal. When Aristotle distinguishes “political” arrangements and activities from other sorts of arrangements and activities, he adds to our understanding of the uniqueness of politics and the standards its practice requires.

If politics and the city are natural to human beings, Aristotle has not yet explained why it is so hard to find a stable and self-sufficient city. Though all cities by nature may aim at full sufficiency and a good life, human fallibility and the need to choose particular arrangements under particular circumstances can cause the enterprise to go astray. The good news is that optimum politics requires what appear to be suboptimal conditions—for example, that there be no clearly superior human being to rule justly and beneficially. Insofar as political rule is natural, the hierarchy of ruler and ruled should have its roots in the soul. Because the city is, by definition, an organization of free and equal citizens, however, much controversy surrounds the problem of distinguishing the best souls for ruling and satisfying the ruled that they should obey others who are, in some sense, their equals. The inequalities of offices, even when they are temporary, cause resentment, potentially instability. Again, this controversy flourishes on the level of selfish motives, but it represents a serious question. It is difficult to delineate the standards according to which a city should choose the best rulers among the souls of equals.4 If political rule is among equals and stability rests on the satisfaction of all parts of the regime, the best political regime does not require the simply best people to rule, but only those the city can be persuaded are the best in the circumstances.

In Book II, as Aristotle criticizes the “city in speech” Socrates builds in Plato’s Republic, he elaborates this issue. A city is not a household. First, truly political rule is not permanent but rotated; those who are ruled also know how to rule. Second, it is necessary for the sufficiency of the political association that the citizens be many and differ greatly.5 Yet, members of cities are all free adults, who see themselves as equal to all the others. One who willingly defers to his father will not necessarily defer politically to all people of his father’s age.6 In political life, as opposed to life in a village or a feudal monarchy, he would demand his share of rule in return for being ruled. And no free man would willingly submit to slavery. “It is thus reciprocal equality that preserves cities.”7 Although he admits that giving each man one art, creating a permanent aristocracy or kingship, might be more effective for some aims, Aristotle shows that if all are “equal in their nature,” all must share the benefits and burdens of office.8 Both here and in a later passage,9 he admits that although such sharing would create defective rule because the rulers are not uniformly wise, rotation of offices is not defective politically.

Aristotle suggests by his criticisms of the Republic that self-sufficiency and stable diversity are more properly political aims for the lawgiver than either perfect harmony or doing justice to the better men. Surely the better men suffer when they are ruled by the worse, but for the sake of stability those who believe themselves equal, and for the sake of justice those who are in some important sense equal, must be allowed to share in rule. Widespread satisfaction with the regime due to equal treatment of roughly equal citizens is a political good, for “the good of each thing is surely what preserves it.”10

That a city is also not really like a man seems obvious, yet it must be stated because the Republic seems to depend on the opposite assumption. Aristotle has indeed argued that a city is analogous to a living organism, insofar as it stands toward a citizen as the whole body to a hand. Each part of the city performs its function for the support of the whole. Again, however, Aristotle insists that that analogy cannot be stretched as far as Socrates takes it. For one human being to obey another as the body or the hand “obeys” the soul is not politics, but slavery.11

Politics differs from the monarchy of the household; it is a partnership of equals ruled by the participation of the members and not controlled by a person of obvious superiority. Politics also differs from the despotism of the household, in which servants are ruled as if they were not fully human, without the capacity to exercise judgment. Finally, politics takes place among a larger and more diverse group of people than the relationship between husband and wife. With many free persons contributing to the sufficiency and happiness of the whole, the city achieves a more complete end than the household—an end associated with the virtue of justice. Such an achievement has its costs: the city must contend with the danger of instability and factional conflict among those who see themselves as (at least) equals and desire honor from all of their fellows.

The activity of politics is also distinguished from the activity within a person’s soul. Its requisite diversity and equality of status among the members rules out the possibility of its ever achieving the harmonious hierarchy of Socrates’ philosophic soul, in which the rational part always rules the appetites and spiritedness always serves the just end. Aristotle suggests that in a political situation, the human beings who represent the appetites and spiritedness demand their due—sometimes more than their due, calculated by another standard—and cannot safely be denied some rewards and honors.12

Magnesia: Plato’s Practical Republic

In discussing Plato’s Laws, Aristotle associates the “political” life of a community with relations toward foreign regions, as opposed to isolation. All regimes must defend themselves against enemies, but “political” cities also must take care to “use for war the arms that are useful not only on its own territory, but in foreign regions as well.”13 A crucial part of the political city’s life consists in the formidable use of the army for defense as well as the willingness to engage in offensive measures. Though this mention of political life is not associated immediately with the republic as a specific regime, it begins to narrow the limits within which a regime can be strictly described as political. It excludes settlements that are purposely established in so isolated a position as to be able to lead a private life of internal perfection. The political regime must act in the world and be prepared to enter into militarily enforced relations with others.14

These criteria of “political” regimes are soon related to the regime of the Laws through Aristotle’s association of polities/republics with a dominant class that reveres military virtue: “The organization of the [Magnesian] regime as a whole is intended to be neither democracy nor oligarchy, but the one midway between them which is called a polity; for it is based on those who bear heavy arms.”15 The cultivation of military virtue to the detriment of all others is an error in legislation, but the military art is an essential one for a political order and cannot be ignored. To put those who are capable of practicing military arts in a position of power in the city surely elevates the status of this virtue in the regime. Aristotle points out, however, that the Athenian Stranger’s proposal to support five thousand warriors (and their wives and attendants) in idleness is not economically feasible.16 Though military virtue must be honored, soldiers will have to perform other productive services for the city as well.

The Athenian Stranger is next taken to task for his definition of the optimum amount of property for a Magnesian citizen: “as much as is needed to live with moderation.”17 Aristotle does not abandon the pursuit of moderation, but he recognizes a parallel criterion for the good political life, generosity. The political regime must support liberal moderation, or the avoidance of both luxury and penury by the practice of two quite accessible virtues concerned with property.18 In contrast to very wealthy citizens who make grand public expenditures, the best citizen—a person of more moderate means—will perhaps not contribute so lavishly to the grandeur of his city but will be both able and willing to share his sufficient possessions with friends. At this point the republic is a good regime associated with certain virtues, but not all virtues, and perhaps not the grandest.

Aristotle acknowledges that Magnesia may be “the most attainable19 of all the regimes for cities,” but it does not surpass “more aristocratic” regimes in its excellence, “for one might well praise that of the Spartans more, or some other that is more aristocratic.”20 Aristotle says it claims to be a mixture of democracy and tyranny,21 and that either these are not regimes at all or they are the worst of regimes. Rather, according to Aristotle, Magnesia actually mixes democracy and oligarchy, like Aristotle’s republic, but tends to favor oligarchy.

Having identified Magnesia as most closely resembling a republic, Aristotle proceeds to criticize it as, in Books IV and V, he will criticize other cities that fall short of the politeia’s goals and tend to emulate either democracy or oligarchy excessively.22 He cites the encouragements for the wealthy to participate in offices and elections and the lack of such encouragements for poorer citizens—a dangerous situation, because the elections turn out to favor a relative few who are willing to form coalitions.23

The examination of the regime of the Laws yields a number of criteria for a political regime and, specifically, a republic. Aristotle insists on the importance of military preparedness and involvement in foreign regions, of liberal moderation and moderate liberality, and of the judicious balance of democratic and oligarchic institutions, particularly in electoral arrangements. He also attends closely to the property distribution of this city. Care must be taken—by whom, it is not obvious—to ensure that important divisions of property will not decay over generations into great wealth for some and great poverty for most.24 Aristotle’s account of Magnesia concludes by pointing to Book IV for further discussion of the republic: “That a regime of this sort should not be constituted out of democracy and monarchy, then, is evident from these things and from what will be said later, when the investigation turns to this sort of regime.”25

Improving Real-World, Highly Respected Regimes

After discussing the regimes and the reform proposals of people not engaged in politics,26 Aristotle turns to the often-praised actual regimes of Sparta, Crete, and Carthage. These regimes test political theories in practice, showing “whether some aspect of the legislation is fine or not with respect to the best arrangem...