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The Problems of a Political Animal: Community, Justice, and Conflict in Aristotelian Political Thought

University of California Press

The shared sentiments and commitments that constitute a community are often the source of its deepest conflicts. Anyone who has lived in a family rather than merely longed for a home knows that all too well. Strangers may cheat you, but only brothers or sisters, comrades or colleagues can betray you. In the end, intense and ugly forms of distrust and conflict are part of the price we pay for the pleasures of communal life.

Aristotle, unlike many of his contemporary followers, is deeply aware of the special conflicts associated with human communities. The intensity of our conflicts, he notes, increases with the closeness of our relationships. Anger is something that individuals "express more strongly against their companions, when they think they have been treated unjustly…. Hence the sayings 'Cruel are the wars of brothers' and 'Those who love extravagantly will hate extravagantly as well.' … And it is reasonable," Aristotle concludes, "that this should happen. For, in addition to the injury, they also consider themselves robbed of this [companionship]" (Politics [hereafter Pol. ] 1328a10).1

Critics of modern liberal democracies often invoke Aristotle's understanding of political community when they complain that our political

See Aristotle, Rhetoric 1379b2 and Nicomachean Ethics 1160a3, for similar remarks. Like Georg Simmel, Aristotle is familiar with "the wholly disproportionate violence to which normally well-controlled people can be moved within their relations to those closest to them"; G. Simmel, Conflict, 43–44.

life is nothing but "civil war carried on by other means," "a war of all against all … we make for ourselves, not out of whole cloth but out of an intentional distortion of our social natures."2 But for Aristotle political community signifies a conflict-ridden reality rather than a vision of lost or future harmony. It is the scene of political conflict rather than its remedy. All the cruel, mindless, and selfish actions that we, sadly, associate with ordinary political life are included prominently among "the political things" (ta politika ) that Aristotle sets out to study; he does not restrict his study to just the occasional moments of warmth and heroism. Just as there are peaks of virtue and cooperation that can be found only among citizens, so there are forms of distrust, conflict, and competition that only citizens experience. Accordingly, an Aristotelian account of politics must explain the problems of political life as well as its proudest achievements. And it must, as I try to show, use the bonds created by political community to help explain these problems rather than treat them as a consequence of the absence or weakening of communal bonds themselves. In other words, Aristotle insists on what we might call a communitarian account of political conflict and competition.

The very idea of a communitarian account of political conflict and competition may seem strange or paradoxical, given the general association of the term communitarian with aspirations toward social harmony and integration. Most contemporary communitarians see political community as a remedy for political conflict rather than one of its sources. But if, as communitarians insist, our shared practices and sentiments largely constitute our identity and character, then it seems sensible to look, as I suggest Aristotle does, to the way in which we share things in order to help explain our continuing social and political conflicts.

Aristotle also insists that a proper understanding of the achievements and opportunities made possible by political community must take due note of the imperfect and conflict-ridden conditions in which those achievements arise. He argues that although the political community comes into being for the sake of survival and comfort, its highest and final purpose is to enable us to lead the good life of rational and virtuous behavior. In particular, the political community provides us with the laws that help us acquire the virtues and the shared practices that

A. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 263; B. Barber, Strong Democracy, 75.

allow us to exercise and perfect them. Without it the Aristotelian good life is impossible.

Nevertheless, the political communities that enable us to lead the good life are the same imperfect and conflict-ridden communities described above. No actual political community has ever approached the requirements of the ideal regime outlined in book 7 of the Politics .3 Aristotle cannot even cite an example of one that meets the less exacting standards of the correct (orthos )—or unqualifiedly just—regimes laid down in book 3. Hence, if we insist, as some do, that "without the ideal city, there will be no good men,"4 then we must conclude that there have never have been and most likely never will be any virtuous individuals in this world. That cannot, of course, be Aristotle's conclusion.5 But it is an unavoidable conclusion unless we can identify, as I try to do in this book, the ways in which ordinary, imperfect political communities can enable us to lead a good life.6

Unlike the majority of modern moral philosophers, Aristotle has a profound sense of the social and political constraints that condition ethical behavior. The Aristotelian good life is built on highly contingent and fragile foundations.7 Unfavorable conditions can keep us from ever achieving it; unforeseen and uncontrollable circumstances can steal part or all of it away from us.

Such is the world in which the Aristotelian good life develops, a world in which nature gives us the tools—reasoning, speech, and the political community—with which to build the good life but, at the same time, erects innumerable and often overwhelming obstacles to realizing it. The problems and the opportunities of ordinary political life are thus inseparable for Aristotle. We need to understand political community in order to explain political conflict, and we need to understand political conflicts in order to identify and explain the nature of the good life as actually led.

On the utopian character of Aristotle's best regime, see C. Rowe, "Aims and Method," 69; R. Bodéüs, "Law and the Regime," 237–38.

T. Irwin, Aristotle's First Principles, 410.

If Aristotle did not believe that relatively virtuous individuals could emerge from the imperfect regimes of the ordinary political world, then he would have no audience for his lectures on ethics, for he insists that the only proper audience for such lectures consists of individuals who are already disposed by their upbringing to the virtuous life; Nicomachean Ethics 1095b4.

See below, esp. chapters 2 and 3.

Martha Nussbaum reconstructs this aspect of Aristotle's philosophical vision with wonderful clarity and insight in The Fragility of Goodness .

Unfortunately, the modern division of politics and ethics into separate disciplines makes it difficult to recognize this Aristotelian approach to the study of political conflict and human flourishing. Moral philosophers devote the bulk of their attention to the analysis and evaluation of concepts, leaving the study of social structures and...