Aristotle and the Rediscovery of Citizenship. B S C. (Cambridge UP, .Pp. x + . Price £..)

Susan Collins offers us, in her Aristotle and the Rediscovery of Citizenship, the latest in arecent series of efforts to search for whatever treasure can be found in Aristotle’smoral and political philosophy. In a series of thought-provoking arguments andoccasionally controversial interpretations of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Politics,she explains how Aristotle’s non-liberal starting-point of a comprehensive concep-tion of the good gives us just the moral resources we need in order to grapple withthe problems concerning civic education, citizenship and legal authority which per-sistently plague debates in contemporary liberal political theory.

Collins suggests that the central problems are caused by liberalism’s refusal toaddress ‘the question of the highest human good’ (p. ). Soon after the publication ofRawls’ A Theory of Justice, challenges arose from several different quarters to ‘theEnlightenment project’ generally and to its manifestation in liberal political theoryin particular. Social contract theorists from Hobbes and Locke to Rawls and Nozick,deeply fearing the reappearance of the religious wars and/or the Inquisition, hadhoped to push competing views of the human good into the private realm and leaveonly rational principles of co-ordination in the public realm; but their critics haveurged that liberalism has ‘failed to make good on its promise to ground morality in arational and non-teleological framework’ (p. ). The main thrust of this criticism isthat the supposedly purely procedural, rational principles of justice in the politicalrealm actually embody one (unargued) liberal but comprehensive vision of the humangood. Collins sets out the essential features of liberal political theorists’ responses tosuch challenges, responses which she shows to be gravely inadequate. Thougheventually conceding that there are liberal virtues and that legal institutions serve apartly educative function for the citizenry, liberal political theorists claim that thisembodies only a ‘thin’ theory of the good. They still reaffirm the Rawlsian claims ofvalue pluralism, rationality understood as the maximization of preferences, and thepriority of the right over the good, believing that ‘comprehensive [i.e., non-thin]doctrines’ can be excluded from the political sphere, so that ‘liberalism emerges asthe [rational] solution to the problem of credal and Salvationist religions’ (p. ).

Though sympathetic to liberalism’s desire to eschew oppression, Collins firmlyrejects its insistence that value pluralism can secure this objective. William Galstonoffers what Collins regards as the clearest defence of liberal value pluralism, whichhe bases on an ‘underlying assumption that coercion always stands exposed to a

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potential demand for justification’, an assumption which in turn is based on the‘pervasive human desire to go our own way in accordance with our own desires andbeliefs’ (p. ). She points out that on liberalism’s own reasoning, any communitywithin a liberal state that ‘rejects the presumption in favour of individual liberty isnot reasonable, and an authority that denies this presumption is in error as to thetrue structure of the moral universe’ (p. ). Her crucial insight is that politicalliberalism is a comprehensive doctrine which wields the power of the state in orderto preserve its vision of the good (pp. –). Liberal value pluralism, contrary to itsclaims, is value monism which yet bears the burden of providing justification (ratherthan mere assertion or desire) for the enjoyment of liberty as the human good.

Having exposed the challenging task of defending a conception of the humangood which ‘liberal thought neglects or obscures’ (p. ), Collins undertakes a wide-reaching and impressive synthesis of Aristotle’s thought on the complexly inter-twined issues of citizenship, moral virtue, law, civic education, and the relationshipbetween being a good citizen and being a good human being. I cannot fully dojustice here to Collins’ rich examination of these issues, but her central conclusion isthat a careful study of Aristotle’s two ‘peak’ moral virtues, justice and magnanimity,reveals a conflict ‘inherent in political life’ (p. ) which has gone unacknowledgedand unresolved by liberal political theory. The law of a political society is necessaryfor educating its citizens with a view to the human good, but when the law is mostsuccessful and cultivates the best person – that is, ‘the morally serious’ (σπουδα�ος)one – this person’s longing for ‘the noble’ carries him beyond the political sphere ofjustice and the common good and into the realm of individual moral perfection(pp. –). The best person both recognizes the law’s authority over him, obliginghim to act for the common good, and feels the pull of needing to go beyond the lawin order to pursue the individual good at the expense of the common good. In acertain sense, the best person is like a law unto himself. So ‘the education suppliedby the political community in no way resolves – indeed, it creates – the tensionbetween the demands of citizenship and the greatest aims of the virtuous’ (p. ).Collins argues that Aristotle’s moral and political theory (unlike liberalism) acknow-ledges the tension and offers the start of a solution.

The deeply underrated virtue of ‘wittiness’ is supposed to save the day for theperson who straddles the political and the philosophical lives. Wittiness is one ofthe virtues that govern the best person’s associations during his requisite time of restfrom the weightier activities of the good life. As the mean between buffoonery andboorishness, wittiness is a liberally informed, mildly ironic, tactful and quick sense ofhumour that ‘occupies the middle ground between a dogmatic commitment to thelaw and sceptical alienation from it’ (p. ). It sustains the virtuous in their ‘questfor wisdom about human affairs’ (p. ), because it gives them a kind of freedomsuitable to their condition: ‘To laugh at a convention is to free oneself from it, and tomake others laugh at it is to liberate them’ (p. ). Not many can pull off such a‘roasting of the law’ (my phrase, not Collins’) which both preserves sufficient respectfor law’s authority and hints at its limitations in governing the best human life, sothe suggestion to take from Aristotle’s remarks on the regulation of comedy is thatfew should dare to tread such terrain (pp. –).

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Collins’ incisive diagnosis of the ills of liberal political theory by itself makes thisbook worth reading. She proceeds with great command through the thicket ofliterature on liberalism and its critics, perceptively isolates the essentials of thedebate, and identifies the many fallacies at the heart of it.

Collins should also be commended for drawing our attention to the oftenneglected ‘lesser’ virtues in Aristotle, such as wittiness, truthfulness and friendliness.At the very least, this is a reminder that we need to attend carefully to all aspects ofAristotle’s densely packed texts lest we miss any insights. More important, though, isto notice how such ‘lesser’ virtues are involved in what actually constitutes a gooddeal of (especially) the philosophic life, and so we ignore them at our own peril.

While Collins ably joins a long-standing debate over what, for Aristotle, con-stitutes the good life – political or philosophical activity? – her arguments on thisissue are somewhat uneven. At times, she suggests that there is a deep and un-resolved tension between the political life (whose virtue, justice, pertains to thecommon good) and the philosophic life (whose virtue, magnanimity, pertains tothe individual human good). At other times, she suggests that the pursuit of wisdomcentral to the philosophic life is the highest good, noting as well that the virtuousneed to engage in political activity as a necessary part of the human good. The latterline of argument does not involve as deep a tension as the former (if it does at all),since both sorts of activity, though they function differently, are in the virtuousperson’s self-interest. Ultimately, Collins endorses the former rather than the latterline of argument, but only at the cost of a problematic conception of self-interest,and an omission of discussions (available in the work of David Keyt and Fred Miller)of any alternative understanding of the ‘priority’ of political society which coulddefuse the tension central to her thesis.

The mildly ironic interpretation which Collins offers of Aristotle’s discussion ofwittiness is intriguing and plausible. However, the weight that wittiness is made tobear in the overall argument is less plausible. It is unclear what sort of ‘liberation’wittiness gives the virtuous person, since Collins does not flesh out the conceptmuch. It could not really be liberation from law per se, because the ‘morally serious’person more than anyone possesses ‘right reason’ so as to act and judge properly inany case, and so follows the law. Having the wisdom to follow the unspecified spiritof the law when the letter of the law is necessarily silent is about as respectful of lawas one could get.

The mention of wisdom brings me to the biggest difficulty in Collins’ argument.She astutely diagnoses liberalism’s ills, but her prescription for curing its maladies isinadequate. Aristotle claims that there is a human good, but notoriously does notprovide a non-circular justification for it. Collins does not explain how he gets out ofhis circular reasoning concerning prudence, moral virtue and wisdom (pp. –,–, –), thus leaving his theory susceptible to the charge of historicist relativismat its foundation. She asserts that ‘it would require a systematic examination [of NEVI–X] to illuminate the full grounds for and significance of the work’s final conclu-sion concerning the best life’ (p. ), but Aristotle and the Rediscovery of Citizenship doesnot offer this examination. This being so, liberalism’s political fears go unallayed,since in the end lurks the spectre of (especially religious) irrationality in ethics.

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Collins deftly unmasks the value monism implicit in liberalism’s most funda-mental claims concerning the protection of individual liberty, and she rightly insiststhat liberalism’s best hope lies in grappling with citizenship in relation to the humangood. Her attempt to push liberalism in the right direction, however, is hobbled byher replicating rather than resolving the problems in Aristotle’s texts. The failure ofAristotle (though not necessarily of Aristotelians) to provide a rational justificationfor the human good vitiates the full rediscovery of citizenship which Collins seeks.

Marymount Manhattan College, New York C-A B

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