the marginalization of aristotles polite

Social Science Information 1 –18

© The Author(s) 2014Reprints and permissions:

sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.navDOI: 10.1177/0539018414532040

ssi.sagepub.com

The centrality of politeia for Aristotle’s Politics: Part II – the marginalization of Aristotle’s politeia in modern political thought

Clifford Angell Bates, JrInstitute of the Americas and Europe, University of Warsaw, Poland

AbstractPolitical theorists today are addressing issues of global concerns confronting state systems and in so doing are often forced to confront the concept of Homo sapiens as a ‘political animal’. This article continues the presentation of Aristotle’s treatment of politeia (initiated in ‘The centrality of politeia for Aristotle’s Politics: Aristotle’s continuing significance for social and political science’, in this journal) as the concept allowing us to understand the nature and workings of human political community in a way that lets us see how the fundamentally social nature of human beings manifests itself. I look at how Aristotle’s politeia became marginalized as a useful means to understand the shape and direction of human community. While the state has become the new frame for the human political community, the concept of the state rests on the fundamental a-social assumptions of early modern thinkers such as Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, etc., whose model of how the state emerges denies the fundamental social character of man and instead insists that political action consists merely of the rational calculations of willing agents for common utility and society. In doing so the model renders politics and political actions as merely another form of economics.

KeywordsAristotle, political community, political theory, politeia, rational choice

RésuméLes théoriciens politiques d’aujourd’hui traitent de problèmes d’ordre global auxquels sont confrontés les systèmes étatiques, et se trouvent ainsi souvent confrontés au concept de l’Homo Sapiens en tant qu’ ‘animal politique’. L’article continue la présentation

Corresponding author:Clifford Angell Bates, Jr, Institute of the Americas and Europe, University of Warsaw, Al, Niepodleglosci 22, Warsaw, 02-653, Poland. Email: [email protected]

532040 SSI0010.1177/0539018414532040Social Science InformationBatesresearch-article2014

Article

2 Social Science Information

du concept de politeia d’Aristote (commencée dans la revue, dans ‘The centrality of politeia for Aristotle’s Politics: Aristotle’s continuing significance for social and political science’) et de son traitement en tant que concept permettant d’appréhender la nature et les rouages des communautés politiques humaines de manière à voir comment la nature fondamentalement sociale des êtres humains se manifeste. L’auteur analyse comment la politeia d’Aristote s’est vue marginalisée en tant que moyen de comprendre la forme et la direction des communautés humaines. Alors que l’état est devenu le nouveau cadre des communautés politiques humaines, le concept de l’état repose sur des présupposés fondamentalement asociaux de penseurs prémodernes tels que Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, etc., pour qui le modèle d’émergence de l’état nie le caractère fondamentalement social de l’homme et insiste au contraire sur le fait que l’action politique ne consiste qu’en calculs rationnels d’agents dont la finalité est l’utilité commune et la société. Ce faisant, ce modèle ne fait de la politique et des actions politiques qu’une autre forme d’économie.

Mots-clésAristote, choix rationnels, communautés politiques, politeia, théorie politique

Introduction

In ‘The centrality of politeia for Aristotle’s Politics: Aristotle’s continuing significance for social and political science’ (Bates, 2014) I maintained that Aristotle’s use of the concept of ‘politeia’ – the given form and way of life of a given political community – was the best way to understand how human political animals are able to fulfill their capacities as human beings and live well, that is to live in such a way that Aristotle would argue that they were fulfilled or happy (eudomonia). In the present article, I would like to make the second half of the argument, that with, first, the corruption of the Aristotelian philosophical model by Roman Catholic theology of scholasticism and then the rejection of Aristotelian political teaching by leading political philosophers of early modern politi-cal thought, Aristotle’s concept of politeia became increasingly marginalized and was either reduced to a rigid legal formalism – understood as merely typologizing constitu-tional forms – or was ignored outright and replaced with the concept of politics as the manifestation of self-aware, willing agents asserting, articulating, calculating and then negotiating through mutual consent not only their mutual interest but even the founda-tions of human political community.

The modern take on the origins of man is that man is an ‘a-social’ being, solitary and isolated, and that the political community is this artificial and willed construct that these solitary creatures create to secure those goods that by their own means they are unable to (see Hobbes, 1991 [1651]; Kant, 1991; Rousseau, 1964). Thus the modern notion works on the level of wills and the bonding together of separate and autono-mous wills via their agreement to secure mutual benefit and security. And this renders the political community as a merely voluntary construction by naturally a-social ‘indi-vidual persons’ a fundamental rejection of the Aristotelian teaching that man is by nature a social being.

Bates 3

This view of human political community, of modern political thought, involves an utter rejection and setting aside of Aristotle’s view of the political community and the nature of man as a political animal, which I sketched out in the earlier ‘Centrality of politeia’ article. Before going on to present the modern account that marginalizes Aristotle’s politeia, I would like to outline how Aristotle’s concept was able to move beyond the polis and remain a viable concept that allows us to understand the nature and character of human political community.

Empires and the political

What came before the polis? Before the polis, one sees only the rule of tribes and empires. The original character of empire was distinct from the polis because, in order to rule over its entire realm effectively and securely, an empire had to reply more on coercion than on other things – and hence had a fundamentally despotic character. For Aristotle, political rule was not to be conflated with despotic rule (see Politics 1.1). When the ruling part rules without regard for the interests of the whole political community, but acts only for its own interests/benefit, then the character of the political community becomes despotic. Hence, tyranny is the political form of despotism. The problem with earlier variants of empire before Alexander and Rome was that their rule over the various tribes was des-potic in character. The birth of politics therefore occurred in Greece with the rise of the polis as an alternative to the empire and the tribe (ethnos).

The polis allowed a form of community to emerge in which the shared life of its mem-bers gave them something in common which individuals understood and recognized as belonging to themselves and to others within the community. In the polis, although coer-cion would be needed to correct parts that sought to have their interest/benefit define the well-being and ability to live well within the community, the degree to which the polis’s politeia had to rely on such coercion rather than on persuasion of shared benefits tended to indicate that the politeia was more despotic and less political in character, and hence a defective form of politeia.

Empire tended to emerge prior to the polis as a heterogeneous construct of numerous peoples/tribes (ethnoi) conquered by the armed followers of a tribe and its leader. Often those tribes had been conquered or somehow subjugated to the ruling tribe. The empire as a whole is composed of tribal parts, and the tribe that rules and has control over the other dominated tribes gives shape to the empire. This gives the ruling tribe – in the empire – the same role over the other tribes and plays a similar role in the ruling of the empire that the politeuma (which on one level is the ruling part of the politeia) has within the nature of the political community (understood as either the polis or Roman civitas). But note that the empire is composed of tribal (ethnoi) components, whereas for the political community the fundamental part of the polis (or civitas) is the oikos, the house-hold. In fact the household of the Caesars can be very much said to be the politeuma/the ruling part of the empire. Hence this similarity to the politeuma of the ruling household of an imperial form suggests that there is a politeia at play there.

Later variants of empire we see in polises and/or other variations of human commu-nity are also found in tribes – as basic units of the imperial entity. Because of the inclu-sion of polises or the remains of polises under these variations of empire and the attempt


by the subordinated polises to keep the institutional arrangements that existed prior to imperial rule over them, the political character of Empire echoes the character of politi-cal rule that is found in the political community, in that its rule is a rule over an associa-tion of discrete communities. For the polis, those communities are the household, whereas for the empire the types of subject parts can vary between whole peoples/tribes or nations (ethnoi) or numbers of different tribes, peoples or nations, or various subor-dinated political communities (polises). After the rise of the polis, the earlier variation of empire that incorporated parts of or whole polises under the rule of a tribal unit (e.g. Persia and Macedon) was replaced by a polis reigning and ruling over other polises and tribes (e.g. the various Greek leagues under Athens, Sparta, and Thebes, later Rome). It becomes clear therefore that Rome, by the time of its peak, when it conquers most of its neighbors in the second century BC, is a polis that reigns over the then-known civilized world. It was a cosmopolis, a polis that encompasses the cosmos, the whole of the known world.

The cosmopolis arises in Rome under the res publica (the Roman civic body) not under Caesar. It was under the res publica that Rome conquered most of the Mediterranean world, incorporating local elites into Roman citizens. The incorporation of all these con-quered parts, including those who were conquered to be made slaves, in Rome only fuelled and exacerbated the divisions that shaped and always did shape Rome until Caesar destroyed the res publica. But the Roman fear of a king led key Romans to kill Caesar, and because of this Roman taboo Octavian (later known as Augustus) kept alive the forms and institutions from the res publica that effectively cloaked the monarchy it became.

This reform of Roman rule over the empire by Caesar’s heir gave rise to public form, as it was led to create newer forms of rule: (1) caesar, kaiser, tzar; and (2) princeps, which in Latin is First Citizen, and was the term Augustus took rather than the title of Rex. The term prince comes from princeps. (3) After the reign of Augustus, the later Caesars slowly discarded the forms of the res publica Augustus had maintained to shade the monarchical character of his reign. With Nero and those rulers of Rome and its empire following his reign, the term became imperator, or emperor. So even with the death of the polis as a viable form of political community, the politeia remains of use to understand the structure and character of politics at play in the empire, and this is why Aristotle and his political science has remained popular up to modernity.

The marginalization of politeia in medieval Christian political thought

Medieval Christian political thought used Aristotle mainly through St Augustine’s Platonizing of him (see Black, 1992; Canning, 1996). It is not at all known whether Augustine or the early Christian Church knew Aristotle’s Politics. It is also widely held that the Romans, and especially Cicero and Polybius – as well as later Roman thinkers – never had access to the text of the Politics. This is also true of Muslim medieval think-ers; although they had all of Plato and most of Aristotle, they seem not to have had the Politics text. Because of this, their understanding (Cicero, Polybius, the early Christian

Bates 5

Fathers, etc.) of the politeia came from what Aristotle suggests in Nicomachean Ethics 8.10 and Rhetoric 1.8 and from Plato’s Republic (whose Greek title is the Politeia) as well as the Laws. In fact it could be strongly argued that the cycle of politeia that Polybius teaches in his Histories 8, where he shows the evolution of the Roman politeia, patterns itself on a cycle that very much echoes the cycle that Plato presents in Republic 8.

With the advent of Christianity, the formation of souls and characters previously uni-fied in the role of politics became separated into the role of the King (secular ruler) and the role of the Church (spiritual ruler). In the Middle Ages, the political concept of Empire – the remnant of the Roman Empire – operated within the political reality of a multiplicity of smaller political (actors) communities which exercised de facto rule over the people and territories in the immediate area (see Black, 1992; Canning, 1996). This mix of separate spheres of political power creates the concept of the mixed constitution.1 Yet the basic form of political rule was still understood as a form of monarchy, and one could very well argue that, from later Roman Imperial rule throughout the Middle Ages, politics as the rule of citizens all but died out and what replaced it was the rule of the monarch (see Wood, 2008).

It should be noted that, during this time, there is no record of any political theorist or actor having knowledge of Aristotle’s Politics. For all purposes Aristotle’s Politics was lost. It is not until the late Middle Ages that Aristotle and his Politics are rediscovered. In other words, the political reality of the ‘mixed constitution’ or the ‘mixed regime’ is working well without the intellectual link with Aristotle. Also until Thomas Aquinas, the so-called intellectual defense of the ‘mixed constitution’ usually looked to St Augustine. With Thomas Aquinas and the rediscovery of Aristotle, there was a demand to justify or rectify Christian practices of not only philosophy but politics, with the rediscovery of classical philosophy (Blythe, 1992). The demand to justify Christian things in light of classical philosophy is Thomas Aquinas propos. Since it is clearly Aquinas who links the ‘mixed constitution’ of political practice with Aristotle, one begins to see how the iden-tification of the two could be so intellectually commonplace (Black, 1992; Canning, 1996). Further, it is again Aquinas who appears to develop the argument that the ‘mixed constitution’ derived from Aristotle is the best regime for human beings on Earth (see Blythe, 1992; also see Black, 1992; Canning, 1996). Although Aquinas argues that while, in Heaven, only the Royal rule of God exists, on Earth the best regime is not mere king-ship, because of the objections to absolute kingship made by Aristotle at Politics 3.15-17 that it is unstable politically (Black, 1992; Canning, 1996). To repeat: both the identifica-tion of ‘mixed constitution’ as the best regime and the tendency to see the intellectual origins of the ‘mixed constitutions’ in Aristotle’s Politics begin with Aquinas and are handed down in the Scholastic tradition. Yet as I have shown above, this is not what we see when we read Aristotle leaving behind preconceptions of what others suggest he argues.

But why does Aquinas begin this erroneous reading of the Politics? There are two possible answers: (1) Aquinas did not read Greek, and his understanding of Aristotle is dependent upon translations (Rubinstein, 1987). Also as Blythe shows, the translator Aquinas relies on in his reading of Aristotle’s Politics, William of Moerbecke, makes several misleading mistranslations of the text (Rubinstein, 1987; and especially see also Susemihl & Guillaume, 2011).2 Unaware of this, Aquinas might have accepted


Moerbecke’s text as what Aristotle in fact said (Blythe 1992: 19, 33–34, 42–43, 57, 81, 96; see also Susemihl & Guillaume, 2011). If this is the case, then we should not place too much weight on what Aquinas believes Aristotle says concerning the issue of the ‘mixed constitution’. (2) In his attempt to make Aristotle acceptable to Christianity, Aquinas may not have attempted to understand Aristotle as Aristotle understood himself but rather read him with the principle of ‘interpretative charity’ – a common hermeneutic practice in the Middle Ages. If this is what occurred then Aquinas does not give us Aristotle qua Aristotle, but an Aristotle that has been cleaned up and make compatible with Christian teachings. This does not deny that Aristotle may be in fact compatible with Christian teachings. Nor does it deny that Aquinas in other places does much justice to Aristotle (see Black, 1992; Canning, 1996).

Furthermore, this tradition of the Middle Ages all too often either reduced all political forms to the rule of a king or a prince, echoing the view that, since the divine order of heaven was the monarchy of God, the reflection of that heavenly order would manifest itself with some form of monarchical rule.3 If other forms are at all understood, they are seen as deviations from the perfect form to less-perfect forms – again the regime cycle of Plato’s Republic 8 rather than any position held by Aristotle. And later, when Aristotle’s text was recovered and started to be widely used to shape people’s understanding of the variety of forms of governments (which was how the politeia was understood in this time), the typical approach to understanding Aristotle’s use of the politeia was to read it in terms of the legal constitutional forms. This way of approaching Aristotle’s politeia tended to be the dominant view held by both St Thomas and St John of Paris (see Black, 1992; Blythe, 1992; Canning, 1996). And all too often the so-called practical books, Politics 4–6, were omitted in version of the Politics text, so that the focus and attention fell on Politics 1–3 and 7–8.

The marginalization of politeia in modern political thought

As we turn to the modern concept of the state, founded as a political concept as we now generally use it by Machiavelli, we see that he does not use the concept of the politeia or anything remotely similar to it. Why does Machiavelli not use it? The reason is that his innovation of the state has no room for it.

Machiavelli, and the tradition that originates from him, understands the state to be a product of will. For Machiavelli, the will of the prince; for the later thinkers, such as Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, et al., it is the will of the body politic per se, the collective will of all the members that form the state. And the state as a will – in order to be effective – must have a unitary character. What would one call a divided will that went off in many directions? Surely not a good or healthy will. Thus the good and healthy will by necessity has a unitary character. Also, though its application or operation can be executed by different institutions or entities within the state, those are merely tools that that are created by and serve on behalf of the sovereign will – executing/carrying out what it desires. Given the character of the state as a unity and thus a homogeneous will, the nature of the whole is shaped fundamentally by the whole. This is to be contrasted with the concept of political community articulated by Aristotle, where the political com-munity is composed of the fundamental parts – the household and other communities

Bates 7

– that give it body. The political community is thus made up of many discrete parts whose commonality arises from their shared life, and perhaps a shared benefit or utility from that life, together.

The state is a product of modern political philosophy. The term ‘the state’ is a creation of Machiavelli (see de Alvarez, 1989: xii–xvii, xxxii–xxxiii; Hexter, 1956: 113–138; Mansfield, 1983: 849–857; Strauss, 1936: xv; see also Strauss, 1989: 39–55; as well as Manent, 1994b, 1994c). The modern state – and its contemporary embodiment, the mod-ern liberal state – as we know it, although conceived by Machiavelli, is the child of Thomas Hobbes and has been continually developed by his intellectual followers (see Manent, 1994a, 1994b, 1994c). Although Hobbes does not explicitly define the state in the way the later-19th-century thinker would, it is nevertheless a conceptual product of this understanding of political community (Strauss, 1936: xv).

The term Hobbes uses to specify the political community is ‘commonwealth’. For Hobbes the commonwealth is the political entity within which human political behavior will be actualized. The real force of Hobbes’ commonwealth must be understood in the expression of the sovereign power toward its subjects (Hobbes, 1991 [1651]). For Machiavelli the state is the articulated will of the prince – an actual person. Hobbes takes this concept of the state and argues that it is not to be specifically the will of a prince or actual sovereign.

What is the sovereign power in Hobbes’ political thought? It is the articulated will of the social compact that gives legitimacy to the commonwealth. For Hobbes the reason the sovereign power arises out of a social contract is that a political community does not exist not by nature, but is instead a humanly made construct (Hobbes, 1991 [1651]). Thus for Hobbes, political community is an artifact, and as such its political expression is the abstracted will of that which forms the political community (see Manent, 1994a, 1994b; Strauss, 1953). Yet the term ‘political community’ is no longer appropriate for the politi-cal entity that is being constructed; instead, such a community is referred to as ‘the body politic’.

‘Body politic’ is a term or, more correctly, a metaphor drawn from medieval political thought, which attempts to explain the relationship between a king and his realm (see Kantorowicz, 1957). Hobbes’ use of the term ‘sovereign’ has long led readers to think he is speaking as if the sovereign will were a single human ruler, a king or a monarch. Hobbes is not referring to an actual human sovereign, but uses the term as a metaphor to describe not a person but the embodied will of that which authorizes the body politic. The sovereign is thus no longer the body of the sovereign, i.e. the king or prince, but the abstracted will of the whole body politic (Hobbes, 1991 [1651]).

The notion of the state is further developed along Hobbesian lines by both Rousseau, who shows that the state is a product not only of human construction but also of human rationality; and by Kant, who (1) shows that all moral action is an act of the will – e.g. the categorical imperative, rather than an outcome of natural predisposition, and (2) makes explicit that the state is a disembodied will, which can be more clearly seen in Hegel’s The Philosophy of Right (see Manent, 1994a, 1994c). Thus the modern state is no longer understood as the articulated will of any specific ruler, but rather as the collec-tive will of a whole of the society it represents.


Hence, the concept of the modern state reaches its intellectual peak in Hegel’s treat-ment of it. The history of the concept of the state entails a rejection of classical (i.e. Greek and Roman) political thought’s understanding of political community as a natural condition (that is to say environment or habitat) for human beings. Rather, ‘the state’ connotes a human construct that is nothing but the disembodied will of the body politic. It does have a will, however, and that will is the collective force underlying the legiti-macy of its political rule. But if the state has a will, are we to understand it as a moral person? This is a question that has haunted modern political thought after Kant and Hegel. It was this emphasis on unity and will that turned off the early generation of behavioral scholars of politics. This view of politics as unifying ‘will’ was thought to leave out or fail to address things that had a much greater impact on the political behavior of human beings than the formal administrative institutionalism that followed from this understanding of the state as the sole and fundamental political actor.

The trajectory of the modern state as the only political form

The focus on wills is why the concept of sovereignty becomes so key to the direction taken by modern politics. Its emphasis on the logic of a unitary will renders Aristotle’s politeia highly problematic, since politeia by its very character is an order of parts within a discrete set of parts that happen to form a given community (koinonia) of households (oikoi). This type of construction is too dynamic and too interactive – even though the various parts share a common life together and all that will entail – but they never form a single or shared will. Hence the modern view of sovereignty that Hobbes finally incor-porates and transforms in his construction of the social compact that creates the state – the modern form of the human political community.

Hobbes’ construction of the modern state as a product of the social contract he so famously describes in his Leviathan takes Machiavelli’s concept of the state and gives it a new more powerful form – allocating to the state the power of the collective will of all the conjoining members of the contracting union gives the state godlike powers that Machiavelli’s model could not. Hobbes offers Machiavelli’s state the means to become like god – echoing the serpent in the Genesis account of the Fall of Adam and Eve.

Also the rise of this state – the moral god – occurs at the same time as the breakdown of the medieval political system, when various powerful kings of entire ethnic nations competed for power with other such kings and were no longer willing to submit to papal authority. All this happens right around the time of the Reformation. One of the strongest voices criticizing the Roman Church and the Bishop of Rome and his interference in temporal matters was the former diplomat, Niccolo Machiavelli, who served in the late Florentine Republic. Before the restoration of the Medici family’s power over the city of Florence, Machiavelli served as a diplomat of the Republic at many powerful courts of Europe, including the Vatican. His first-hand witness to the political intrigue that led to the Spanish and later French invasion of Italy and their power grab over parts of Italy led him to be highly critical not only of the contemporary Italian political systems of City-Republics, but also of the role the Vatican played in this sorry story. What Machiavelli

Bates 9

sought was an Italy that would be free from foreign control; yet such an Italy would never come from the set of political powers that governed Italy at the time, and especially never from the Vatican and the Roman clergy.

What Machiavelli demanded was a revolution in thinking about the political system that would have to govern Italy if it were ever to become free. And for Machiavelli, such a system would be the state, led and created by a strong and powerful prince (or lawgiver, as in his other work The Discourse, which tells his readers, mainly those with more lei-sure time given its great length, all he had learned about politics). For Machiavelli, the state would be the tool by which the prince would establish his rule and free Italy from foreign powers, including the Roman Church. Yet Machiavelli’s understanding of the state was still too tied to a personal ruler, despite his setting of the state by which the nation can effectively be governed in such a manner that it empowers the nation so that it can seek glory and dominance over its peers. In fact Machiavelli’s use of the concept of stato as an instrument of princely will to give ‘new modes and orders’ suggests that it is an instrument of form, that which gives shape to the principality or republic (de Alvarez,1989: xii–xvii, xxxii–xxxiii; Hexter, 1956: 113–138; Mansfield, 1983: 849–857; see also Strauss, 1989: 39–55). Conceptually Machiavelli’s concept of stato has more in common with the Greek concept politeia (regime/political system) than with the unit of political community – the polis – and is thus different from how the state as transformed by Hobbes will appear (see Mansfield, 1983: 849–857). For Machiavelli, the state is that which forms and gives shape to the prince’s will and thus gives order to the civic space, be it republic or principality. It is thus the formal part that shapes the entire body of the civic space, as in classical political thought the politeia shapes the polis as a whole.

If Machiavelli still relies to a great degree upon an older version of the ruler and bod-ied sovereign, Bodin offers a more important transition to the modern conception of sovereignty as the territorial body politic of a nation or people. Although Bodin’s under-standing of sovereignty still places kingly power under the norms of law, and justice as found in the natural law teaching of the Catholic Church in the late Middle Ages, his introduction of the concept of ‘the body politic’ provides the needed transition to what Hobbes does with this concept.4

Bodin does this because he is trying to find a place for the recovery and revival of political rule that followed the Renaissance rediscovery of classical thought and the power of various Italian city-states that had embraced the concept of the republic. The recovery of the possibility of political rule and the recovery of classical understanding of politics as separate in form from household rule required either a change of political speech, which at the time spoke of princely rule and the princely cbody – his body and his territorial body – or a whole new political language. Given the negative reaction to Machiavelli’s even minor revolution, any radical break with the political concepts and language of the past would not be successful. To avoid the perception that monarchy and the princely system and the new recovery of political and republican rule were funda-mentally different on their level of being and thus incompatible with each other, Bodin had to find a way to allow both systems to find a common political language. So, using the language of the sovereign’s body and allowing the political community to be under-stood as this territorial body, Bodin finds a way to connect these two traditions of rule (Bodin, 1993).


Thus Bodin’s reading of both the classical republican tradition and classical under-standing of politics works within the linguistic construct of reality of feudal and kingly rule. And this was accomplished by separating the civic space from the territory of the household. One must keep in mind the intimate connection between the property-owner and his property (as most clearly expressed in the concept of the king’s two bodies) and how this would blur household rule and political rule if this connection had to be extended to non-monarchical/princely forms of rule. Thus the concept of the ruler’s owning the property of the territory had simply to be extended. The ruler’s actual physical body had to be divorced from the territorial body, especially if this concept was going to work when speaking about political systems where numerous persons shared in ruling. Hence Bodin’s treatment of the body politic – his use of the commonplace medieval political concept and his re-appropriation of that concept as merely the given territorial political unit from which the ruler’s power emanates as sovereignty (Bodin, 1993). Bodin offers a solution to this problem of the immanent connection between the land and territory of the ruler and the actual body of the ruler by merely separating one from the other and seeing the royal person as completely separate-able from the territorial unit, which for Bodin was merely the body politic.

Yet at the same time Bodin still really had no way to resolve the tension between monarchy and republican-political rule. Yes, they could now talk to each other and explain their forms of ruling in the same way, however Bodin’s solution was not a solu-tion but more of a ruse to mask the problem, so as to protect this infant recovery of clas-sical politics from the ruling order suppressing it, as previous projects of philosophic/intellectual recovery had been doing throughout the Middle Ages.

If Bodin’s use of the concept of the body politic is a ruse to protect the recovery of classical politics and help restore political-republican rule, Hobbes takes Bodin’s con-cept and sets it firmly on clear and consistent philosophical ground. For it is really with Hobbes that the modern concept of sovereignty gets its clearest formulation and expres-sion. For Hobbes the formation of the body politic and its sovereign body arises from the social contract, wherein people consent to form such a body for their mutual security and protection from the war of all against all that nature permits.

The introduction of the Machiavellian concept of the state had an immediate impact on the political scene of the 16th century. When various political actors of the period embraced the concept of ‘the state’, they found their political fortunes altered. The con-cept of the modern state was simply so effective in organizing and empowering the political actors of the time that it changed the balance of forces among the various politi-cal actors of the day within the structure of the Res publica Christiana or the political embodiment of Christendom that was the remains of the Holy Roman Empire – an order founded by Charlemagne but limited to the feudal mechanism that shaped and consti-tuted its form and structure and thus never really as effective or as powerful as the Roman Imperium. The political actors who rejected the existing political modes and orders and opted for the new Machiavellian ones found themselves at a competitive advantage over those political actors who refused to follow in kind. This imbalance of power and ability led to a challenge to the status quo of the Res publica Christiana and the imperial institu-tions that gave political shape to it.

Bates 11

The rise of the actors on the political scene who embraced the state to achieve their ambitions – either by domestic or for foreign conquest – in doing so destabilized the given international political order of the Res publica Christiana, which was the given political order that shaped the political environment of the Middle Ages. The new unsta-ble environment caused by the introduction of the state onto the political scene led to conflict, but not the type of conflict that usually defined the conflict of competing rulers fighting for new realms to rule or merely to retain their reigns. The state was definitely a game-changer, and those actors who embraced and established their rule into a state tended to be at a competitive advantage over those rulers who failed to embrace the con-cept of the state or failed to establish a state in lieu of their older forms of rule.

The breakdown of the Res publica Christiana also broke the rule of the ius gentium that had governed the European political environment from the time of the Roman Empire to this point in time. The ius gentium defined rules of ruling (what rulers and any other political actor could or could not do) and the rules that restrained what political actors of the time could or could not do in regard both to each other and to their subjects. The law of nations that the Romans gave and which the Res publica Christiana retained use of (and by retaining its use claimed this was evidence that it was the true successor to the Roman Empire in the West) shaped the environment of political action before the introduction of the concept of the modern state.

The state changed the game so much that the old rules that defined and helped govern the interaction of political actors no longer seemed to work well with the new political environment of the interaction of states with other states. Hence the old international law resting on the Roman ius gentium no longer reflected the political realities that the state produced. Thus there was a need for new international law to govern or help govern the interaction of states and provide useful limits in order to prevent the type of conflict that these states could bring about.

As Machiavelli noted, the new mode and order of the state would lead to innovations in military affairs, and those innovations in military affairs fundamentally altered both the ways wars would be waged but also their impact on all parties caught up in conflict. Thus the new laws of nations were as much a means to regulate and control states and their actions among themselves as to avoid the negative consequences of the new power that the state gave to the actors using it, while allowing and encouraging positive consequences.

The outbreak of the Thirty Years War is all too often attributed to the Reformation and the breakdown of the religious consensus that it brought to the Res publica Christiana. But this view is a bit too one-sided and totally misses the impact that the modern state had on the given political environment that made any repeat of the Treaty of Augsburg impossible. Why? Because the Treaty of Augsburg operated mainly under the legal and institutional frame of the imperial instruments of the existing imperial order. It was exactly those institutional bodies that were for the most part unable to effectively com-pete against the new mode and orders of the modern state. This was primarily due to how the empire’s guardians understood the character and the role of those institutions in their traditional legal form as instruments maintaining order over the inferior bodies under their authority. The outcome of the Thirty Years War required recognition of the new international environment as that of the reign of states, and they collectively, not the


empire acting on behalf of all, were to be the instrument enforcing the peace brought about by the Treaty of Westphalia.

It could be said that the Treaty of Westphalia merely recognized the reality of a system of states and established a set of norms by which states would be guided in order to pre-vent future breakdown into total war. The horrors of the Thirty Years War were so recog-nized and so destructive that no state actor, especially those Germanic-Bohemian state actors who bore the brunt of the war’s consequences, doubted that any repeat of such a war was to be avoided. Therefore a new international law to guide the community of states was needed. This is where Hugo Grotius comes into play. It could rightfully be said that he helped to shape the Westphalian system that would govern affairs until very recent times.

Some might argue that I am neglecting Francisco Suárez. But I would suggest that Suárez, in his attempt to remain within the Thomistic/Scholastic tradition of natural law, thus sought only to modify and fix the existing Thomistic/Scholastic Natural Law under-standing of the ius gentium rather than establish a new system, which Grotius seems to be doing. Grotius, not being so indebted to or much enamored with this Scholastic/Thomistic tradition, was not averse to following in Machiavelli’s footsteps and establish-ing new modes and orders. Although for him the older pre-Thomistic natural right tradi-tions were still helpful, the need was to help allow the modern state to work within a framework that was not created to deal with it. Whereas Machiavelli had no concern with the claims of natural right, or at least made no open attempt to give heed to those claims, Grotius sought to find the natural right that would work for states and help govern and balance the actions of states per se. Thus for Grotius, the establishment of modern inter-national law becomes the only means by which the concept of natural right can remain in any way meaningful for the modern state.

To repeat: the older classical tradition of natural right was not created in view of the actions of states, since the very concept of the state did not exist when the tradition of classical natural right emerged and evolved into the ius gentium of later periods. The fact that classical natural right was not established for states but for the forms of political community that preceded it (the polis and later the empire as a form of cosmopolis as found in the Stoic rewrite of natural right), also led to the fact that it also was not neces-sarily able to deal with various political concepts that emerge out of the modern state – that of sovereignty, legitimacy, etc. If one looks within classical natural right for the concept of either sovereignty or legitimacy – to name the two biggest new items that flowed from the concept of that state – one will look in vain because these concepts are nowhere to be found in the works of authors of classical natural right because they did not yet exist as such. Thus natural right needs to either be modified or re-cast to allow for the state to fit within it. Grotius opted for a refit but a more thorough refit than Suárez would offer.

Grotius’ recasting of classical natural right to accommodate the state, and the prob-lems that the state brings into the issues that shape classical natural right, thereby recasts a new law of nations so as to allow it to be more effective than the older ius gentium in dealing with the outcomes and actions the new state gives heed to.

Now the means that give shape to this new recasting of natural right is Grotius’ intro-duction of the realm of nature (albeit a nature that is inherently social) out of which the

Bates 13

state is to emerge. This new realm of nature in Grotius allows for the state to arise and for the possibility that in prior times there might not have been states – a view that is historically factual insofar as the state is a product of modern political thought and not present in classical or medieval political thought. This state of nature Grotius speaks of helps address why states emerge where before there were no states. This is because Grotius realizes that the state is an emerging political property and not simply one that would be found continually in all human history. So there is a period of political or social action prior to the existence of the state that needed to be addressed. Thus this concept of the state of nature can help explain the interaction between the pre- and post-state stages of political development. Nonetheless Grotius’ ‘state of nature’ remains more true to the classical natural right tradition of classical political philosophy because it remains social. Because the historical contingency of the state leads to a separation between the state per se and the natural social condition of man, the state is that political form allowing for a more perfect ordering of man’s social nature. Although Grotius’ use of a state of nature allows Hobbes to seem to follow in his steps with similar insistence, there exists a state of human condition prior to the advent of the state. But unlike Grotius’ concept, Hobbes’ state of nature is not only pre-state but pre-social.

For Hobbes the commonwealth that emerges from the social compact is said to be an artificial person. All too often people misread Hobbes and his discussion here, and read the creation of the commonwealth as that of an actual incarnate, i.e. bodied, sovereign. This is far from what Hobbes is saying. The sovereign in Hobbes cannot be embodied by a single being in that it is the collective agreement, the collective will of those who agreed to form the commonwealth. Thus the sovereign is the collective embodiment of all those who form the commonwealth and cause its creation out of the chaos of nature. Hobbes’ sovereign in Hobbes is thus the collective will of those who created the political community via the social contract. So for Hobbes, the body politic, the commonwealth, the state, and the sovereign are different terms all ultimately expressing the same thing.

Thus sovereignty is the will of those who form the civic association, body politic, political community, state, or whatever you call it. In Hobbes’ reasoning, then, the state is the whole, not an instrument or part as it was in Machiavelli (Hobbes, 1991 [1651]). Hobbes thus makes a much more radical break with classical teaching about the political community than does Machiavelli, in that for the classical model the ruling element is a part of the whole (that claims to be acting for the whole’s best interest and for its good – yet it remains a part of the whole) rather than the body politic or political community in itself. In classical political thought the ruling part, or politieia (regime/political sys-tem), is not identical with the political community, rather it is the part that gives shape to and forms the given direction in which the political community will go. Whereas for Hobbes, the state is the whole community, for it is constituted by those forming it when they form the social compact that solidifies and confirms their creation of one single community.

Thus for Hobbes the community is a product of human willing, not of mere human association, and so the creation of a community is a product of human will, not human nature (Hobbes, 1991 [1651]). Being a product of human willing, the political commu-nity knows no limit. The territory of the body politic is therefore not a factor in the logic of Hobbes’ thinking. Territory is tied to people who form the community when they join


together via the social contract. So the act of willing to join together that frames the con-tractual character of the origins of the state, Hobbes merely takes for granted given com-munities of people or nations (Hobbes, 1991 [1651]). But there is no logical reason within Hobbes’ framework why contracting parties must be of the same racial, ethnic or territorial make-up. To be sure, such a condition will make contracting easier, but such parts or limits have no role in the basic logic of the Hobbesian state.

Notes

1. For the argument that this mixing of differing sources of political authority is the cause of modern liberal parliamentary democracy, see Hintze (1975: 302–353).

2. Susemihl and Guillaume (2011) is the only readily accessible copy of William of Moerbecke’s translations of the Politics of Aristotle. It is basically Susemihl’s edition of Moerbeck’s Latin text and with a cross-comparison of Immanuel Bekker’s edition of the Greek text.

3. Beyond the scope of this article would be the full spelling out of how Medieval Christian Christology influenced the understanding of the political community in Medieval Christian political thought. For a further explanation, see note 4. For the death of the Greek invention of politics (as explained by Meier, 1990), see Wood (2008).

4. The ‘Body Politic’ language is firmly a product of medieval Christian political thought (see Black, 1992; Canning, 1996). One of the most explicit treatments of it is by Christine de Pizan in The Book of the Body Politic (de Pizan, 1994). De Pizan and her treatment of the body politic is a much more secularized version of what Ernst Kantorowicz proposes in his 1957 classic The King’s Two Bodies (Kantorowicz, 1957). In this work, Kantorowicz views the sovereign state in human politics as a secular alienation of the understanding of Christ’s two bodies – that of Christ himself and the Church, a duality symbolized by Christ as God and Christ as the host in the Eucharist. Thus the dual nature of Christ was transferred to the earthly embodiment of Christ’s rule, the secular king as an agent of divine justice.

The body politic was thus the landed and territorial body of the King, versus his cor-poreal body. And thereby the territorial reign of the given ruler thus increasing came to be understood as a body. And the body metaphor for the political thinkers of the Middle Ages, contra the metaphor of the soul (psyche) – which was the metaphor Plato and Aristotle used – became increasingly used as the dominant way to understand the nature of the political community. This reliance on the political community as being understood via the analogy of a body led to the view that the teaching of Plato and Aristotle about the political community was ‘organic’.

References

Bates Jr CA (2014) The centrality of politeia for Aristotle’s Politics: Aristotle’s continuing signifi-cance for social and political science. Social Science Information 53(1): 139–159.

Black A (1992) Political Thought in Europe, 1250–1450. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Blythe JM (1992) Ideal Government and the Mixed Constitution in the Middle Ages. Princeton,

NJ: Princeton University Press.Bodin J (1993) Les Six Livres de la République. Paris: Livre de Poche.Canning J (1996) A History of Medieval Political Thought: 300–1450. New York, NY: Routledge.De Alvarez LPS (tr.) (1989) Niccolo Machiavelli: The Prince. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland

Press.De Pizan C (1994 [1404–1407]) The Book of the Body Politic, ed. & tr. Langdon Forhan K.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bates 15

Grant A (1885) The Ethics of Aristotle. London: Longmans, Green & Co. (4th ed., rev., 2 vols)Hexter JH (1956) Il Principe and lo stato. Studies in the Renaissance 4: 113–138.Hintze O (1975) The preconditions of representative government in the context of world history.

In: Gilbert F (ed.) The Historical Essays of Otto Hintze. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 302–355.

Hobbes T (1991 [1651]) Leviathan, ed. Tuck R. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Kant I (1991) Kant: Political writings, ed. Reiss H. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Kantorowicz E (1957) The King’s Two Bodies. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Lord C (1984) Aristotle: The Politics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Manent P (1994a) An Intellectual History of Liberalism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Manent P (1994b) The modern state. In: Lilla M (ed.) New French Thought: Political philosophy.

Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 123–133.Manent P (1994c) The contest for command. In: Lilla M (ed.) New French Thought: Political

philosophy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 178–185.Mansfield Jr HC (1983) On the impersonality of the modern state: A comment on Machiavelli’s

use of Stato. American Political Science Review 77(4): 849–857.Meier C (1990) The Greek Discovery of Politics, tr. McLintock D. Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press.Rousseau JJ (1964) The First and Second Discourses by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, tr. Masters R,

Masters J. New York, NY: St Martin’s Press.Rubinstein N (1987) The history of the word politicus in early modern Europe. In: Pagden A

(ed.) The Languages of Political Theory in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 41–56.

Strauss L (1936) The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: Its basis and its genesis, tr. Sinclair EM. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. (reissued 1962)

Strauss L (1953) Natural Right and History. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Strauss L (1989) An Introduction to Political Philosophy: Ten essays by Leo Strauss, ed. Gildin H.

Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press.Susemihl F, Guillaume F (eds) (2011) Aristotelis Politicorvm Libri Octo. Marston Gate: Ulan

Press.Wood EM (2008) Citizens to Lords: A social history of western political thought from Antiquity to

the Late Middle Ages. London: Verso.

Additional reading

Agamben G (1998) Homo Sacer: Sovereign power and bare life, tr. Heller-Roazen D. Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press

Ambler W (1985) Aristotle’s understanding of the naturalness of the city. Review of Politics 47: 53–95.

Arendt H (1958) The Human Condition. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.Arnhart L (1990) Aristotle, chimpanzees, and other political animals. Social Science Information

29(1): 479–559.Arnhart L (1994) The Darwinian biology of Aristotle’s political animals. American Journal of

Political Science 38: 464–485.Arnhart L (1995) The new Darwinian naturalism in political theory. American Political Science

Review 89: 289–400.Bates Jr CA (2003) Aristotle’s Best Regime. Baton Rouge, LA: LSU Press.Bennington G (2008) For better and for worse (there again …). Diacritics 38(1–2): 92–103.Bennington G (2009) Political animals. Diacritics 39(2): 21–35.


Bluhm W (1962) The place of ‘polity’ in Aristotle’s theory of the ideal state. Journal of Politics 24(4): 743–753.

Bookman JT (1992) The wisdom of the many: An analysis of the arguments of Book III and IV of Aristotle’s Politics. History of Political Thought 13(1): 1–12.

Cherry KM (2009) The problem of polity: Political participation and Aristotle’s best politeia. Journal of Politics 71(4): 1406–1421.

Coby P (1986) Aristotle’s four concepts of politics. Western Political Science Quarterly 39(3): 480–503.

Coby P (1988) Aristotle’s three cities and the problem of factions. Journal of Politics 50(4): 896–919.

Dahl R (1956) A Preface to Democratic Theory. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Dahl R (1964) Modern Political Analysis. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.Dahl R (1971) Polarchy: Participation and opposition. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Dahl R (1982) Dilemmas of Pluralist Democracy. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Davis M (1996) The Politics Of Philosophy: A commentary on Aristotle’s Politics. Savage, MD:

Rowman & Littlefield.Derrida J (2009) The Beast and the Sovereign, Vol. I, tr. Bennington G. Chicago, IL: University

of Chicago Press.Derrida J (2012) The Beast and the Sovereign, Vol. II, tr. Bennington G. Chicago, IL: University

of Chicago Press.De Tocqueville A (2000) Democracy in America, tr. & ed. Mansfield Jr HC, Winthrop D. Chicago,

IL: University of Chicago Press.Dreizhnter A (1970) Aristoteles’ Politica. Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag.Diamond M (1981) The Founding of the Democratic Republic. Itasca, IL: FE Peacock.Dietz M (2012) Between polis and empire: Aristotle’s Politics. American Political Science Review

106(2): 275–293.Easton D (1953) The Political System. An inquiry into the state of political science. New York,

NY: Knopf.Everson S (ed.) (1996) Aristotle: The Politics and the constitution of Athens. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.Farrar C (1988) The Origins of Democratic Thinking. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Finer SE (1997) The History of Government from the Earliest Times. Oxford: Oxford University

Press. (3 vols)Finley MI (1985) Democracy Ancient and Modern. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

(rev. ed.)Forsyth M, Keens-Soper M (1988) A Guide to the Political Classics. Oxford: Oxford University

Press.Fukuyama F (1992) The End of History and the Last Man. New York, NY: The Free Press.Fukuyama F (2011) The Origins of Political Order. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus & Giroux.Hansen MH (1994) Polis, Politeuma and Politeia: A Note on Arist. Pol. 1278b6-14. In: From

Political Architecture to Stephanus Byzantius: Sources for the ancient Greek polis. Stuttgart: F Steiner.

Hardt M, Negri A (2000) Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Jaffa HV (1975) What is politics? An interpretation of Aristotle’s Politics. In: Jaffa HV, The

Conditions of Freedom. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 9–72.Keyt D (1987) Three fundamental theorems in Aristotle’s Politics. Phronesis 32: 54–79.Keyt D (ed. & tr.) (1999) Aristotle’s Politics, Books V and VI. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Keyt D, Miller F (eds) (1991) A Companion to Aristotle’s ‘Politics’. Oxford: Blackwell.Kraut D (1999) Aristotle: Politics V and VI. Oxford. Clarendon Press.

Bates 17

Kraut D (2002) Aristotle: Political philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Kullman W (1980) Der Mensch als politisches Lebewesen bei Aristoteles [Man as a political ani-

mal in Aristotle]. Hermes 108: 456–477. (An English translation appears in Keyt D, Miller F (eds) (1991) A Companion to Aristotle’s Politics. Oxford: Blackwell, 94–117.)

Manent P (1995) Christianity and democracy, tr. Mahoney D, Seaton P. Crisis, Part I (January): 40–44; Part II (February): 42–48.

Manent P (2006) A World Beyond Politics: A defense of the nation-state. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Mansfield Jr HC (1989) Taming the Prince. New York, NY: The Free Press.Mansfield Jr HC (1995) Self-interest rightly understood. Political Theory 21(1): 48–66.Masters RD (1989a) Gradualism and discontinuous change in evolutionary theory and political

philosophy. Journal of Social and Biological Structures 12: 281–301.Masters RD (1989b) The Nature of Politics. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Mulgan RG (1974) Aristotle’s doctrine that man is a political animal. Hermes 120: 438–445.Mulgan RG (1977) Aristotle’s Political Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Newman WL (ed.) (1973) Aristotle’s The Politics. New York, NY: Arno Press. (4 vols)Nichols MP (1991) Citizens and Statesmen. Savage, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.Pascal M, Gruengard O (1989) Knowledge and Politics. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.Pocock JGA (1975) The Machiavellian Moment. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Popper K (1945) The Enemies of the Open Society. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. (2 vols)Rasmussen D, Den Uyl D (1991) Liberty and Order: An Aristotelian defence of liberal order.

LaSalle, IL: Open Court.Reeve CDC (1998) Aristotle The Politics. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing.Robinson R (ed. & tr.) (1962) Aristotle’s Politics Book III and IV. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Ross WD (1957) Aristotle’s Politica. Oxford: Clarendon.Rousseau JJ (1978) On the Social Contract, ed. Masters R, tr. Masters J. New York, NY:

St Martins Press.Sachs J (ed. & tr.) (2012) Aristotle The Politics. Newburyport, MA: Focus Publishing.Saunders TJ (ed. & tr.) (1991) Aristotle The Politics. New York, NY: Penguin.Saunders TJ (ed. & tr.) (1995) Aristotle, Politics: Books I and II. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Saxonhouse A (1992) The Fear of Diversity. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press.Schmitt C (1976) The Concept of the Political, tr. Schwab G. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers

University Press.Simpson PLP (ed. & tr.) (1997) The Politics of Aristotle – Translation and introduction. Chapel

Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.Simpson PLP (1998) A Philosophical Commentary on the Politics of Aristotle. Chapel Hill, NC:

University of North Carolina Press.Strauss L (1988 [1959]) What is Political Philosophy?: And other studies. Chicago, IL: University

of Chicago Press.Strauss L (1991) On Tyranny, ed. Gourevitch V, Roth MS. New York, NY: The Free Press. (rev.

and expanded ed.)Susemihl F, Hicks R (1894) The Politics of Aristotle. London: Macmillan.Swanson JA, Corbin CD (2009) Aristotle’s Politics. London: Continuum Press.Terence I (ed. & tr.) (1985) Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett.Tilly C (2006) Regimes and Repertoires. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Vlassopoulos K (2007) Unthinking the Greek Polis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Von Fritz K (1954) Theory of the Mixed Constitution in Antiquity. New York, NY: Columbia

University Press.Wilson JQ (1993) The Moral Sense. New York, NY: The Free Press.


Yack B (1985) Community and conflict in Aristotle’s political philosophy. Review of Politics 47: 169–188.

Zuckert C (1992) Aristotle’s practical political science. In: Rubin L (ed.) Politikos, II: Educating for ambition. Pittsburg, PA: Duquesne University Press, 144–165.

Author biography

Clifford Angell Bates holds a PhD in Political Science from Northern Illinois University, DeKalb (IL). Since 2002 he has been a professor at Warsaw University’s Department of American Studies (Warsaw, Poland), as well as, from 2004, an instructor for the Masters of Diplomacy Program in the Online Graduate Program at Norwich University (Northfield, VT, USA).

the marginalization of aristotles polite

Documents