Aristotle's Politics

The ancients are seductive. Although Aristotle is very clearly the product of significant cultural accumulation, there remains a sense, a feeling, that in order to understand this, I don’t really have to go further back. Aristotle is not to be explained, but rather explains; of course an illusion, but a sort of pleasant one. I have begun, perhaps wrongly, with The Politics. I’m using the translation by Jonathan Barnes, in the Cambridge edition edited by Stephen Everson.

The physicality of Aristotle’s analysis is striking. There are definitions and distinctions, but the project itself never gets very far away from the practical being-together of human beings. One reason I turned, finally, to Aristotle is Hannah Arendt. Yet her notion of ‘the political’ is infinitely more abstracted than his. I saw recently an article, I think in JHI, pointing out that the polis is always implicit behind Arendt’s discussion of the political. Reading On Revolution, I myself wanted to ask about place in the sense of geography. If I had more energy, I would dig back through the book, and submit this notion of the place of politics to a critique with the resources suggested in David Harvey’s Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom. It becomes a problem for Arendt’s whole way of thinking that politics only really happens when humans are face to face, talking with one another. This seems totally inadequate to the modern world, a sort of deep utopianism. In a sort of reverse move, Claude Lefort’s formalism (for lack of a better word), seems equally utopian, so abstracted from the essential problem of getting human beings to do one thing rather than another, as to be, well, philosophically rather than politically useful.

Aristotle, on the other hand, is never far not only from humans facing one another, but from their bodies themselves. The Politics begins with a consideration of the practical necessities for the sustenance of human life. It ends with what seems today to be an over-long consideration on the proper place of music in education—what effect do certain rhythmic structures and music modes have on the development of body and mind? Aristotle often compares the state to a body, in order to argue that proper proportion is crucial for excellence. Yet more physical, bodily, evidence runs throughout the work. For instance in book V, which treats revolutions and is, interesting, the most empirical chapter, we get the following example, “In the conspiracy against Archelaus, Decamnichus stimulated the fury of the assassins and led the attack; he was enraged because Archelaus had delivered him to Euripides to be scourges; for the poet had been irritated at some remark made by Decamnichus on the foulness of his breath” (1311b.30). The passions of individuals are always an important consideration in politics—sex, therefore, is never far away. Also in book V, in the Machiavellian second half (on preventing revolutions), he advises, “neither he [the tyrant] nor any of his associates should ever assault the young of either sex who are his subjects, and the women of his family should observe a like self-control towards other women; the insolence of women has ruined many tyrannies” (1314b.25). I don’t remember Machiavelli talking particularly about sex; I do remember, however, that he says it is better to kill a man’s relative than strip him of his property, because he will forget the former faster than the latter. I doubt Aristotle—despite several times repeating the parable about cutting down the tallest corn-stalks—could bring himself to think such a thing.

Related to this, and one of the moments of estrangement for me in the text, were all the discussions of the common meal. It was evidently a widespread custom in the polis for all the citizens to eat meals in common, not always in one place, since their numbers were too great, but in common eating-rooms. Aristotle at several points discusses the best way of organizing this custom, its benefits, the problems that can arise. More than that, though, the example and metaphor of the public feast is nearly as important for him as is that of the body. This is to say that the physiognomy of the feast is well enough known that it can serve as evidence for other things. For instance, “Now any member of the assembly, taken separately, is certainly inferior to the wise man. But the state is made up of many individuals. And as a feast to which all the guests contribute I better than a banquet furnished by a single man, so a multitude is a better judge of many things than an individual” (1286a.28). Perhaps the importance of the meal in common should not surprise me (there is, after all, the Symposium, or Banquet). Still, it is a reminder of a very different mental world underneath what sometimes seems like quite a familiar one. Although, the familiarity and strangeness of this, “children should have something to do, and the rattle of Archytas, which people give to their children in order to amuse them and prevent them from breaking anything in the house, was a capital invention, for a young thing cannot be quiet” (1340b.26), with loud children everyone is familiar, but the idea that you might be able to cite the name of the person who invented the rattle…well, here is just another reason for the seductive (which is to say, to be resisted) feeling that Aristotle is in some profound way an origin, a beginning.

I have read elsewhere references to, discussions of, Aristotle’s treatment of the economy in The Politics. More interesting was what I can only call a sociology of political forms that emerges from its pages. For instance,

The first governments were kingships, probably for this reason because of old, when cities were small, men of eminent excellence were few. Further, they were made kings because they were benefactors, and benefits can only be bestowed by good men. But when many persons equal in merit arose, no longer enduring the pre-eminence of one, they desired to have a commonwealth, and set up a constitution. The ruling class soon deteriorated and enriched themselves out of the public treasury; riches became the path to honour, and so oligarchies naturally grew up. These passes into tyrannies and tyrannies into democracies; for love of gain in the ruling classes was always tending to diminish their number, and so to strengthen the masses who in the end set upon their masters and established democracies. Since cities have increased in size, no other form of government appears to be any longer even easy to establish. (1286b.10-20)

This is not so very far away from certain pages in, say, Durkheim’s Division du travail social, on the extent and density of society. Although I’m wary of the term ‘middle-class’ as it appears in this translation, we must surely also see a sort of political sociology behind such statements as, “a government which is composed of the middle class more nearly approximates to democracy than to oligarchy, and is the safest of the imperfect forms of government” (1302a.14). It is hard not to find some kind of Tocquevillian ‘proleptic shadow’ in an analysis of the present such as this, “Royalties do not now come into existence; where such forms of government arise, they are rather monarchies or tyrannies. For the rule of a king is over voluntary subjects, and his is supreme in all important matters; but in our own day men are more and more upon an equality, and no one is so immeasurably superior to others as to represent adequately the greatness and dignity of the office” (1313a.4-9). Aristotle comes to the conclusion that “the best material of democracy is an agricultural population” (1318b.10) through a consideration of the economic necessities of agriculture, and the (few) possibilities it leaves open for political activity. The examples of this sort of thing could be multiplied.

The point for me is that this sort of analysis—linking political forms to quite concrete social realities—no longer seems to make any sense. Why is that? An obvious answer would be that Aristotle’s world was the polis, most of which contained similar institutions, and most of which were small enough that their leadership could not be too separate from their day-to-day life. A person such as Aristotle might well come to know a great deal about all parts of life in such a society. Today, this is simply no longer possible. Even a reasonably small polity is massively more diverse than a Greek polis. But of course this line of reasoning, although it abolishes itself at the end, is just the same as Aristotle’s—it basis political theory on practical reality, although it begins by claiming that the practical reality is unknowable. I think the key here really is the space of politics. For Aristotle and Arendt, it was contained, limited, knowable. Today it is endlessly multiple. The question would be, is it fractal, and therefore in a sense knowable? or is it chaotic and basically available only in fragments? The Marxist answer is fractal, the ‘liberal’ one chaotic. That’s one way of thinking about things, at any rate.

Although I’ve said almost nothing about the ‘political theory’ elaborated in The Politics (what is democracy? What is a polity? What is the nature of a good constitution?), I will finish by remarking on the adjectival nature of most of Aristotle’s analyses. (I am tempted to grammatically summarize Greek philosophy: Heraclitus, verbs; Plato, nouns; Aristotle, adjectives—have I read that somewhere before?) Although Aristotle does, of course, describe ‘an oligarchy’ or ‘a tyranny,’ the bulk of his theoretical elaboration, it seems to me, goes into establishing the ends, therefore the natures, of these forms and then pointing to certain institutions as democratic, oligarchical, and so forth. I had often in the past heard of Aristotle’s ‘teleological’ method, but I had not realized that this might be what it meant. How rigorously must this be distinguished from a Weberian notion of ‘ideal types’? It bears some thinking about.

Excess

The fact is that the greatest crimes are caused by excess and not by necessity. Men do not become tyrants in order that they may not suffer cold; and hence great is the honor bestowed, not on him who kills a thief, but on him who kills a tyrant.

Aristotle, The Politics, book II (1267, 14-16)

Modern War

Modris Eksteins' Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age begins with Sergei Diaghilev in a dreamlike and timeless Venice and ends in the bunker with Hitler in Berlin, surrounded by Soviet soldiers. Eksteins is continually overstating individual points and making questionable assertions, but the broader argument of the book is straightforward and compelling. The modernist spirit present in the pre-1914 world was intensified, broadened, and transformed by the experience of the war. The Europe that emerged in 1919 is comprehensible only in these terms. Ultimately, the Nazis are themselves to be understood as a modernist phenomena, art made life and life made art, thinkable only in a world dominated by the experience of the front and the trenches.

The final pages of Rites of Spring have troubling implications that point to my larger problem with the book. In particular the fevered passages from Goebbels' diary from the very last days of the war in which we read: “Now that everything is in ruins, we are forced to rebuild Europe...In trying to destroy Europe's future, the enemy has succeeded in smashing its past; and with that, everything old and outworn has gone” (cited on Eksteins 329). Which makes me think of the bitter irony Tony Judt suggests in Postwar—that the post-45 national and supra-national order in Europe found its stability in the massive human suffering inflicted by Hitler and Stalin. Inconvenient populations had simply been moved or eliminated; I believe the phrase from economics is 'creative destruction.'

One might have expected a less elegant and more 'theoretical' writer than Eksteins to make heavy use of the notion of trauma. Certainly the psychoanalytic idea has often been applied to the First World War, but also to wars and conflicts in general. I suspect that, if questioned on the subject, Eksteins would say that the concept of trauma is too decontextualized for his liking. The 'experience' of war described in his book is deeply contextual, depending on the world before, the world during, and the world after. It is neither a simple product of, nor abstractable from, the technical means of making war. The obvious question, though—and this is suggested only very gently by the preface of the book—must be what came after 1945. If the trauma of 1914-1918 (in the historical sense Eksteins might give the word) shapes the decades after it, what about the manifold traumas of the Second World War? Might it be argues that the First World War had a unity of experience that its sequel and continuation lacked? After all, the French, Germans, British, and to a lesser extent Americans, all fought the same sort of war on the same ground. The human cost (a polite war of saying 'body count'?) of 1939-1945 was considerably higher, in particular among noncombatants. But the shape of the war was different everywhere. Someone like Dominic LaCapra might agree that if we take the Shoah as the originary trauma of the contemporary world, it none the less imposed itself in a way totally different from the imposition of the experience of, say, Passchendaele. In what sense are both 'traumas'? I myself as skeptical of any very technical use of the term; none the less the notion of an experience or event that is repressed, that returns repeatedly, insisting on itself, that cannot be 'gotten past' but seems to call out for a 'working through' that always recedes into the distance—this is an image with descriptive power.

Given this, I'd like to ask Eksteins the question of periodization. I like already very much his suggestion that the turn is not with the guns of August, 1914. Rather, the turn takes place deep in the war, in the dark moments of 1916 when the 'true nature' of the senselessness of the war has become plain. Where is the next turn? Perhaps 1968 is a good symbolic year. In terms of Eksteins' framework, though, I think we would be better off seeing the 'lifestyle revolution' of 1968 as something like the very last gasp of the modernist paradigm enforced by the First World World. The real turn would come some time in the 1970s, with the extinguishing of this last revolutionary dream. The 'totalitarian' experience and its broken dialectic of individual and state-enforced totality, this is clearly unimaginable without the front experience. This is probably the limit of what can usefully be said about their relationship. Still, it does seem to me that Eksteins' story demands a sequel to explain how the post-war culture of the 20s and 30s confronted the new war, and the degree to which the world that came after 1945, despite the rhetoric of stunde nul, had indeed escaped from the trenches.

Rites of Spring is a book about modernism, perhaps not modernist art as such, but certainly modernism as a way of life, as an experience. Eksteins is an historian. He uses works of art in the service of a larger argument, rather than bringing history to bear on works of art. Still, there is an implicit argument about the nature of modernism: within the avant-garde, life and art become one, the rational is made to serve the irrational. This is Dada, this is fascism. As interesting comparison might be made to Arno Mayer. At various points, Eksteins insists on the bourgeois nature of the First World War. He also insists on the bourgeois nature of Germany, the most modernist of nations. I'm not convinced that the category 'bourgois' is a very important part of his argument. I think, therefore, it might be interesting, some time in the future, to compare Rites of Spring to Arno Mayer's Peristence of the Old Regime. They disagree, no doubt, about the importance of the avant-garde as a cultural formation. But that's for another day.