Aristotle and Modern Constitutionalism

2020

The moral evaluation of political power is justifiably a central subject in political philosophy. In its most important manifestation, political power is found in the state with its laws and government, which are formally and for the most part effectively supreme over all the other rules, institutions, and persons in any society. Political philosophy deals with the criteria for bringing this supreme instrument of political control under moral scrutiny, by subjecting them to moral requirements concerning their sources, limits, and purposes. This paper critically examines Aristotle’s idea of constitutionalism as an alternative model to Plato’s utopianism. It explores the interrelatedness of the concepts of constitution and constitutionalism. It attempts an exposition of Aristotle’s political philosophy with particular attention to his analysis and understanding of the rule of law. Methodologically, this work employs the qualitative research method; it is descriptive and adopts a textu...

2014

Everyone knows that, for Aristotle, ‘correct’ constitutions, unlike their ‘deviant’ counterparts, aim at the common advantage (§1). But interpreters routinely mistake, or ignore, the conceptual distinctiveness of characterizations of aim or purpose (§§2–3), a distinctiveness that Aristotle himself highlights (§4). This paper brings out the special nature of Aristotle’s thought on constitutional correctness, by emphasizing its intentional and therefore intensional aspect: a regime’s correctness hangs on its rulers’ practical self-understanding. The favored reading works to unite Books III and V of the Politics in an unfamiliar way, and it also unifies the idea of constitutional correctness with Aristotle’s treatment of virtue’s requirements from the Ethics (§5). The paper ends by suggesting an attractive but radical way of conceiving of Aristotle’s view as a kind of ‘virtue politics’ (§6). 1 A Sketch of the Intentionalist Reading When the one or the few or the many rule for the commo...

Rivista italiana di filosofia politica, 2024

Apeiron, 2016

For several decades, most philosophical studies of Aristotle's Politics have treated the work as more or less unified in substance, if not in form. Recently, however, a challenge to this emerging consensus has been raised by Mogens Herman Hansen, who maintains that the Politics in fact contains two fundamentally incompatible theories of constitutions (politeiai). Despite raising a number of legitimate interpretive problems, this challenge has gone unanswered by Aristotelian scholars. This paper considers Hansen's argument and seeks to resolve the puzzles it raises. Answering Hansen's challenge illuminates Aristotle's theory of constitutions and its place in his broader political theory.

This paper contends that, despite evidences, Aristotle’s view of aristocratic constitutions displays a heavily marked normative content. I argue that his understanding of aristocracy may be separated into four main strands: (i) an ideal type, based on the rotation of power of virtuous people over equally virtuous citizens (as evinced from a joint reading of Books III and IV); (ii) a type grounded on a fine blending of social classes, as emerging from a reading of Pol. IV, 7.1293b7-18 in the light of Politics IV,3.1290a24-29; (iii) a polity inclining toward oligarchy, which seems to lack any normative worth; (iv) an ‘aristocratic polity’, grounded on the political role of the middle class (Book IV.11). I shall propose that, in non-ideal conditions, type (iv) is the constitution which best accommodates (a) the need for stability and concord, (b) the search for an ideal of structural harmony and proportion among rulers and citizens.

Problemos

The aim of this paper is to discuss the issue of the best constitution given Aristotle’s account of human flourishing articulated in the Nicomachean Ethics. There, Aristotle claims that monarchy is the supreme form of constitution. A similar claim is repeated in Politics. The paper argues that these claims sit uneasily with Aristotle’s teleological accounts of the polis, the citizen, and his discussion of the virtues of the citizen and the good man in Politics. Given Aristotle’s philosophical definition of the state as “an association of equals for the sake of the best possible life” and his notion that “the best is happiness, and that consists in excellence and its perfect actualization and its employment”, and Aristotle’s argument on the relationship between the good man and the good citizen, this paper concludes that the best constitution is politeia. Yet, simply to argue so is not enough if we are to rescue Aristotle from his inconsistencies and his claims on “natural inequaliti...

2023

Contemporary political philosophies, which are sometimes referred to with the expression Marx used for false justifications, “ideologies”, are social or political theories. Political parties and social movements have their own ideology, that is to say, their “vision of the world.” Contemporary political science aims at making a neutral analysis of political reality, or a theory. Regimes, constitutions, political parties, elections are observed impartially, “from the point of view of Mars,” as the French saying goes. It is fundamentally theoretical research. For this purpose, current political science sometimes coins new expressions (for example, a democracy can be either consensus or majoritarian; dominant values can be materialistic or “expressive,” etc.). Aristotle’s “political science” is different from ours, first of all, because it sees politics as citizens or rulers facing concrete issues. His view is not essentially different from the commonsense view: it goes further, but in the same direction. It does not observe “political phenomena” from outside. There are no new technical words in his political books alien to the practical knowledge of Greek citizens, nor does he use “scientific” terminology (and even less inferences from a “theory”). His description of ethics and politics is certainly not intended to be neutral and begins precisely by studying what “good” means. In fact, politics has only recently become a theoretical science, moving radically away from the Aristotelian methods and perspective. We borrow from his vocabulary, but, as modern men, we try to make it precise and scientific. One of the keywords we borrow is the concept of citizenship. We no longer live in self-governing cities, but the concept “civic” and the very word “politics” derive from civitas and polis. In translations of the works of Plato and Aristotle, polis is sometimes incorrectly translated as “State” (or at best, as “city-state”), but the difference between polis and State is very profound. The ancient city is different from the modern State because Greek politics did not consist, as it does today, in managing a population within a certain territory. The Greek “regime” is not opposed to “civil society,” as distinct from political organization. The ancient city is not spontaneously born out of anarchy, like the modern state. The city must be founded by men and ordered by legislators. The political authority of the ancient city, sometimes compared to a ship, does not seek to organize a sort of cruise, where passengers live their own private lives while everyone is taken along by the cruise. Neither is the ancient political authority a “sovereign” who manages everything that exists in a territory, like a guard who manages a forest park; the sovereign rules men and distributes offices. In the polis, the free part of the population is called to participate actively in a special “institution” that is the city, with a view to the excellence and goodness of its members. Ethical inquiry aims at attaining nobility or good, and political inquiry aims at the good of all members of the city. None of these inquiries are “neutral” because neutrality would obscure the main object of the noble life and the place where virtue or excellence (arété) flourishes. “Natural justice” is not about the right of man as man, but part of political right. What is just by nature is only understood and can only flourish in the environment of the polis. This thesis is diametrically opposed to the later theses of Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau, for whom the formation of civil society implies moving away from the state of nature and is, therefore, unnatural. Only with Stoicism and Christianity did the good of man come to be understood as, if not alien or indifferent, much more important than, and “separable” from, political life, making citizenship infinitely less important. This is why today we think that a “merely” political question is somewhat less serious and profound than a moral one. Even so, we have the feeling that Aristotle’s books Ethics and Politics are of great interest to us, both from the historical and philosophical viewpoints, and continue to be read today. They contain provocative discussions on issues that have not vanished nor been resolved such as: citizenship, or the relationship between the individual and political authority; distributive and commutative justice; political regimes; the causes and remedies for political change and revolutions; the importance of the moral education of the citizenry. But if we have this feeling of familiarity when approaching these sorts of questions, it is because the essential concepts that we use today are derived from the concepts that Aristotle took from commonsense vocabulary. However different our political knowledge and political concepts are from Aristotle’s own, they are derived from his political science and notions.

On Civic Republicanism: Ancient Lessons for Global Politics, Vol. 4, 2014

Global Intellectual History, 2018

Straumann presents a grand narrative: Roman constitutionalism in the West from the age of Cicero to the American Founding Fathers. His project is forensic, mounting a case framed in terms of a dichotomy between the Greek ethical and political tradition of Plato and Aristotle which emphasizes civic virtue (Pocock’s classical republicanism), and the Roman-law based constitutionalism of Cicero (Skinner’s version). But this is too easy. Cicero was heavily influenced by Aristotle; and the very survival of Western civilization depended on translation movements, Greek into Arabic and Arabic into Latin under the Abbasid and Cordoba Caliphates, which preserved the classical Greek texts on which it rests, and recirculated them back to Europe. This had important implications for Islamic jurisprudence which was the progenitor of medieval European jurisprudence and scholastic dialectic. Justinian’s recovery of Roman Law and subsequent Medieval codifications are related to the impetus for the Isl...

Archiv fur Rechts- und Sozialphilosophie, 2008