Lawgiver, Aristotle's Politics

Note that at the time I wrote this, I was translating meaning number 3 of politeia as 'republic' (in its meaning number 2). I now use 'polity' and use 'republic' for meaning number 2 of politeia (political system without a monarch).

New and improved! Footnotes instead of endnotes (as in the book). I see that this originated in a presentation I made at the American Political Science Association conference in Washington, D.C. in 1993. My paper was titled "Legal Formalism vs. Equity in Aristotle." But when 3 years later I was informed that a book was coming out and my paper would be included, I so thoroughly revised the paper that there is little relation to my original paper. In the meantime I had learned a lot more about Aristotle (due to the dissertation that was submitted in 1996) and so I somehow went off on the tangent of the book chapter. But it was a much better paper. I was pretty intense during the time I wrote it. I held up the book a bit, I think, because I wanted to get it just right.

Aristotle says that while it is democratic for all matters to be deliberated upon by all citizens and oligarchic for all matters to be deliberated upon by only some, it is republican or aristocratic (i.e., correct) for some matters to be deliberated upon by some citizens and other matters to be deliberated upon by all. 1 Among the matters about which there must be deliberation, Aristotle lists laws and electing and auditing officials. 2 In this essay I extrapolate from things Aristotle says to the conclusion that he wants laws to be deliberated about (i.e., framed) by "some" and legislative officials to be deliberated about (i.e., elected and audited) by "all," at least in his second-best ideal.

Aristotle’s assertion in Politics I.2 that there is a natural impulse to form political communities is immediately contraposed with the claim that the person responsible for their foundation is the cause (aitios) of the greatest of goods (Pol. 1253a33). The attribution of an essential role to the legislator as an efficient cause appears to clash, however, with Aristotle’s political naturalism. If the polis exists by nature and humans are by nature political animals (1253a1-2), then the question arises as to why active intervention by the legislator is necessary for a polis. Conversely, if the polis is an artefact of practical reason, then Aristotle’s distinction between products of the intellect and natural entities seems to preclude the status of the polis as natural.  In light of this apparent tension between different aspects of Aristotle’s account of the origins of political communities, the current paper seeks to demonstrate their reconcilability.  Section one considers the role of the Aristotelian legislator in light of broader Greek assumptions regarding law-making. Section two then considers the status of law-making expertise (nomothetikē) as a part of political science (politikē) and examines the mode of practical reason that is exercised by the legislative founder. Finally, in section 3, and building on recent interpretations which have emphasised that Aristotle operates with an extended teleological conception of nature, I argue that acts of legislative founding and nature can consistently serve as joint causes of the polis because the ‘products’ of the practical rationality of the legislator are themselves an expression of distinctly human nature.

This is the unchanged 1998 prefatory material for the book I was trying to make out of my 1996 dissertation. I would have added more people in the acknowledgments, presumably including all of my dissertation committee. But this is what I found.

Republican translates politikē. In my older writings, I translated it as political. By polite, Aristotle sometimes means constitution, sometimes republican constitution, and sometimes republican constitution that is a careful mixture of other constitutional types (especially oligarchy and democracy). Depending on the meaning in context, politeia should be translated either constitution, republic, or polity. Politeia has had other meanings, such as citizenship. And those other meanings can help explain why the one word has these three meanings in Aristotle. The word politeia is derived from politēs, which means citizen.