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Nature, Justice and Rights in Aristotle's "Politics" (review)
- Journal of the History of Philosophy
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 34, Number 4, October 1996
- pp. 607-608
- 10.1353/hph.1996.0076
- Review
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
Book Reviews Fred D. Miller Jr. Nature, Justice and Rights in Aristotle's "Politics." New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Pp. xvii + 424 . Cloth, $49.95. Fred Miller has been writing and thinking about Aristotle's Politics for a good many years now and it is clear from this new book just how fruitful his thinking has been. Nature,Justice and Rights is not only a model of philosophy and scholarship; it must now be acknowledged to be the best overall account of Aristotle's political thought currently available. For, first, Miller examines the several books of the Politics with much care and in considerable detail, paying great attention all the while to the exact structure of particular arguments. His presentation of many of these arguments in logically schematic form is much to be commended and will be welcomed by many readers, both scholarly and lay, as providing just the sort of help they need to get a clear and accurate grip on what it is that Aristotle is saying and why. Second, Miller is thus able to show convincingly that Aristotle's Politics is not an amalgam of ill-fitting treatises, but a carefully crafted whole that contains a unitary and coherent argument. Third, in the process of expounding the progressive stages of this argument, Miller neatly dissects many current scholarly disputes and systematically works his way to decisive solutions of them. In this respect, indeed, his discussion of Aristotle's arguments about nature in Book One of the Politics is masterly. Perhaps more and different things could be said about some of these arguments and the scholarly disputes they have provoked, but there can be no doubt that Miller has moved the whole discussion to a higher plane of both understanding and fidelity to Aristotle's text. Future discussions in this area will have to begin, if they do not end, with Miller. Miller's book is, however, in some respects two books rather than one; or, put differently, it is doing two jobs. The first is that just mentioned, the careful and insightful analysis of the overall argument of the whole Politics. The second is the contention that key elements of this argument, and of Aristotle's political thought generally, can and should be cast into the form of a theory of rights, even natural rights. Miller is not the first to suggest that a theory of rights can be found in Aristotle's Politics, but he is, I think, the first to state and defend this suggestion with the precision and thoroughness it requires. Indeed it is remarkable how easily Miller is able to prove that there exists in Aristotle a full range of rights and of expressions for rights, though one must hasten to add, as Miller himself hastens to explain, that the theory of rights to be found in Aristotle is very far from the theory of rights to be found in such thinkers as Hobbes and Locke. But, as Miller says rightly, we should not suppose that the only theory of rights it is possible to have and defend is a Hobbesian or Lockean one. There is no reason to let Hobbes and Locke and their modern followers claim for themselves [607] 608 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 34:4 OCTOBER 1996 a monopoly on rights and rights talk. Indeed, argues Miller in the concluding chapter of his book, a theory of rights, including natural rights, based on Aristotle is likely to prove better and to make more sense, logically and politically, than current theories based on Hobbes and Locke. Miller is not alone in suggesting for our modern times a political theory of rights inspired by Aristotle, but he has gone furthest in showing just how much of such a theory can be bodily extracted from Aristotle's text. Miller is, nevertheless, right to stress certain distinctive features of Aristotle's theory, notably that political rights are prior to and delimit property rights (the reverse, of course, is true for Locke), and that Aristotle can only be said to recognize natural rights in the sense of "rights based on natural justice" and not in the sense of "rights possessed in a...