Aristotle

15. POLITICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

15 POLITICAL ANTHROPOLOGY 15.1 THE RELEVANCE OF THE POLITICS With all respect for other cultures’ ideas about law and the state, the creation of a true theory, the combination of fundamental philosophical reflections, empirical inquiry and normative evaluation, goes back to the Greeks. While in Homer the legal system is still considered as sacral, the tragedies touching upon this subject by Aeschylus (e.g., the Oresteia), Sophocles (Antigone), and Euripides (Orestes) as well as the historiographers Herodotus and Thucydides, together with the Sophists, pave the way for the two outstanding theoreticians, Plato and Aristotle . Although both Plato and Aristotle treat their subject—politics including law, justice, and the state—with an unparalleled combination of analytical and speculative power, it is not until Aristotle that we get the first discursive investigation in the true sense. Plato’s leading intention, the outline of a “state according to one’s wishes” (cf. Pol. II 1, 1260b28 f.) is still present in Aristotle: he describes in detail the size of the state, the constitution of the land and its links with the sea, the social classes, the age for marriage, education, and even the defense of the state. However, before dealing with the ideal he examines the actual polis, its foundations, structures, and hazards. The text on this topic, the Politics, a masterpiece of political science unequalled to this day, is by right studied not only by philosophers, philologists, and historians, but also by legal and constitutional theoreticians, political scientists, and even empirically oriented sociologists. Many of the tenets remained effective throughout the Middle Ages and early modern times until the American and French revolutions and not infrequently beyond them: the central statement of a political anthropology (I 2); the beginnings of an economical theory (I 3-13), together with the influential criticism of demanding interest and of usury (Pol. I 10, 1258a38 ff.) and the no less influential justification of slavery; a discussion of constitution from the viewpoint of the history of problems (II); the model of a comparative morphology of the political (III–IV), including the notion of legitimate and illegitimate forms of state; the outline of a political sociology, including a pathology of the political (V); a theory of democracy that also considers the consequences (VI 1–5); not least a political 163 utopia in the sense of the outline of an ideal polity (VII–VIII)—a remarkable number of topics and important theses either go back to Aristotle or are given a treatment by him that was to be influential for centuries. The Politics is not a “work made in one casting.” If its eight books can at all be said to be a homogeneous unit from beginning to end, they do not read as fluently as for example the Ethics, but they nevertheless represent an essentially coherent doctrine. Without doubt it contains elements that are tied to a specific time and era, beginning from the reductive size of the polities; in comparison with the city-states that formed in the limited spaces of the Aegean coast, even small modern states look like complexly large societies. In addition, the legal system of Aristotle ’s times shows a far smaller incidence of regulations, and there are no professional judges or lawyers. Most importantly, the degree of direct democracy present at the time is unknown not only in our representative democracies but also in the present-day model of direct democracy, those Swiss cantons that have annual assemblies of citizens. Other elements, in particular slavery or serfdom and the inequality of women, are offensive to us, but one needs to keep in mind that these were present practically everywhere at the time and remained so even in Europe and the United States well into the nineteenth century. However, what is still the most important element of a theory of the state was known to the Greeks. Their polities were in charge of civil and criminal law; they demanded taxes, called up their citizens to military service, banished by means of ostracism (ostrakismos), and, as in the case of Socrates, condemned individuals to death. In brief: they knew public authority and therefore dominion in the neutral sense of the term. From a methodological point of view the Politics, like the Ethics, makes do almost without metaphysical elements. Aristotle’s arguments are anthropological and based on social theory, theory of institutions or the comparison of constitutions, and occasionally on biology—when he states that the whole is by essence (physei, ousia) prior to...