Zimmern: Ancient Greek Political Theory

Page 13

We have dwelt upon some of the special directions in which Thucydides and Plato can be of help to us. Let us now turn briefly to the third of the great triad. Aristotle is, of course, the most systematic thinker of the three: and it is just for that very reason that the two elements already noted in Greek political thought, the local and ephemeral and the universal, are most closely interwoven and most baffling to disentangle. Tutor of Alexander though he was, his mind is incapable of stepping outside the city-state framework. His Ethics is half a treatise on human nature, half a book, akin to the Characters of Theophrastus, on deportment for a Greek citizen. No wonder that successive generations of English undergraduates have failed to respond to the human excellence or social charm, of his hero or paragon, described as 'the big-souled' or 'magnificent man'. Similarly the Politics is a book in which it needs a trained reader, already familiar with Greek life, to pick out the universal from the particular and draw his own modern conclusions. But when you have read, say, the first book of the Politics in this spirit, when you have ruled out from what is said of the State all that pertains solely to the City, when you have made allowance for the hazardous biological, psychological, and sociological generalizations ('man is more of a political animal than bees or other gregarious animals', 'he who is by nature not his own but another's and not a man is by nature a slave', 'the state is by nature clearly prior to the family and to the individual, since the whole is of necessity prior to the part'), based, as the examples show, on the embryonic condition of those sciences at the time, you have a large residuum of practical wisdom that is and will remain of value to the modern world.

Let us look for a moment at one element in this legacy, for it has recently become a subject of much controversy—Aristotle's conception of the State, and of its relation to other social and political groupings. As has already been said, Greek political thought is open to criticism for unduly neglecting the claim of the individual. Aristotle is less open to this indictment than either of his great compeers: he does indeed allow, for certain favoured individuals, an inner or 'theoretical' life, as he calls it, remote from the concerns of the City-State and almost, except for its excessive intellectuality, recalling the monastic ideal of the Middle Age. But this is only for the fewest. Nevertheless it involved the admission that behind the citizen remained the man, who might conceivably on occasion have his rights, that 'political science', as he says, 'does not make men', as Thucydides regarded Athens as making Athenians, 'but receives them from nature and uses them'. And the justification for this taking over of human nature by the state, this subjection of man over the whole or part of his nature, is clearly set forth. It is that 'man when perfected [i. e. taken over and educated by the State] is the best of animals, but, when separated from law and justice, he is the worst of all', or, as he puts it in another place, the man who does not participate in State or city life is 'either a beast or a god'—more likely (as the order of the words indicates) the former. In other words, it is law and justice, not, as Thucydides would have it, an exaltation of the spirit to its highest power, nor, as Plato preaches, some organic identification between the inner life of the soul and the outward order of society, which is the basis and justification of politics. 'It is justice', he says, using the word in a strict, not a platonic or metaphysical sense, 'which is the bond of men in states, and the administration of justice, i. e. the determination of what is just, which is the principle of order in political society.'

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A. Zimmern
Ancient Greek Political Theory

Learned Freeware

A. Zimmern Ancient Greek Political Theory

Learned Freeware

A. Zimmern
Ancient Greek Political Theory