One reason I decided I had to study Aristotle was that he kept popping up in my research in early US history. Hence, it was a happy surprise to see that the author of a couple of excellent books on US history made a similar discovery.
I'm slowly reading my way through Walter A. McDougall's Throes of Democracy: The American Civil War Era 1828-1877 and, in an endnote on American political rhetoric, ran across the acknowledgement: "I am indebted to David Eisenhower for steering me, at this late date in life, to Aristotle" (p. 620, note 19).
Although McDougall doesn't say much more about it, the history of ancient Greece and Rome were familiar to many in the early American colonies and early republic, and a lot of social and political rhetoric not only followed Aristotle's Rhetoric, but used allusions to those two cultures to make their points.
Aristotle's Politics is possibly the most important single document to the Founding. They were trying to figure out how to set up a new form of government, and the ones who didn't want another monarchy looked to it to help them work through the challenges of different forms. Work through it yourself sometime, and you'll see that what Aristotle ends up semi-endorsing as the 'least dangerous form of government' looks a whole lot like Jeffersonian democracy.
ReplyDeleteIt still has perils, which the Founders famously tried to settle via a system of checks and balances. But the reason they knew what to check and what to balance was that they studied the Politics.
They were greatly influenced by the Roman writers too, to be sure. But although we have a "Senate" and not an "Areopagus," the Roman lessons tend to be about the dangers of factions and concentration of power -- lessons learned more or less the hard way, and on the experience of one city/empire. The Politics works through the typology of forms of government based on dozens of such attempts over a long period of political experimentation.
That is not to say that the British common law tradition was not important, or that documents such as the Declaration of Arbroath or Defensor Pacis weren't. They very much were. But that's what they wanted to keep: when they were looking for things to change, they looked to the Politics and the Romans.
I look forward to reading it (although at the rate I'm going it may be in a retirement home ...).
ReplyDeleteSomething interesting I found in my own research were the advertised requirements to enter an American university in the 1850s. Before you were eligible to begin studying as a freshman, you had to have read a short list of books in the original Greek, and another short list in the original Latin. I don't know whether or how they enforced these requirements, of course.
They probably did. I know quite a few people who read the original Greek, and more who can do Latin. Reading knowledge in a language is much easier than being able to speak or write it.
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