"Jaffa" Part II: Aristotle

One of the regular features of the article we are discussing is that it imagines the American Founding in a kind of dialogue with Aristotle. That is obviously a facet of the article that interests me particularly; it may interest a few of you. (Others will find it much less engaging!) 

This will be quite long, so I will put it after a jump.

I will treat these claims as the author raises them.

[Harvey] Mansfield argues that any regime based on the principle that “all men are created equal” will inevitably degenerate into permissive egalitarianism, no matter how much its founders believed the principle of equality was grounded in the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” According to Mansfield, resorting to natural law or natural right is irrelevant for understanding the American founding, or any political founding. He supposedly takes Aristotle as his authority, who, he contends, argues that all claims of justice are political claims. The fact that the founders appealed to natural law or natural right was either a way to disguise their partisanship or it was a self-deception. 

Emphasis added. I would definitely not agree that Aristotle contends that all justice claims are political claims: justice is also (at least) a personal virtue that is explicated as such in the Nicomachean Ethics. However, there is certainly a relationship even in the personal virtue to just laws for Aristotle. Aristotle contends that half of the virtue of justice is lawfulness, meaning the obedience to laws that compel every man to act as the virtuous man ought to act. Thus, even if you lack the virtue of courage (to use his example), you will still go and fight in the wars of the polis because the law compels you to do so.

Yet the other half of the virtue of justice is fairness, and there is not necessarily a political component to that. If you are a father with three sons, treating them all fairly doesn't require a political relationship at all: the family relationship will do. (For Aristotle, politics is a level of human organization that only occurs when more than one family has to come together into relationships; see here and here).

Mansfield’s invocation of Aristotle has obvious reference to a short dialogue in chapter 10 of book three in the Politics. The many poor make a democratic claim, arguing that free birth or equality is the superior claim to rule. The few wealthy make an oligarchic claim, justifying their argument by noting the inequality of wealth. Aristotle remarks that both claims hit on a part of justice but not the whole of justice. Both claims are only partial and therefore partisan. The polis needs free and equal citizens no less than it needs wealth. 

Politics III is here. My own mentor on Aristotle argued for an interpretation of Aristotle relevant to America here that Aristotle takes the 'middle class' to be the safest place for rule. Middle class people are not rich, so they have to work for a living and will be eager to get back to minding their own business -- and therefore shall exercise power as little as they can, so that they can get back to the farm (or other source of personal security). Indeed Aristotle does say something quite like that.

Both claims to rule are valid, therefore, but both are also incomplete. Aristotle suggests that a mixed regime, one he calls a “polity” could combine the two claims to rule. In the polity, the interests of the two antagonistic classes would balance one another. What Aristotle makes clear, however, is that the oligarchs and (small “d”)  democrats will not share a common good. Mansfield agrees wholeheartedly with Aristotle: The equal and the unequal can never coexist in a regime animated by the principle that “all men are created equal.” Although there will be pious talk of a common good, each side will remain fiercely partisan. 

One of the things that I think is most important to notice about the United States' political setup is that it combines all three of Aristotle's basic modes of governance: government by the many, by the one, and by the elite few.  Indeed, these are the first three articles of the Constitution: Congress (Article I), the President (Article II) and the Supreme Court and subordinate court of trained jurists (Article III). If you want to engage this discussion about how the United States attempted to learn Aristotle's lessons about balancing the goods and harms of the three types of government, it's very much worth considering that the Founders attempted to incorporate all three modes.

This still doesn't answer the basic problem, though it does provide a modus vivendi for most ordinary problems: the Many craft a law, it is enforced by the One, and if there's a controversy about it we put the issue before the Elite. Consider though a contentious question, such as abortion rights: who finally decides? Whose vision of justice ultimately prevails? Well, the Elite's interpretation is immediately contested by the One and fought over by the Many in several states. That goes back around to the Elite again, and becomes a ground for the election of a new One and Many.... it doesn't actually solve the problem of whose vision of justice prevails, it just provides an extended (and, importantly, peaceful) mode for the contest to play out. 

In today’s democracy, the democrats (Aristotle’s partisans of free birth and equality) are able to display their partisanship openly while the oligarchs (partisans of inequality) must disguise their partisanship as enthusiasm for the welfare of the democrats, or the “least advantaged.” This concealed partisanship, Mansfield calculates, cannot last forever, especially when, as he predicts, the headlong slide into “permissive egalitarianism” makes it impossible for the oligarchs to continue dissembling their contempt for democracy and egalitarian natural right. 

Note these are small-d democrats; the Republicans are also divided between those who genuinely favor equality of the free (usually rural or blue collar ones whose loyalty is to the ordinary people of the countryside) and the ones who merely pretend to such loyalties (e.g., Mitt Romney).

Thus, according to Mansfield, the founders’ idea that the principle of equality, properly understood as the equal protection of equal rights, could provide the common ground for the few and many was merely an illusion. The unequal, he believes, can never seek common ground with the equal because they seek incommensurable goods that have no common denominator. There can be no common good: the world of politics is always (and only) partisan. 

But the founders clearly believed otherwise. 

As did Aristotle; we shall return to that at the end. 

The private right to property—an idea unknown to Aristotle—provided the common ground or the common good for the few and the many to unite around. Both have a common interest in supporting the right to property. The few do not want to be dispossessed by the many, and the many want to keep what they possess in security, knowing that if they prosper in the future, their property will be secure. Here is the important passage from the Federalist: “the first object of government” is “the protection of [the] different and unequal faculties of acquiring property, [from which] the possession of different degrees and kinds of property immediately results.” The natural right principle of distributive justice inherent in the Declaration’s principle of equality clearly reconciles both the claims of equality and the claims of inequality—equality of opportunity and the justice of the inequality of results. It is clearly false to claim that the principle of equality in the Declaration inevitably leads to “permissive egalitarianism.” No founder believed that a proper understanding of the Declaration could yield this result. 

I don't understand why the author thinks that the private right to property was unknown to Aristotle. Indeed, if you read the remarks about the middle class, he clearly is aiming at the very idea that the author is citing here. The poor in Aristotle's terms aren't going to be persuaded by 'the private right to property' because they have no property. It is the middle class that will defend the rich's property accidentally by defending their own, for they really need the farm (or whatever) that provides their security and their family's. The Republican model in the Reagan years was to reach out to 'Reagan Democrats' who, though blue collar, owned shops or tools or houses, and wanted to keep more of what they earned to invest in more. It's a very similar idea.

The poor, for Aristotle as for us, were the ones who depended on government largess for their survival. Aristotle says in the Politics that government redistribution of wealth must be forbidden in a democracy because the poor will keep voting themselves access to the wealth of the rich, who will eventually then  hire mercenaries and overthrow the state. Yet in an aristocracy, where the rich rule, redistribution is very important. It keeps the state stable because otherwise the poor will rise up and overthrow the rulers. In a sense, then, whoever has power has to pay for it: in a democracy, the poor must give up on redistribution and earn their living by working for the government. In an aristocracy, the rulers gain power but have to pay for it by accepting that some of their wealth will be redistributed regularly to the poor. 

Again, to some degree the United States takes both sides of the question: we have expansive government jobs with fireproof labor protections, but also very extensive redistribution. The poor may both have a government job and also food stamps and various other forms of aid, so that they can live in a rough equality with the middle class guy who runs his own shop but is heavily taxed. The rich pay quite a lot in taxes in return for the extensive power they enjoy over the decisions of the government.

There is now a jump in the article, before the author returns to the question of Aristotle's influence. I want to clarify one point in particular before I return to the paragraph-by-paragraph commentary.

But we learn from Aristotle that art is always an imitation of nature. Even though the polis needs art for its being, it exists by nature.

That is not quite correct. What Aristotle says about art and nature is that art is properly the perfection of nature.  Nature gave you eyes, and the nature of those eyes is to see; but as you age, you may need glasses to perfect your eyes' ability to see.

The polis is meant to perfect human nature in an analogous way.  Human nature is ordered toward activity that expresses its excellences, and above all toward philosophical contemplation such as we are engaged in here today. Yet to perfect the individual capacity for action it helps to have schools, gymnasia, training programs, sports; and to give the individual a maximal ability to effect action, it helps (and indeed can be necessary) to have organizations of others with whom to cooperate. One man may fight, but an army may be necessary to defend a physical space; one man may throw water on a fire, but an engine company can put one out.

The polis, in other words, is a human art; it is human nature that exists by nature, and the polis is (per Aristotle) the art that offers the ability to perfect that nature.

So too philosophical contemplation, which for Aristotle was the highest end of human nature. Its perfection requires quite a lot of education, freedom of thought and speech, and others who have been similarly well-fitted to engage with in order to test and explore these ideas. A polis that can develop such men through its arts gives them also the capacity to have deep friendships of the sort that are one of the great goods of human activity, indeed the friendships themselves a field of activity in which human beings express the highest and best parts of their nature. 

The polis is also itself a field of activity, as active men may use their capacities in politics or by engaging in war in the armies of the polis. Yet it enables schools and friendships, and thus in several ways offers the perfection of the human experience. Or so Aristotle argues; and the American approach to governance has intended to do all of these things as well. 

This is why there is a universal 'common good' in Aristotle as well. Human nature has a good that is common to all, and the polis pursues that good as art perfecting nature. 

Now, to return to the text:

Aristotle in the first book of the Politics says that the principles of human nature are universal, but for human nature to flourish, for human potential to become actual, it must do so in particular human communities—in the polis.

It must do so because particular people exist in particular places with particular neighbors. You aren't free to form a polis with anyone you want, say myself and the people of Scotland and Iceland; or Conservative Catholics around the world. However much you might feel a connection -- ethnic, nationalistic, religious -- you have to deal with the people who are close to you. That is going to inform the compromises you have to make, and thus your polis will end up being a particular place with a particular tradition.

Man is by nature a political (or polis-dwelling) animal, Aristotle says. The Declaration is also Aristotelian in its recognition of universal human nature (“all men are created equal”) but also recognizes that the implementation of that equality in securing the “safety and happiness” of the people requires the creation of a “separate and equal” nation. Only in a separate, sovereign nation can the privileges and immunities of citizenship be guaranteed and the habits, manners, and virtues suitable for republican citizenship be inculcated. 

No doubt Kendallites will complain that social compact is hardly Aristotelian because social compact is a human construct, whereas Aristotle maintained that man is by nature a political animal.

If they did, they would be missing Aristotle's point about what 'nature' entails quite completely.  

For Aristotle, of course, the polis does not grow spontaneously—it is not the result of natural growth; rather, it had to be “constituted” by human art, and the one who first “constituted” the polis, Aristotle says, is the cause of the “greatest of goods.” The polis exists by nature because, while it is last in the order of time, it is first in the order of final causality. 

That is quite correct, but it is probably passed over too quickly to be intelligible if you haven't spent time with Aristotle. The idea is that -- sometimes, not always -- the last thing in a series was actually the thing of first importance, because it is the thing for which everything else was done. If you are preparing a meal, first you slice the vegetables and then you heat the pan and then you do all the various other things in order. The last thing you do is eat the meal, but the eating of the meal was the whole point of all the other steps. It has priority, then, even though it comes last. 

But -- as this is Aristotle -- that is only true in a way. In another way, eating the meal is only one thing in a larger chain whose end is human nature, and therefore philosophical contemplation. Indeed I shall very soon have to leave off philosophical contemplation in order to go make a meal. That does not imply that the meal is of higher importance than the contemplation; it is, rather, that I won't be able to continue contemplating effectively without fuel. Thus, even though the philosophical contemplation is the highest part of my nature as a human being, in order to enable me to do that some more I will require fuel, and that requires interrupting the contemplation to go cut vegetables etc. 

All associations—male and female, the family, the tribe, the village—are incomplete, and their incompleteness points to the polis as a final cause. And the final cause is nature.

Human nature specifically, as discussed above.  

Aristotle’s polis thus seems to be no less the result of artifice than social compact. But we learn from Aristotle that art is always an imitation of nature. [See digression above. -Grim] Even though the polis needs art for its being, it exists by nature. The American regime, grounded in social compact, freely composed of freely consenting citizens, rests on the Western tradition of political thought. It is an expression of natural right which is the oldest of all traditions. Ask Harry Jaffa.

Hopefully this is clear from the perspective of the Aristotelian tradition, at least. I don't think you have to endorse Jaffa to get to Aristotle, though. 

There is also a huge intervening part of the Aristotelian tradition that is being excluded, which is the influence of the Christian tradition from Aquinas' Summa Theologiae onward on the idea of what natural laws were about. The Founders did not intend a theological state, although they invoke the Creator and the Creator's endowments of rights as the first (and only proper) order of business for a just state. That wasn't in Aristotle at all, and if you skip it you end up missing something important about what the Aristotelian tradition would have thought by the era of 1776.