Politics

[laughs]

Now, I've read M- uh, Aristotle's Politics many times, all the Platonic dialogues, a lot of political philosophy.

Like, no one else just says outright-

[laughs]

He is a dead man still.

Uh, but it was, it was Aristotle, and the first four lines that I read you, um, come from his book, Politics.

Uh, the last one comes from a book called Generation of Animals, where he basically explains that women are effectively men who didn't quite get finished in the cooking process, so to speak.

[laughs] Yeah.

Why on earth am I reading that? Uh, well, Aristotle lived about 300 and, 300, 350 years before Jesus.

Um, so he wasn't a prophet, he wasn't an apostle.

He was a Greek philosopher who taught Alexander the Great, and he wrote some of the most influential household advice for the ancient world that was ever produced.

And the thing about influential ideas is they never stay in a book.

Of Adam's title to sovereignty by creation.

Sir Robert, in his preface to his observations on Aristotle's Politics, tells us, "A natural freedom of mankind cannot be supposed without the denial of the creation of Adam." But how Adam's being created, which was nothing but his receiving a being immediately from omnipotence and the hand of God, gave Adam a sovereignty over anything, I cannot see, nor consequently understand how a supposition of natural freedom is a denial of Adam's creation, and would be glad anybody else, since our author did not vouchsafe us the favor, would make it out for him.

For I find no difficulty to suppose the freedom of mankind, though I have always believed the creation of Adam.

He was created or began to exist by God's immediate power, without the intervention of parents or the pre-existence of any of the same species to beget him, when it pleased God he should.

Whenever we at the James Wilson Institute begin one of our week-long fellowships or even our weekend introductory seminars on natural law jurisprudence, we begin not with the writings of our Institute's namesake or even other familiar figures from the founding.

Instead, we begin... as Professor Hadley Arcus does in his classic book First Things, with the opening pages of Aristotle's Politics, on that moral association we call the polis, and how articulating an understanding of rights and obligations, those markers of political life unique to human beings, must spring from the very nature of human beings as the only creatures that can reason about such things.

Natural law, or right reason, before it became a necessary tool for lawyers, was simply this to Aristotle, a way of understanding how human beings are made to flourish, and politics either serves that end or it fails.

For our latest episode of the Anchoring Truths podcast, we thought to welcome a bona fide scholar of Aristotle, Alexander Petkus, onto the show to join us for something of a deep dive into a good bit of the philosophy animating much of our work at the Institute.

Specifically, I'm going to be discussing and reflecting upon an article written by Margaret Delorier.

Her article is entitled Sexual Difference in Aristotle's Politics and His Biology.

This was published in the journal Classical World in 2009.

Delorier is, and I don't know when you're going to be listening to this, but at least at the time of recording, Delorier is a professor at McGill in Montreal.

And then we have other, you know, downstream differences where women just are unable to fully concoct the thing that men are able to fully concoct.

And therefore women depend on men for the, the humanness of their offspring, the form of their offspring.

Meanwhile, in the politics, in Politics Book 1, whereas the biological stuff was really coming from Generation of Animals, Book 4, Chapter 6.

Meanwhile, in Politics Chapter 1, Aristotle develops the view that women are naturally subjects of men.

Where are we? T- today we're going to study, I'm gonna talk about Aristotle's, you might call it Aristotle's comparative politics, and focusing on the idea of the regime.

This is the theme that you remember in the opening day, uh, I said was really the central concept or the leading thread of this, of this course.

And it's in books three through six of Aristotle's Politics that he develops, uh, his, his idea of regi- of the regime and regime politics.

Books, book one, that we spoke about last time, really in, in a way tells us something about the, uh, you might say almost the metaphysics of Aristotle's politics.

Today, Aristotle speaks more empirically, more politically about what a regime is.

There seems to be, at least built in to Aristotle's account of politics, a certain flexibility, a certain, uh, latitude of discretion that in some ca-ca-passages even seems to border on a kind of relativism.

But nevertheless, Aristotle understands that a person, this pan basilea, this person of superlative virtue, is not really to be expected.

Politics is really a matter of dealing with less than best circumstances, which is perhaps one reason why Aristotle gives relatively little attention to the, uh, structure of the best regime.

He collected constitutions, 158 of them in all, from throughout the ancient world and was the first to give some kind of conceptual rigor to the vocabulary of political life.

Above all, Aristotle's works like the Politics and the Nicomachean Ethics were explicitly intended as works of political instruction, political education.

They seem to be designed less to recruit philosophers and potential philosophers than to shape and educate citizens and future statesmen.

His works seem less theoretical in the sense of constructing abstract models of political life than advice giving in the sense of serving as a sort of civic-minded arbiter of public disputes.

and there are certainly echoes of this reading of Aristotle as a teacher of participatory republican government in the later writings of democratic thinkers from Tocqueville to Hannah Arendt.

Anyway, this returns us to the enigma of Aristotle.

Who was this strange and elusive man whose writings seem to have been enlisted both for the support of monarchy and for republics, even for a universal monarchy and a smaller participatory democratic kind of government? Who was this man and how to understand his writings? Well, the best place to start is, of course, with his views stated in the opening pages of The Politics on the Naturalness of the City.

His claim that man is by nature the political animal, right? That's his famous claim.

And this means for Hobbes, first of all, adopting his book as the authoritative teaching on moral and political doctrine in the universities.

This should be the required textbook of political science, of political teaching in the universities to replace the older textbook, uh, i.e. Aristotle's Politics.

Therefore, he says, "I think it may be profitably printed and more profitably taught in the universities," he confidently, uh, asserts.

The ideal audience for the book, he says, should be the preachers, the gentry, the lawyers, men of affairs, who, drawing such water as they find from the book, can use it, he says, to sprinkle the same, both from the pulpit and from their conversation upon the people.

I would, I would recommend to Peter, and again, I don't wanna get too into it when he's not here, 'cause I don't think that's fair.

Um, but I would recommend that he reads Aristotle's Politics.

Um, I think it's, like, b- chapters eight through 12, somewhere in there.

It talks about, uh, gold coinage and how it's not necessary for the means for anything, uh, uh, essential to human life.