There are widely varying views of the responibility of leaders in the proper formation of government. Plato believed in the philosopher king while his student Aristotle believed in the rule of law and the proper formation of a constitution consisting of the laws, traditions, and habits that together form the nature of a country. But what did Aristotle believe was the responsibility of the citizens who were living in his ideal country?
To begin with Aristotle describes the nature of mankind that leads to the creation of a city state and government. It is in man’s nature to pair and come together for survival. In the same natural way that a man and a woman come together to create children, and a master and slave come together for mutual survival, small groups of people would naturally come together to create more survivable groups. (Please remember that slavery was the norm all over the world at the time Aristotle was writing. Although he does not address it directly, his likely thoughts here would mirror those of Plato that there is a natural order that creates master and slave.) Men have certain leadership characteristics that make them natural leaders in families and women have certain natural nurturing characteristics that make the pairing better than each individual part.
This mirrors the individual role of citizens in the city state. Children, the result of this first pairing, are limited by age and wisdom and thus need the supervision of parents. In this sense, the family mirrors the political in that parents exist for the benefit of their “subjects” and that undertaking has inherent nobility. In another parallel to the political, parents take turns with certain parenting duties in the same way that citizens take turns assuming civic responsibility, all for the benefit of the family and larger community.
These small groups would come together and form larger groups that would be independently survivable, and the city state is naturally born from that. Once again, the philosopher looks at the nature that surrounds him and draws natural conclusions. Human nature includes speech which enables man to organize in ways that animals cannot, a second natural element that makes the city state possible.
And finally, it is natural for the philosopher in man to lead these small groups away from the horror that was life for our prehistoric ancestors. Therefore, the city state grows in a natural sense in the same way that a seed grows into a plant that flourishes, produces its own seed, and thus continues to grow. Mankind comes together then, because that grouping allows for man to lead a more noble life than he could individually or in separated tribes.
To understand the role of the individual citizen in this arrangement, we need to define what it means to be a citizen. In Aristotle’s view that included the natural inhabitants of the city state but, as was custom at the time, would not have included resident aliens, slaves, women, as well as the very young and very old. Common workers would also generally not be considered participating citizens.
We already discussed how the democracy in Athens at this time was actually more directly democratic than what we have today. The remaining subset of the population would be eligible to directly vote on laws and participate in juries and the like, and therefore were deeply tied to the identity of the city state in which they lived. Since the state exists, like parents, for the benefit of its citizens, those same citizens would feel vested in the success of the state. Justice, which is a key role of the constitution of the state, would drive fairness.
We previously saw those constructions that Aristotle viewed as “despotic” included both oligarchy and democracy. The oligarchs would naturally believe that their wealth should grant them greater power, and those supporting democracy would naturally believe that all people should have equal rights. Aristotle would have thought them both wrong because they both misunderstand the mission of the state. The state does not exist to maximize wealth or to provide equality. Its intentions are more noble than that. The state exists to pursue virtue as a whole and to provide the conditions for a “good life”. In that sense, the state is aristocratic in that it is designed to encourage those with the most noble actions. The result of this would be the most virtuous state.
Because Aristotle understood the nature of humans, he understands that the state can be manipulated in such a way that its goal of achieving the best “common advantage” could be misused to hurt an individual or group. This is far different than a misinterpretation which is mitigated by educating citizens on the common understanding of the constitution of the state. What Aristotle is describing here is the deliberate misuse of the state by unscrupulous people, a danger in any society.
While he is not entirely clear on how to solve this issue, you can see the beginnings of his thoughts on “individual” rights beginning to form. Clearly though, if we go back to the idea of the constitution of the state including laws, customs, and traditions, we can see why Aristotle felt that the proper education of all levels of citizens was such a critical matter. Customs and traditions are just as critical to preserving a noble constitution as laws would be. Often these cultures and traditions are more important than written laws as they exert a greater influence on behavior than law itself.
Justice, according to “Politics”, includes understanding how to distribute some common property when more than one party claims ownership. He believed in treating this problem “fairly” which meant treating people in proportion to their merit. In our past discussion we saw how oligarchs would come to believe that their wealth entitled them to a greater share of property where as the democrats would believe that all had an equal share. Aristotle would have disagreed with both of these premises. Because he believed that the purpose of the state was neither to maximize wealth, nor to distribute property equally, but rather to cultivate virtue, those who contributed the most to society, the aristoi or best persons, the aristocracy, should justly receive more.
For this to work in a practical sense citizens must be virtuous both in their education and in their actions. If they were not, Aristotle would have believed, like Plato, that the natural result of democracy would be strife and eventually tyranny.
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