Cities and Public Passions in Plato and Aristotle (for presentation at the Montreal
Workshop in Political Theory, March 2008) by Rebecca Kingston, Associate Professor of
Political Science, University of Toronto.
In this paper I will focus on Books VIII and IX of Plato’s Republic as well as the middle
books of Aristotle’s Politics to show how both these thinkers saw in their analyses of regimes,
both ideal and deviant, an important place for passion in the public sphere. Through this analysis
I will present what I will call the “classical view” of the place of emotion in the public sphere.1
While we will see important differences between Plato and Aristotle in their views of the ways in
which regimes are defined, there is a similar theme in both these thinkers with regard to their
analyses of politics. In both we find a general understanding that regimes can be identified in
part through the patterns in the emotions of the people living there; in other words, there are
common dispositions shared by a population who live according to common constitutional
provisions. While this can be seen in their visions of the ideal regime as based on a common
love of wisdom, it becomes most apparent in their understandings of the cycle of regimes and
through those political systems considered to be deviant. It is a psychological understanding of
the nature of citizenship that is rarely invoked in the modern context.
It may be suggested that one of the conditions underlying the possibility of this classical
view is the small size of the states Plato and Aristotle had in mind, a condition that helped to
ensure the virtual homogeneity of populations, that is, a quality of character shared by virtually
all citizens. This is fueled in part by an assumption in much contemporary political discourse
that there was a lack of adequate attention to human diversity in the ancient world and thereby
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that ancient theories are of limited relevance in conceptualising a modern liberal republican
regime. There can be no doubt that the views of politics of both Plato and Aristotle were partly
shaped by this characteristic of ancient communities. Nonetheless, for both of these thinkers the
unity and unique identities of political communities was not something they took for granted.
Indeed, in this analysis I follow a line of well established argument that for both the forging of
political community is conceived as a construction of unity in the face of basic sociological
diversity. This diversity was recognised through the acknowledged importance of a variety of
professions making up a self-sufficient community in material terms, as well as the recognition
that people living in a city would have varied capacities and varied moral outlooks. So contrary
to a certain topos in the history of political thought that goes back at least to Constant’s famous
lecture on the liberty of the ancients as compared to the moderns, ancient thinkers did not
presume broad homogeneity. As we will see, there may be reasons for seeking a modified
paradigm of the place of the emotions in public life than that suggested by the classical view; but
this is not due to reasons of a lack of some attention to diversity.2
This chapter will show that in the very foundations of the Western tradition of political
theory there was a robust tradition of reflection on the place of the emotions in public life, not
just as the motivation of individual political actors in public actions, but rather as a distinctly
public phenomenon. It was a common ethos shared by a people living within a single regime that
informed their emotional lives with regard to matters of public importance and that constituted
their political identity, an ethos fashioned by the political institutions and educational forces of
their community. Furthermore, we will see in both Plato and Aristotle important distinctions
between the public shape of citizen identity and individual or personal character formation. This
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helps to reinforce the idea of a public passion in particular, that is one that manifests itself as a
shared emotional experience among citizens and in the relations between citizens and rulers,
emotions that are distinct from those associated with unique personal histories.
Other theorists have looked to Plato and Aristotle as a means of retrieving a better sense
of the importance of the emotions in political life. Cheryl Hall, for example, looks to the
Platonic idea of eros as a defining feature of all ‘political’ emotion seen as the striving and
longing for a political project of either conservation or reform.3 For Hall, all political emotion is
constituted by the attachment to some envisioned good relevant to the community as a whole.
This idea has the merit of helping to account for the strength of commitment that must underpin
any proper understanding of the potential fierceness of political dialogue. In addition, it can
provide us with a framework to explain deeper commitments that are recognised as essential in
the very project of liberal democracy itself. These commitments have been variously described
in competing frameworks of liberalism as a passion for justice, or an attachment to the overriding
importance of the values of liberty and equality. Still, this appropriation of Platonic eros as the
basis for political emotion becomes more problematic with competing understandings of liberal
democracy that incorporate emotion, but no substantive positive attachment. For example,
Shklar’s articulation of the basis of liberal democracy as a fear of cruelty or Isaiah Berlin’s idea
of negative liberty permits of no eros driven underpinning or explanation.4 In addition, there are
certainly a number of what we might term ‘negative’ or ‘neutral’ emotions in politics in addition
to fear, such as spite and indifference, that are not driven in any real sense by a vision of the good
and that therefore cannot be captured in any direct way by this Platonic framework.
Hall, perhaps, seeks to do too much in searching in Plato for a genre or type of emotional
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experience that could account for all politically relevant dispositions. Her vision of liberal
democracy is one in which there are a number of competing visions of the good and she thereby
does not wish to ascribe any one substantive commitment to all. Her appropriation of eros is
voided of all its original metaphysical content and read as a synonym of political motivation in
general. But this belies political reality in that the diversity of citizen motivation may be too
wide to be captured by the idea of eros alone.
In a somewhat different way, Barbara Koziak has tried to resuscitate the Aristotelian
notion of thumos as a basis for bringing the emotions to the centre of our understanding of
politics.5 She argues that contrary to Plato, Aristotle had a vision of politics that was grounded
on a certain understanding of thumos, reconstrued as the capacity for emotion in general (rather
than its more prevalent scholarly translation and appropriation as political anger).6 The feeling of
appropriate anger, fear, affection and pity towards other citizens was a central feature of good
citizenship and provided a basis for, and not a supplement to, institutional arrangements and
constitutional norms.7 It involved, in general, the turning away from domination as an end in
politics and the cultivation of dispositions through law, rhetoric and cultural production to
develop social relations and to increase mutual benefaction.
While Koziak’s analysis provides an impressive demonstration of the importance of
emotional disposition for Aristotle’s understanding of political life, it may emphasise perhaps too
much for our purposes the ideal and normative vision of politics that informs Aristotle’s analysis.
In other words, the portrait that she draws of the nature of good citizenship in Aristotle is
convincing, but it is not clear, apart from a project of citizen education, how this understanding
of good citizenship should work in exploring political life in regimes Aristotle would regard as
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defective.8
With this in mind, I would like to return in this chapter to a reading of Plato of the middle
period, that is in particular as the author of The Republic, and Aristotle of The Nicomachean
Ethics , The Politics and The Rhetoric with a focus on what they have to say about the role of
emotion in the politics of corrupt regimes, that is regimes that are not structured according to
their respective metaphysical conceptions of the good. I believe that in exploring these passages
we can find reflections of importance for us today in trying to make sense of the place of
emotions in political life. While clearly Plato and Aristotle recognised that the emotions that
drove citizens and rulers in these corrupt regimes were not to be admired, they both saw that the
emotions played an important role in the public sphere and helped indeed to define differences
among the various regimes. It is this sense of a public passion and the differing patterns of
emotional life found in competing regimes that I seek to recover in selected works of Plato and
Aristotle.
Before turning to the politics of differing regimes as portrayed by these thinkers it is
important to note that their distinctions between reason and emotion are not as clear-cut as has
often been assumed. Certainly the division of the soul into the two parts (as found in the
Phaedrus) or three parts (as found in The Republic) might lend itself to this interpretation. Still,
as argued convincingly by various interpreters, these divisions hide a much more complex
psychology.
Indeed, in contrast to their seventeenth and eighteenth century counterparts, Plato and
Aristotle in their analyses of the passions share two fundamental principles. First, they recognise
that the differing causes or objects of the passions, such as the love of honour vs. love of money
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vs. love of truth, are more significant in understanding the nature of the soul and the individual,
than the physiology and the effects of passion within the soul. Indeed, for both Plato and
Aristotle it was the moral worth of the cause or object of the passion which determined the moral
worth of the feeling or emotion itself. In both there is a deep understanding of the passions as
ways of experiencing the world. On this basis, Cooper and Kahn have suggested that interpreters
of Plato often have been misled by reading Descartes and Hobbes into Plato’s discussions (in
particular of his middle period) of the parts of the soul. For both Plato and Aristotle, appetite and
spirit are distinguished not by the essential mechanics of motivation (for all parts are recognised
to have their own kinds of pleasure); rather they are distinguished by the objects of their
impulses, whether they be truth, honour or bodily pleasure .9 As Plato himself writes at 485d of
The Republic: “...when someone’s desires incline strongly for one thing, they are thereby
weakened for others...when someone’s desires flow towards learning and everything of that sort,
he’d be concerned...with the pleasures of the soul itself by itself, and he’d abandon those
pleasures that come through the body- if indeed he is a true philosopher and not merely a
counterfeit one.”10 Similarly for Aristotle the ethical life involves the proper training of the
emotions towards the appropriate objects or appropriate actions, such as an attraction to “the
pleasures that are characteristic of moderation” and with the recognition that “the chief good will
be a kind of pleasure”.11 His interest in rhetoric stems from an awareness of the central
importance of speech in shaping our perceptions and feelings with regard to various persons and
events in the world around us. So for both Plato and Aristotle, and in contrast to most
seventeenth and eighteenth century reflection on the emotions, the cause of the emotion is more
significant than the effect and it is through an assessment of the worthiness of those causes in and
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of themselves (rather than a comparison with the hypothetical impact of the same situation on
individual souls) by which one can judge the reactions of others.
The second principle shared by Plato and Aristotle is the idea that the passions can have a
strongly collective component and work beyond a face-to-face context. In other words, both
recognised that the movement of souls towards or away from certain objects or causes was
something that helped to distinguish not only individuals but whole regimes as well. For these
classical thinkers the causes or objects of emotional life worked on populations as a whole. This
can in part be attributed to the Greek term for regime or constitution, politeia, that in one of its
various connotations refers not mainly to the legal structure of a state, but rather the way of life,
or the sociological features by which a community distinguishes itself. The way of life included
the manner in which citizens related to each other in affect. There was a public component to
this passion which helped to identify the social life of the regime with a particular emotional
quality and particular hierarchy or set of moral goods.
Let us begin with an analysis of Book VIII of The Republic. In discussing the decline of
the kallipolis Plato outlines the four imperfect constitutions starting from that of the honor-loving
timocracy through the money-loving oligarchy, the freedom-loving democracy and the tyrannical
regime characterised by the pursuit of the lowest pleasures and desires (544c-d). Of course, he
purports to show not only the dynamic of decline within the philosophic city itself, but also the
nature of decline in the individual soul that turns away from the love of truth and attachment to
the Form of the Good.
There are two key questions that must be raised in relation to these passages: first, what is
the exact status of the city-soul analogy and what does it reveal to us about the nature of the
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corrupted city and its citizens and rulers in particular?; second, what are its lessons for the place
of emotions in politics?
Many commentators have taken for granted that Plato considered that there was a clear
correspondence between the nature of regime and the individual soul of the same type.
Nonetheless, the issue of the exact nature of this correspondence would seem crucial. Traditional
commentators such as Alexandre Koyré take the analogy at face value and suggest that Plato is
saying as much about the courage and honour based nature of timocracies as he is about
timocratic man.12 It is a suggestion that the principles which inform the types of soul ranging
from the timocratic, oligarchic, democratic and tyranny also inform the politics of the
corresponding types of regimes. More recent commentators, however, have raised questions
about the city-soul analogy. While Williams suggests that the analogy is a failure because of its
inability to account for the complexity of soul of individuals within regimes, and in particular
within the ideal regime, Annas suggests that the political side of the analogy is meant to be
illustrative and not to carry any deep significance for the study of politics.13 More recently,
Ferrari has claimed that the analogy of city and soul should be conceptualised as a loose
metaphor in the sense that both the city and soul illustrate the same general pattern of internal
harmony and/or discord, but that there is no intended correspondence between the parts of one
and the parts of another. It would seem that if one is to take any stance at all on the lessons of
Book VIII one must first resolve the issue of the nature and status of the city-soul metaphor in
this work.
Is it possible that the political rhetoric of Books VIII and IX in which Plato discusses the
cycle of regimes and the descent from justice of kallipolis through timocracy, oligarchy and
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democracy to tyranny is purely instrumental and is meant to do nothing more than to present us
with equally discredited variants of individual injustice? A positive response to this question as
suggested by Annas and others seems puzzling. While one could argue that the dialogue of The
Republic as a whole has more to do with the individual soul than that of the city, the amount of
detail devoted to the peculiar institutional setting of the regime throughout the work, complete
with eugenic practices and gender considerations, would appear completely superfluous if there
were no political message or meaning behind the dialogue beyond that meant for the cultivation
of the self. This is not to say that a political message need be a full endorsement of the just city
as a practical political project.
Furthermore, if we examine the text we can see that by Book VIII Plato had no need to
carry on with the city-soul analogy if it was merely for purposes of illustrating individual soul
formation. In Books VI and VII he had already abandoned the analogy to embark on his famous
metaphors of the sun, the line and the cave and thereby to provide his readers with a more solid
illustration of the nature of his principles of education and truth. One of the main lessons of
Books VI and VII is to show us that we should not be content with the rule of reason in the soul
as a sufficient condition for justice (as argued in Book IV), but that there are exacting epistemic
conditions that require the just individual to grasp the underlying foundations of value, i.e. that
the study and mastery of philosophy as the knowledge of the Forms will suffice for the
understanding and hence the practice of true justice.14 From this account, it can only be deduced
that all individuals who do not love true wisdom must be equally corrupt, deficient and thereby
unworthy of our interest and attention.
So why return to an analogy which was no longer necessary for him to talk about the
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capacities of the individual soul? The unhappiness of the unjust soul can be clearly deduced by
the lack of harmony it will exemplify. Still, in Book VII it is precisely to the politics of these
deficient and corrupt souls and the regimes they inhabit, and indeed to a certain hierarchy of
corruption among them to which our attention is drawn. What does Plato mean by this? The
cycle of corruption can only make sense if one takes the political side of the analogy with greater
seriousness than just an illustration writ-large. Indeed, if one looks closer there is a logic unique
to communities and states that is evident from the start of the The Republic. Despite the analogy
between the individual and the city on which most of the argument of the text is based, we are
presented with two different frameworks for making sense of the place and need for concord in
the city and the soul. The dichotomy between the just soul of the philosopher who alone can see
the truth and the equally unjust souls who are not philosophers is not matched by a similar
dichotomy in the realm of politics.
In the closing passages of the Gorgias Socrates provides us with a contrast between a
good and corrupt model of politics. The first he describes as analogous to the practice of
medicine in which the statesman ‘confronts’ the Athenian people and ‘struggles’ to ensure their
perfection. The latter is analogous to the role of servants who make pleasure ‘the point of the
operation’. However, we find a very different representation in The Republic. Instead of a good
politics that is formed by the struggle of leaders with their constituency, justice requires and
sustains the virtue of moderation whereby all classes agree on who should rule. In addition,
whereas the corrupt regime of the Gorgias is one in which the wishes of the people are indulged,
whatever they may be, in The Republic Plato provides us with a more nuanced view. He
recognises the mixture of virtue and vice in the maintaining of any political community as well as
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a vast difference among the object of politics in competing regimes, differences that allow us to
ascribe a hierarchy of moral worth among them.
As early as Book I Socrates led Thrasymachus to acknowledge that even the most corrupt
association requires a modicum of morality in order to act ‘effectively’ and he notes that these
corrupt associations can be “a community or an army or pirates or thieves...”.15 Similarly,
despite the aura of timelessness that tinges his depiction of the aristocratic kallipolis, it is also
evident in Book VII that there are permanent seeds of its degeneration and indeed a certain
degree of inevitability to the fall of the just regime, as if justice was really foreign to the nature of
political community: “It is hard for a city composed in this way to change, but everything that
comes into being must decay. Not even a constitution such as this will last for ever. It, too, must
face dissolution.” (546a). While at the level of the soul there is clearly an absolute moral divide
between just and unjust souls identical to the division between philosophers and nonphilosophers, in the realm of politics and communities there is a more subtle continuum and
measured degrees of corruption. The further the regime moves away from the structure of
kallipolis, the more corrupt it becomes.
So the cycle of corruption presented here makes better sense only if one takes the political
side of the analogy with greater seriousness than just as a metaphor for the individual soul. Why
is it the specific nature of political community that it can be salvaged with varying degrees of
minimal justice in ways that are impossible on the level of the individual soul? One possible
answer is that environments can not be seen as fully determining of human behaviour, but rather
can help to facilitate, to a wide range of degrees of effectiveness, the development of justice
within the soul of the individual.
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Lear’s suggestion is that Plato illustrates here, as well as in his earlier discussion of the
education of the guardians, the principle that regimes can nurture a type of soul, but also reflect a
soul’s priorities.16 There is no doubt that Plato saw a link between the character of individual
souls and the broader political context in which these souls find themselves. Socrates states at
544d: “And do you realize that of necessity there are as many forms of human character as there
are of constitutions? Or do you think that constitutions are born ‘from oak or rock’ and not from
the characters of the people who live in the cities governed by them, which tip the scales, so to
speak, and drag the rest along with them?” suggesting that there is an important collective
dimension in the formation of character and in the ordering of desires in the soul. From this
perspective Book VIII can be best understood as an analysis of this process through which the
souls of all are transformed by the character of those who govern.
What this means in part is that one cannot easily deride Plato for focusing on the ruling
class without any regard for the moral outlook of the lower classes. What we will see instead is
that the ruling class is regarded by Plato as establishing the central good of the regime and that
the lower classes, or factions of the ruling class, can sometimes seek to redefine or reappropriate
that good to serve their own ends. In the case of the kallipolis, whose constitution is established
by the philosopher kings as structured around the principles of love of truth and justice, the
classes of guardians and producers can feel an attachment to the truth and its reign, through
which they are said to exercise the virtue of moderation, without fully knowing what the truth is
(442d). The lesser goods of certain pleasure and discipline that the lower classes pursue should
not be regarded as distinct goods, but rather subordinate goods necessary to, or instrumental to,
sustaining a deeper love of truth and justice. They are lesser and weaker manifestations of the
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same principle by virtue of the social and political context and the limitations of human souls.
In the case of the timocratic state, described by Plato as a “mixture of good and bad”
(548c) we see both the promotion of war as the dominant object of politics, as well as a secret
love of money (548a). We are told that the community will prefer a ‘passionate’ ruler who is
more suited for ‘war than for peace’. The love of philosophy and truth that had characterised the
kallipolis is now replaced by ‘competitiveness and ambition’ (548c), that is, a love of
competition and of success as mastery over others through a display of physical and cultural
excellences.
Ferrari is certainly correct to note that there is an independent class dynamic in the
making of these corrupt regimes, a dynamic that make their internal politics difficult to reduce to
an aggregation of identical personalities that Lear appears to predicate of the various regimes.17
As Plato notes, the timocratic regime is born of a compromise between the bronze class who
incline towards business and want to enrich themselves and the gold and silver classes who still
shun money and wealth (547b). Nonetheless, despite the class dynamics, there is a particular
character to each regime that emerges from the conflicts through a generalised love of
competition and success or in short, ambition. In other words, while it may be too much to say as
Lear does that each regime produces one type of individual, it is clear that there is a certain, even
if short-lived, consensus around what is politically desirable that emerges from these political
associations, even given the varying backgrounds and conditions of their members.
The next type of community presented by Plato in Book VII is that of oligarchy. The rise
of envy as a dominant passion tips the balance towards a greater regard for material wealth
(550d-e). At the same time, the greater the involvement in the exercise of accumulating wealth
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the greater the passion for money. In this way, wealth alone becomes the standard by which
access to political power is regulated (551b). The ensuing class antagonism makes security and
self-defense very difficult (551e), but more significantly, it leads to the excessive
impoverishment of certain individuals, some of whom are likely to pursue money through
begging and others through criminal behaviour (552c-d). While the type of individuals living in
an oligarchic regime may differ quite significantly in terms of way of life and even fundamental
character (i.e. law-abiding or not), the dominant passion shared by members of the community
means that many of their choices and activities will be motivated by this same shared passion. In
his depiction of corrupt regimes Plato can recognise both a shared motivational force and a
plurality of behaviours. Despite his depiction of the origin of this regime in the decline from
timocracy, Plato is clear to acknowledge that the most important factor in making acquisitiveness
the defining passion of this regime is the law prescribing property value as a criterion for
rulership (553a). While social friction may help to explain the evolution from one regime to the
next, it is the political infrastructure and the goods that it embodies and exemplifies that largely
set the tone for the society and help to determine the passions around which the activities of the
citizens are oriented.
For Plato the institution of democracy is the result of revolutionary desires among the
poor who in victory distribute equal social and political rights (557a). Through a growing lack of
self-discipline bred by an excessive love of luxury and class resentment, the population develops
in a multiple number of ways (557c). As Plato states: “it contains all kinds of constitutions on
account of the license it gives its citizens...” (557d). Indeed, Plato expresses certain admiration
for this system in all the variety it lets flourish and calls it “the finest or most beautiful of the
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constitutions...” (557c) Given the deep plurality that characterises this regime, can it be said that
there is any corresponding shared emotion? The one dominant principle of behaviour here is the
treatment of everyone as equal, that is as the same, with the related passions of love of freedom
as individual autonomy. While the corresponding individual in Plato’s picture is highly
conflicted and erratic in his behaviour (560c-561e)), the citizen of the democratic regime that he
depicts is largely set on one desire and shown to be able to pursue that desire with a certain
constancy in parallel with the varied desires of others. Despite the greater stability of the
democratic regime as opposed to the individual, its weakness, as described by Plato, lies in an
“insatiable desire” for freedom (562c) to the neglect of anything else.
Plato famously depicts the encroachments of freedom in the redefining of relations within
the household (including the insubordination of pets) and the classroom and the spread of equal
rights to resident aliens and visitors (562e-563c). This will grow into a general disrespect for law
and indeed for governance in general. Still, the catalyst for the advance of tyranny becomes the
corrupt classes or drones who in such an environment seek to advance themselves by both
milking the rich of their assets and catering to the sympathies of the poor. The worsening state of
class conflict gives rise to ruthless political leaders who in a state of political confusion may end
up by seizing power and instituting a form of direct rule (566b-d).
Tyranny is characterised as the rule of one through various duplicitous means to ensure
the leader’s hold on power. One means is to provoke warfare “so that the people will continue to
feel the need of a leader” (566e) as well as to eliminate those, usually the bravest, who will
criticise what’s going on (567b-c). Plato does not offer us much of a glimpse of the population
of a tyranny, other than to suggest that there will be a division of sympathies between those who
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benefit from the tyrant’s rule, most notably the drones, and those who may object to the rule of
the tyrant but who are either too afraid or too preoccupied to speak out.
On the surface, one sees in Plato’s depiction a complete disjuncture between the political
tyrant and the individual of a tyrannical disposition. While the first is calculating and duplicitous
in his means to maintain power, the latter is merely driven by lust with complete lack of selfdiscipline (574d). Still, as Plato tells us near the close of this discussion, the tyrannical
disposition is that which leads to criminal behaviour and “when such people become numerous
and conscious of their numbers, it is they- aided by the foolishness of the people- who create a
tyrant. And he, more than any of them, has in his soul the greatest and strongest tyrant of all.”
(575c-d). The ultimate means of meeting the desires of a tyrannical personality is through their
enslavement of a non-compliant population, i.e. through the political manifestation of their drive
for control and complete license (575d).
In terms of elucidating the societal grounds for political rule, Plato shows inconsistency
in his treatment of tyranny. The foundations of power are no longer directly rooted in a particular
and shared social sentiment, such as the ambition or acquisitiveness that grounded the timocracy
and oligarchy. Indeed, Plato notes that the population under the tyrannical regime can have very
distinct dispositions towards the holder of power, some highly flattering and supportive and
others very critical. It is the character of the tyrant that clearly is the focus of his attention and
concern. Nonetheless, Plato also recognises that the tyrannical regime can only be possible in a
social climate where political power is open to all and where the paradox of a love of freedom in
excess can lead to the undermining of freedom. In this sense, there is no positive principle
informing the institutions of tyranny, but merely a negative one; a growing lack of common
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identity and a lack of shared sense of the limits of justifiable public behaviour. In tyranny there
is no common sense of purpose or community in affect, something that makes it much easier for
the tyrant to impose a sense of his own necessity through multiple strategies.
Through this study of Plato’s analysis of corrupt regimes we have seen the lack of direct
correspondence between the regime and the individual type associated with it. Indeed each of
Plato’s regime types have been seen to be inhabited by a diversity of individual characters. This
suggests to us that the use of the city-state analogy does more in this part of the text than merely
elucidate the state of the individual soul.
We also see emerging from this Plato’s recognition of a dominant emotional force in all
regimes except tyranny, an emotional quality that is shared by a general population and shaped in
large part by the political institutions which define the community. So in the first instance it may
be that Plato is alerting us to an important feature of our selves as social beings. In other words,
the development of a desire for truth and wisdom that he seeks to instill in all his readers must
also be accompanied by an acute sense of the force that generalised social norms have over us.
Still, this generalised emotional quality does not result in a homogeneity of situation and
character. As we see in all the various regimes, the generalised emotional predisposition allows
for a plurality of responses. Thus, while the individual who sets his or her sights on something
other than philosophy becomes by that very fact corrupt and unworthy of any commendation, the
regime devoted to less than philosophy is somewhat salvaged in Plato’s eyes by the varying
possibilities it allows for individual goodness. The analogy of Books VIII and IX thus serves a
double movement in the development of Plato’s argument. On the one hand, he here reinforces
his argument for the need of individuals to devote their lives to the study of philosophy to be
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assured of goodness and true moral worth by showing the corrupt nature of any other form of
individual life. On the other hand, he shows the mixed moral potentialities in any number of
regimes devoted to essentially unjust objectives. The argument serves to show in the end that the
reign of philosophers is not a necessary condition for justice, but also that the possibilities for
justice will be limited by the realities of politics.
Many people have criticised Plato in his depiction of corrupt political regimes because of
their lack of resonance with his own political reality, as well as a rather inaccurate understanding
of the ways in which revolutionary change actually occurs.18 It is said that Aristotle with his
more ‘empirical’ approach had a more sensitive and thus more accurate understanding of the
actual working of political institutions in his own day. Nonetheless, one cannot read Books VIII
and IX of The Republic without some appreciation for the perspicacity of Plato’s remarks as they
relate to the description of varying types of political regimes. It may be that revolutionary or
evolutionary change does not readily follow the cycle that he envisaged; but the idea that political
regimes do set priorities and thereby have an impact on the way in which communities come to
understand themselves cannot be denied. Indeed what is said to be Aristotle’s more concrete
approach carried over this important insight of Plato’s.
Aristotle defines a regime or constitution (politeia) as “the arrangement which a state
adopts for the distribution of offices, and for the determination of sovereignty in the constitution
and of the end which the particular association aims at realizing” (IV, i; 1289a11), or more
basically “the constitution of a state is in a sense the way it lives” (IV, xi; 1295a34).19 Flowing
from this, the question of the place of emotion and reason in political life is a complex one for
Aristotle. The place of emotion in collective life as viewed by Aristotle carries over certain
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Platonic elements, and with a renewed emphasis on the essential plurality with which politics
must come to terms.
On the one hand, it is clear that Aristotle, like Plato, recognises at least in theory that the
best regime is one that can further the dictates of reason. There are many passages in The
Politics where Aristotle echoes Plato and appears to suggest that the most desirable form of
politics is one where emotion is overcome and mastered. In the opening book where Aristotle
explores and justifies the natural hierarchies in the household, he notes that it is natural and
expedient for the emotional part of our natures to be ruled by the mind, the part that possesses
reason (I,v; 1254b2). In his commentary in Book 2 on the kallipolis Aristotle agrees in principle
with the ends of political community posited by Plato, such as a need for certain unity and shared
sense of identity, but disputes largely the means by which these ends are to be achieved, i.e. a
rejection of communalism of goods and family (II, iv). Similarly, in his famous defense of
kingship, Aristotle suggests that if a community were to find an individual of ‘pre-eminent’
virtue (understood as outstanding rational discernment in practical and theoretical matters as
argued in The Nichomachean Ethics), the community could do no better than to submit to their
rule and judgement (III, xiii). Barring the possibility of the absolutely wise ruler, or the
philosopher king, Aristotle states in his discussion regarding the rule of law: “...he who asks law
to rule is asking God and intelligence and no others to rule; while he who asks for the rule of a
human being is importing a wild beast too; for desire is like a wild beast, and anger perverts
rulers and the very best of men. Hence law is intelligence without appetition.” (III, xvi; 1287a1).
So in general terms Aristotle, like Plato, seems to advocate a regime guided by the judgements
of uncommon wisdom.
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On the other hand, there is evidence in Aristotle, like Plato, that there is a more complex
story to be told. In the first instance, there is the question of just what is meant by the rule of
wisdom, intelligence and virtue in the individual soul. It is important to acknowledge Aristotle’s
understanding of the essential work of the emotions in even the most virtuous soul, as shown in
the recent work by Sokolon.20 The Ethics shows a clear portrait of a proper emotional balance,
according to the principle of the mean, by which the sensitive and rational parts of the soul are in
harmony: “...since excellence of character is a disposition issuing in decisions, and decision is a
desire informed by deliberation, in consequence both what issues from reason must be true and
the desire must be correct for the decision to be a good one, and reason must assert and desire
pursue the same things.”21 As he explains in The Politics, the rule of intelligence over desire in
the virtuous soul is to be considered akin to the rule of a statesman or king, rather than a tyrant:
that is, according to principles of persuasion, rather than command (I, v; 1254b2). Aristotle is no
Stoic and even in his most refined understanding of virtue as the best manifestation of theoretical
and practical wisdom he does not rule out the importance of an emotional life. Indeed, as is often
acknowledged, a righteous anger is a necessary capacity of the virtuous Aristotelian soul. So
here emotions are acknowledged as an important feature of the human soul and the attainment of
virtue involves not the eradication of emotion, but its careful management.
Yet we might go even farther still to suggest that for Aristotle, the capacity for certain
forms of rational thought itself depends on emotional capacity. In a close reading of Aristotle’s
Rhetoric in conjunction with The Ethics it has been suggested that the exercise of practical
wisdom (phronesis) and the work of political deliberation for Aristotle requires important
emotional input as a precondition for proper (reasonable) judgement.22 Aristotle also suggests in
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Book I of The Ethics that the aspect of the soul that possesses reason can be seen as ‘double’ in
nature: “one element of it will have it in the proper sense and in itself, another as something
capable of listening as if to one’s father [or loved ones]”.23 He acknowledges here that in
addition to rational thought that is deductive or that works out proper solutions by the force of
logic and independent judgement alone, there also can be rational thought that is more passive
and receptive. Yet, with regard to the latter and as its most important feature, its receptivity to
reason depends less on the content of the message than on the emotional nature of the relation
between the individual giving advice and the individual hearing it. Of course, one not need
always ‘take’ the advice of a father or loved one, or indeed always conceive of that relation in a
fully pleasant way. Aristotle is suggesting here that it is rather the fact of a personal relationship
based on feelings of certain loyalty and attachment that provide the necessary precondition for
receptivity to reasonable judgement. If one’s judgement was impaired by excessive emotional
turmoil the same advice given by a stranger would not carry the same authority. Emotional ties
to others make it possible to take account of advice and be receptive to and possibly accepting of
the rational judgement of others as guidance in one’s own judgement. So indeed for Aristotle,
some of the working of human reason, and indeed the type of judgements required in the
development of good habituation where one’s own rational capacities are undeveloped, do
require a prior embeddedness in emotional ties and an exercise of affective capacities in
particular.
At another level, in the second instance for the issue that most concerns us in this work, it
is evident that the emotional life of individuals and societies is central to a proper understanding
of politics in all its forms. In Book VIII of The Ethics, Aristotle speaks of cities as keeping
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together through a form of like-mindedness that he compares to friendship.24 Furthermore, while
friendship can be of three different kinds, i.e. for the love of the useful, for the love of pleasure
and for the love of the good, Aristotle recognises one common feature to all forms of friendship,
namely a reciprocal awareness of the basis or the type of friendship through which friends
associate. As he states: “There are, then, three kinds of friendship, equal in number to the objects
of love; for there corresponds to each of these objects a reciprocal loving of which both parties
are aware...”25 The experience of citizenship, then, is emotional insofar as association involves
attachment to a particular group of people through a common set of desires; and it is public
because it is not only shared, but because there is a mutual awareness of the fact that it is partly
constitutive of the identity of the community.
What then is the particular nature of citizenship in Aristotle? In much of the political
commentary on friendship there is a question as to the sort of friendship corresponding best to
Aristotle’s idea of citizenship.26 It is complicated by the fact that some political regimes are
based expressly on inequality of rulers and ruled, and others on the equality of citizens,
corresponding to two different modes of friendship. Given the recognised diversity of human
association it may well be that for Aristotle there can not be any one form of friendship to typify
all forms of citizenship. While friendship based on use, or love of the useful (such as in
monarchies where one is grateful for the benefits bestowed by a well-minded king or in
democratic regimes based on pursuit of profit), may be the most common basis of citizenship,
other forms of citizenship may be more clearly centred around a love of the pleasure that political
association brings (as may be the case in regimes based on the pursuit of honour or the work of
political education on the young).27 Because of the demanding terms of the highest form of
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friendship, which Aristotle acknowledges as rare and only possible between the most virtuous of
individuals, it does not form a generalised basis for political community. From this emerges a
key distinction between ethics and politics in Aristotle, namely that even though politics is
considered to be the ‘architectonic’ discipline insofar as “the end of this expertise will contain
those of the rest; so that this end will be the human good”, and despite the longer term
perspective inherent in politics, the social conditions for even the best practice of politics will
always fall qualitatively short of the most excellent forms of personal attachment based on
mutual admiration of good character.28 There will always be a degree of instrumentality in our
political relationships that we may not always find in all our personal ones. This raises the
prospect of the greater fragility of these political relationships insofar as they will involve
individuals of a wide spectrum in capacities for proper moral judgement and therefore offer
greater likelihood of conflicting interpretations of the exact end of their political association (be
it in use or in pleasure) as well as a proper distributive principle. Aristotle acknowledges this
with regard to friendships of use in particular: “The friendship that exists because of the
useful...is prone to accusations; for since their having to do with each other is conditional on its
bringing them benefit, they always want the larger share, think they have less than they ought,
and complain that they are not getting as much as they want even though they deserve it;
meanwhile those conferring the benefits are not able to supply the demands of those receiving
them.”29 From this fragility comes also a greater chance of personal disappointments from these
relations and hence anger, spite and the like. Politics as friendship, as Aristotle conceives it, does
not minimise opportunities for emotional distress and civil conflict.30
What of the place of emotion in working through the demands of political justice? If we
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look to Aristotle’s famous depiction of political life as an ‘association’ (kononia) in Book I of
The Politics, he suggests that the fundamental reason for collective life is the human capacity for
logos (I, i; 1253a7). Most commentators have underlined the double meaning of logos as both
‘reason’ and ‘speech’. This capacity extends beyond that of the communication of pains and
pleasure, a capacity that he attributes also to animals. To paraphrase, it is the distinction between
the useful and the harmful and the just and unjust and the use of collective deliberation in
attempts to build a common view on these matters that distinguish a political state, for Aristotle,
from a mere aggregation. But is the process of deliberation and indeed the ethical distinctions
themselves a matter merely of reason and speech?
It is clear that the emotional needs of human beings are part of the impetus that ground
human community in the first instance. As Aristotle states: “...men have a desire for life
together, even when they have no need to seek each other’s help” (III, vi; 1278b15). So while the
chief end of political life in Aristotelian terms is the good life or happiness, the lesser goods of
self-interest and emotional well-being do play a role in helping to maintain the institutions of
political community. Indeed, pursuit of the goods of profit and honour may define a regime’s
own sense of itself, as in the case of democracies and oligarchies respectively. So while the
articulation and subsequent ongoing deliberation on the nature and application of these lesser
political goods in the structure and laws of these regimes may be a matter of logos as reason and
speech, we can see that the content of the goods of justice as conceived here involve attachment
for substantively emotional causes to material well-being and/or love of good reputation.
Of course it is important here to recognise Aristotle’s distinction between correct or
deviant regimes. For Aristotle, regimes or constitutions can be classified as correct or deviant in
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two ways. As he notes in The Nichomachean Ethics, “lawgivers make the citizens good through
habituation, and this is what every lawgiver aims at, but those who do it badly miss their mark;
and this is what makes one constitution different from another, a good one from a bad one.” 31 In
the Politics Aristotle raises another way of regarding the distinction as related to the degree to
which the rulers seek the widest possible distribution of the goods or ends of political
community, how ever they may be defined (III, vii). Because all regimes have some
understanding of the good they seek and the distributive principle for that good, all regimes in
some sense are motivated by a corresponding principle of justice.
Political deliberation requires the articulation and discussion of what the community
considers to be good and on how to implement it. However, the dominant conception of the
good in a community can initially be both the outcome of unreflective attachment and affect as
well as reflective judgement. Indeed, insofar as the goods pursued by a regime will, in most
instances, involve minimally some level of material well-being as well as a desire for partially
fulfilling human interaction, it could be said that natural human desires will always in some sense
help to constitute the content of justice in any constitution. While logos as reason/speech is the
means by which these attachments are made explicit, implemented and possibly adjudicated in
the political realm according to Aristotle, the content of justice, as signifying what goods will be
honoured and distributed in political community as well as according to what principle, will
always, in part, be constituted by the appetitive as well as the emotional attachments and desires
of human beings.
In terms of the nature of differing regimes Aristotle can be seen as going even farther than
Plato insofar as he provides each with a distinct individual character. This analysis is linked to
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his view of the relation between the conditioning of desire in the soul and the broader social and
political context. As he suggests in Book 1 chapter 8 of The Rhetoric:
[A deliberative speaker] should not forget the ‘end’ of each constitution; for
choices are based on the ‘end’. The ‘end’ of democracy is freedom, of oligarchy
wealth, of aristocracy things related to education and the traditions of law, of
tyranny self-preservation. Clearly, then, one should distinguish customs and legal
usages and benefits on the basis of the ‘end’ of each, since choices are made in
reference to this. Now, since pisteis [means of persuasion] not only comes from
logical demonstration but from speech that reveals character (for we believe the
speaker through his being a certain kind of person and this is the case if he seems
to be good or well disposed to us or both), we should be acquainted with the kinds
of character distinctive of each form of constitution; for the character distinctive
of each is necessarily most persuasive to each.32
If we remember that for Aristotle character is as much as matter of feeling as it is of judgment we
will acknowledge that these communities of character or ethos are largely distinguished by a
form of collective emotional consensus on what is to be desired and what is to be feared. The
development of this consensus, as argued by Aristotle here, is not always the product of rational
deliberation but can also be through a community of affect.
Let us look more closely at a few of the most common types of regimes identified by
Aristotle. While the answer to the question of the ideal regime in Aristotle can waver from
monarchy, aristocracy to polity, there is no interpretative difficulty in identifying what constitute
for him the most corrupt regimes of tyranny, oligarchy and democracy. What is most
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characteristic of their corruption or deviance, according to Aristotle, is the difficulty with which
rulers of such states submit to reason, in part determined by their economic circumstances. As
Aristotle states: “Following reason is just what is difficult both for the exceedingly rich,
handsome, strong and well-born, and for their opposites, the extremely poor, the weak, and those
grossly deprived of honour...where one set of people possess a great deal and the other nothing,
the result is either extreme democracy or unmixed oligarchy, or a tyranny due to the excesses of
either. For tyranny often emerges from an over-enthusiastic democracy or from an oligarchy”
(IV, xi; 1295b1-34). Despite Aristotle’s attempt to defend a scheme for the more practical ‘ideal’
of polity, as the ‘best constitution’ and ‘best life for the majority of states and the majority of
men’ (IV, xi, 1295a25), he tells us that most states are either democratic or oligarchic, “for the
middle being frequently small, whichever of the two extremes is on top, those with possessions
or the common people, abandons the middle and conducts the constitution according to its own
notions, and so the result is either democracy or oligarchy” (IV, 1296a22)..
So the vast majority of states, according to Aristotle, while not obedient to the dictates of
reason in the quality of their rule, nonetheless instantiate a certain conception of justice. In the
case of democracies, a conception of justice is derived in part from the assumption that those
who are equal in any respect are equal absolutely. Because all are alike in their claims to
freedom, democrats will consider all equal in absolute terms and thereby will hold that all have
an equally just claim to participation in public matters (V, i; 1301a25). In the case of oligarchies,
the corresponding conception of justice flows from the assumption that those who are unequal in
some one respect are completely unequal. Given inequalities in wealth it is held that the wealthy
should also have a larger share of political rights (V, i; 1301a25).
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In later passages Aristotle advances his description of the general characteristics of these
two regimes based in part on a critique of Plato. He suggests that Plato was misguided in
characterising an oligarchy as devoted to the making of money. “...it is...an odd notion that
change into oligarchy is due to the fact that those who hold office are fond of money and makers
of money, and not rather to the fact that those with vast possessions think it unjust that those who
do not have property should participate in the state on equal terms with those who do. And in
many oligarchies it is not possible to make money: there are laws to prevent it. On the other
hand, in democratic Carthage they do make money and have not yet changed their constitution.”
(V, xii; 1316a39). Instead, an oligarchy is distinguished by both a continued sociological
distinction between classes (V, ix; 1309b14) and a shared sense among the members of the
wealthier classes that wealth is a basis for privilege and greater political power. The practice of
distributing honours and political office on the basis of existing wealth is a reflection of the
oligarchic conception of justice. It is also the embodiment of a desire for honour above all,
though sometimes allied with a desire for profit (V, ii; 1302a22 and VI, vii; 1321a5). Because of
the smaller power-base for the oligarchic constitution and the greater threat of faction both
between the oligarchs and the people as well as internally, if the regime is to survive it is
important that it enforce good order (VI, vi; 1321a1). As Aristotle tells us at the opening of The
Nichomachean Ethics, “it is possible to desire honour both more than one should and less than
one should. The person who is excessive in his desires in this case is said to be honourloving...”33 So the broad character of the regime of oligarchy features a desire for honour that is
greater than is requisite for a regime that encompasses a wide cross-section of individual
capacities.
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In contrast, a democracy is formed by a generalised sense of injustice given a broad
exclusion from the spoils of power. A desire for gain or profit constitutes a large part of the
democratic drive for Aristotle, not in the sense of a strictly individual need, but as the due of all
those who should be considered as equals (V, ii; 1302a22 and VI, vii; 1321a5). Democrats
extend this commitment to equality to entail the sovereignty of the multitude and the justice of
the decisions of the majority as well as the liberty to live as you like and the idea of not being
ruled (VI, ii; 1317a40). These are the principles identified by Aristotle that give rise to the
various legislative and constitutional possibilities in the regime. The tyrannical potentialities in
democracy in the temptation of the majority to use their power to abuse the rich leads Aristotle to
argue for various mechanisms by which a democracy can be preserved that keep the majority of
the poor from actually exercising their political power and that institute some recognition and
protection for the wealthy (IV, iv, and V, xii; 1313b32). Still, insofar as there is less potential of
internal faction in a democracy, than there is in oligarchy, democracy is generally safer and more
stable (V, I; 1302a2). It may be said that the democratic drive for profit and gain at the expense
of others is a manifestation for Aristotle of a drive to avariciousness, something that
demonstrates a state of character beyond the mean of open-handedness, or moderation as it
relates to money.34 “The avaricious...are scavengers for profit-[they] ply their trades, and put up
with being called names, for what they can get in the way of profit...making a profit out of their
friends, to whom they should be giving.”35.
Of course, Aristotle recognises that the forms of democracy and oligarchy are theoretical
constructs and that the characteristics of actual states will be more complex given the diversity of
the various elements making up a state. As he states: “there are plenty of instances of a
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constitution which according to its law is not democratic, but which owing to custom and
training is democratic in its workings; conversely, there are in other places constitutions which
according to law incline towards democracy, but by reason of their customs and training operate
more like oligarchies...” (IV, v; 1292b11) Along with recognising and advocating various
versions of mixed forms of oligarchy and democracy, he also acknowledges the vastly different
sociological composition of states, and in particular the balance of professions and social classes,
that will have an enormous impact on the character of the regime and its potential for political
stability (VI). So, for example, a democracy that is not dominated by either an agrarian or
pastoral people will not last long as it will more than likely give rise to deep resentment on the
part of the wealthy who will form a faction and push for a change of constitution (VI, iv;
1319a24). In contrast, as is evident from the history of Athens itself, an oligarchy that relies on
the navy and light-armed infantry for its military power will most certainly flirt with the
temptation of democracy given the tendency of those who bear arms for the regime to demand in
turn their share of political power (VI, vii; 1321a5).
It is of particular significance that despite the corrupt nature of these two regimes of
oligarchy and democracy, it is precisely a combination of these two constitutions that Aristotle
posits as the most practical ideal for a majority of regimes. The combination of laws and balance
of principles, along with the cultivation of a large middle class, allows for a moderation of policy
that accords with a more rational standard that can more readily further the common good of all.
In this way, a certain mixture of poorly balanced dispositions, while not achieving a good of
individual character excellence, nonetheless can achieve more limited political goods.
Aristotle’s conception of a public passion, then, is fully evident in his conceptions of the
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corrupt regimes of democracy and oligarchy whose rulers pursue a partial view of justice,
identical to the interests of the dominant class and characterised by the drive for material gain
and honour respectively. For Aristotle, it is not necessary that all citizens in these regimes see
themselves as driven in their individual responses by the regime’s defining principle. Rather, for
Aristotle the dominant principle manifests itself in the various institutions and laws through
which citizens are educated, but it also can serve as a catalyst for dissension and rebellion for
groups who find themselves in a minority or oppressed. Thus, while the dominant desire can
serve as a principle of identity, it can do so in both positive and negative ways. While
conceptualised somewhat differently from Plato, Aristotle also makes room for various forms of
response and character formation against the background of a singular regime and its dominant
emotional principle.
In this chapter we have seen how Plato and Aristotle both seek to characterise regimes,
and corrupt regimes in particular, by a particular emotional disposition on the part of the rulers or
dominant class. At the same time, they both do not wish to deny a certain inescapable plurality
of the social body, and so in various ways they combine their idea of a dominant character or
ethos in each corrupt regime that can be reduced to the idea of a dominant emotional principle,
with an explanation of diverse social forces and in particular social catalysts for change. In
addition, we have seen how this idea of a dominant emotional characteristic associated with each
regime type takes on a particularly ‘public’ quality, insofar as it manifests itself in key
institutions and practices of the regime, while at the same time allows for diverse personal
appropriations and responses.
The general characteristics of this view of politics found in Plato and Aristotle as exposed
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here constitute what I call “the classical view” of the place of the emotions in politics. It
involves an acknowledgement that the majority of individuals will live in political communities
that are not perfect and that are not organised to maximise the highest possible human goods.
Instead, the groups who hold most power in any given political community will define the
dominant qualities of the regime. In addition, despite their normative dismissals of corrupt
regimes as working largely contrary to the highest ideals of rationality and humanity, it is
significant that within these regimes both thinkers can find some room to acknowledge a striving
for justice, however misconceived. Thus, there is a dual edge to politics. On the one hand, one
can only demand of politics the same high standard of generalised human happiness that one
demands in the individual and the philosopher, and in that light all political experiments come up
short. On the other hand, there appears to be a more tempered reaction to the inevitable failures
of politics. Both Plato and Aristotle find redeeming features in many of these experiments, in
ways that do not fully correspond to their low regard for individuals (most/all) who do not attain
their high ideals of fulfillment.
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1
In identifying this as “the classical view” I do not wish to have it inferred that all
thinkers of the classical era can be deemed to subscribe to this view. Rather, it is a short form for
suggesting that it was a position that can be attributed to important thinkers of this period in the
history of political thought, though not exclusively so.
2
It will nonetheless be conceded here that the recognition of diversity found in Plato and
Aristotle did not attain the degree of moral diversity acknowledged in accounts of liberalism
today. I am merely arguing that it would be wrong to construe their theories as in principle not
incorporating some recognition of deep diversity.
3
Cheryl Hall, The Trouble With Passion (New York and London: Routledge, 2005).
4
There may be some who will doubt that Shklar’s idea of liberalism really counts as an
incorporation of emotion insofar as her argument is based more on a need to avoid cruelty rather
than an emphasis on ‘fear’. Nonetheless, she does base her understanding in part on the
supposition (drawn, she argues, from Montesquieu) that there is no definite positive political
attachment underlying a commitment to liberalism, but rather both a reasoned and visceral
rejection of the other political alternatives. For Berlin see “Two Concepts of Liberty,” Four
Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969).
5
Barbara Koziak, Retrieving Political Emotion (University Park: Penn State University
Press, 2000).
94
8
6
Ibid., 110.
7
Ibid., 115.
See also the work of Marlene Sokolon, who convincingly argues that Aristotle recognized how
a wide spectrum of emotional response can be functional to his vision of good political life.
Marlene Sokolon, Political Emotions. Aristotle and the Symphony of Reason and Emotion
(Dekalb, Ill: Northern Illinois University Press, 2006). In a similar move, Christina Tarnopolsky
argues how the emotion of shame can be beneficial to a Socratic understanding of the political
good. See “Plato on Shame and Frank Speech in Democratic Athens,” In Bringing the Passions
Back In: the emotions in political philosophy , Leonard Ferry and Rebecca Kingston, eds.
(Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2008), pp. 40-59.
9
See John M. Cooper, “Plato’s Theory of Motivation,” In Plato II, Gail Fine, ed.
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 189-190 and Charles Kahn, “Plato’s Theory of
Desire,” Review of Metaphysics 1(1987), pp. 77-103.
10
I use here the George Grube translation as revised by C.D.Reeve, i.e. Plato, The
Republic (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992).
11
Aristotle, Ethics, ed. S. Broadie and C. Rowe (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2002), VII.13, 1153b36, 205and 1153b13, 206.
12
Alexandre Koyré, Introduction à la lecture de Platon (Paris: Gallimard, 1962).
13
Bernard Williams, “The Analogy of City and Soul in Plato’s Republic,” In Plato II,
95
Fine, ed., pp. 255-264 and Julia Annas, An Introduction to Plato’s ‘Republic’, (Oxford:
ClarendonPress, 1981).
14
Christopher Bobonich, Plato’s Utopia Recast (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002),
chap. 1.
15
Plato’s Republic, 351c-d. Subsequent references to the text will be incorporated in the
body of my chapter.
16
Jonathan Lear, Open Minded: Working Out the Logic of the Soul (Cambridge MA:
Harvard University Press, 1998).
17
G.R. F. Ferrari, City and Soul in Plato’s ‘Republic’ (Chicago and London: University
of Chicago Press, 2005).
18
19
Aristotle, The Politics, trans. T.A. Sinclair, revised by T.R. Saunders (London:
Penguin Books, 1981). All subsequent citations of this text are taken from this edition and will
include a note of the book and chapter number as well as the line number of the start of the
paragraph from which the citation is taken. These will be noted in parentheses directly after the
relevant citation.
20
21
Marlene Sokolon, Political Emotions.
Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, trans. C. Rowe, commentary S. Broadie (Oxford:
96
Oxford University Press, 2002), VI.2, p. 177.
22
See Arash Abizadeh, “The Passions of the Wise: ‘phronesis’, rhetoric and Aristotle’s
passionate practical deliberation,” In Bringing the Passions Back In, Kingston and Ferry, eds.,
pp. 60-77 and Nancy Sherman, Making a Necessity of Virtue. Aristotle and Kant on Virtue
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). There is certainly an affinity between this
reading of Aristotle and de Sousa’ s more general argument that all uses of rational capacity
depend on a more basic capacity for emotion. See Ronald de Sousa, The Rationality of Emotion
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987).
23
Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, 110.
24
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, VIII.1, 1155a24, 209. He discusses the like-
mindedness of citizens further in IX.6:”...a city is said to be like-minded when its citizens share
judgements about what is advantageous, reach the same decisions, and do what has seemed to
them jointly to be best. Their “like-mindedness”, then, is about projects for action, and of these,
ones that have a certain magnitude, and can be engaged in by both parties, or by everyone, e.g.
when it seems a good thing to a whole city that offices should be elective, or that an alliance be
made with the Spartans, or that Pittacus should rule (during the period when he was willing to do
so). When each of two parties wishes power for himself, as in Phoenician Women, then there are
contending factions; for being like-minded is not a matter of each side’s being of the same mind
about whatever it may be but of being of the same mind in the same particular set of
circumstances, e.g. when both the masses and decent people think the best should rule; for in that
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way everyone gets what they are aiming for. Like-mindedness, then, appears to be a friendship
between citizens, as indeed it is said to be; for it has to do with what is advantageous, and what
affects people’s lives.” (IX.6, 1167a26-b4, 232)
25
Ibid., VIII.3, 1156a7-9, 210.
26
See, for example, Jill Frank, A Democracy of Distinction (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2005), chap. 5; John M. Cooper, “Aristotle on Friendship,” In Essay’s on
Aristotle’s Ethics Amelie Oksenberg Rorty, ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980),
pp. 301-40; John M. Cooper, “Aristotle on the Forms of Friendship,” Review of Metaphysics
30(1997), pp. 619-48; Lorraine Pangle, Aristotle and the Philosophy of Friendship (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003); Paul Schollmeier, Other Selves. Aristotle on Personal and
Political Friendship (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1994); Sibyl Schwarzenbach, “On Civic
Friendship,” Ethics 107(1996), pp. 97-128; and Elena Irrera, “Between Advantage and Virtue:
Aristotle’s Theory of Political Friendship,” History of Political Thought 26,4 (2005), pp. 565585. While Jill Frank suggests that accounts of Aristotle’s civic friendship converge on an
acceptance of the relationship as a form of advantage or use friendship, it is evident that there is a
much broader disagreement in the literature. Frank, Democracy of Distinction, 150.
27
“Corresponding to each kind of constitution there is evidently a friendship, to the
extent that there is also justice. There is, first, that of a king for his subjects, based on the excess
of benefits bestowed; for he benefits his subjects, if indeed, as a person of excellence, he takes
care that they do well, as a shepherd takes care of his sheep...Next, the friendship of husband for
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wife is the same as that in an aristocracy; for it is based on excellence, assigning more of what is
good to the better, and what is fitting to each; and in this way what is just is achieved too. The
friendship of brothers, for its part, resembles that between comrades, since they are equals, and of
an age, and people like that are for the most part in sympathy with one another, and have a
similar character; and the friendship involved in timocracy, too, resembles this one, for being
citizens in a timocracy means being equals, and decent in character, so that they rule in turn, and
on a basis of equality; so too, then, is the friendship between them. As for the deviations, just as
there is little in the way of justice in them, so there is little friendship, and least in the worst
deviation...there seems to be a kind of justice that obtains for any human being in relation to
anyone capable of sharing in law and taking part in agreements, and so there can be friendship
too, to the extent that the other is a human being. There is little, then, by way of friendships or of
justice in tyrannies either, but more in democracies; for with those who are equals the things in
common are many.” Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, VIII.11, 1161a10-b10, 220-221.
28
Ibid., I.3, 1094b6, 96. Also,”...the political community does not seek the advantage of
the moment but takes regard to the whole of life...” Ibid., VIII.9, 1160a23-24, 218.
29
Ibid., VIII.13, 1162b17-21, 223.
30
On this point also see Bernard Yack, The Problems of a Political Animal: Community,
Justice and Conflict in Aristotelian Political Thought, (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1987?), esp. chap. 7.
31
Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, II.1, 1103b5, 111.
99
32
Aristotle, On Rhetoric. A Theory of Civic Discourse, trans. G. Kennedy (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 77.
33
Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, II.7, 1107b25, 119.
34
Ibid., II.7, 1107b5, 118.
35
Ibid., IV.1, 1122a7-11, 145.
100