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The Basis of Politics: Aristotle and the Scientists

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2009

G. Barraclough
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Extract

There is so much truth in the conception of the state as a natural organism and of man as a political animal, as commonly contrasted with the various theories of the state as an artificial formation based on contract, or implied contract, that Aristotle's proposition is rarely criticized from any other standpoint. When Aristotle said that man was a political animal, that is that political life was his nature, and consequently that the state, as the ultimate development of his nature, was a natural institution, or, as we should say, an organism, he was, we may say with a good deal of certainty, speaking in the light of this contrast. But his theory must be judged on its own merits, and not on the demerits of that which he was attacking. We may grant that the state is natural; but we may nevertheless mean by “natural” something other than Aristotle means. And if our conception of Nature is different from his, it will follow that our agreement about the state is one of words only.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 4 , Issue 16 , October 1929 , pp. 490 - 496
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1929

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References

page 490 note 1 Barker, E., Plato and Aristotle, 221; Physics, 193, a, 28; 193, b, 12; 193, a, 30.Google Scholar

page 491 note 1 De Gen. Animal, 778, b, 1–5.

page 491 note 2 Politics, ii. 2.

page 491 note 3 Ibid., iii. 6.

page 491 note 4 Ibid., iii. 17: “There is no such justice or expediency in a tyranny, or in any other perverted form of government, which comes into being contrary to nature.”

page 491 note 5 Ibid., v. 9: “Oligarchy or democracy although a departure from the most perfect form, may yet be a good enough government, but if anyone attempts to push the principles of either to an extreme, he will begin by spoiling the government and end by having none at all.”

page 492 note 1 Whitehead, A. N., Science and the Modern World (1926 edition), 150, 210,Google Scholar

page 493 note 1 Barker, E., Plato and Aristotle, 291.Google Scholar

page 494 note 1 Politics, ii. 5: “The evils now existing in states, suits about contracts, convictions for perjury, flatteries of rich men and the like … are said to arise out of the possession of private property. These evils, however, are due to a very different cause—the wickedness of human nature.”

page 494 note 2 Ideas, strikingly developed by A. N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, in regard to natural science, are here applied to politics.

page 495 note 1 Whitehead, 151: “An individual entity, whose life-history is a part within the life-history of some larger, deeper, more complete pattern, is liable to have aspects of that larger pattern dominating its own being, and to experience modifications of that larger pattern reflected in itself as modifications of its own being.”

page 496 note 1 Harmony is perhaps too strong a word. The whole problem of Authority arises out of the fact that at times there can be notable discord. But, as Sir Paul Vinogradoff has pointed out in a strictly historical context, cooperation is so indispensably the counterpart of conflict as almost to contain it. See Vinogradoff, Oxford Studies in Social and Legal History, VI. vii.