In Our Time - Aristotle's Politics

Episode Date: November 6, 2008

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the most important works of political philosophy ever written - Aristotle’s ‘Politics’. Looking out across the city states of 4th century Greece Aristotle asked what made a society good and developed a language of ‘oligarchies’, ‘democracies’ and ‘monarchies’ that we still use today. Having witnessed his home town of Stagira destroyed by Philip of Macedon, Aristotle tried to establish a way of preserving a good society in dangerous times. How should it be governed and who should be allowed to live in it? Thomas Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Aquinas and Niccolo Machiavelli, to name but a few, have all asked the same questions and come up with wildly differing answers.Aristotle’s conclusions range across the role of wealth and the law, across men, women and slaves, education and leisure. They are far reaching, influential and, at times, deeply unpalatable. But they are also answers to questions that have not and will not go away. With Angie Hobbs, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick; Paul Cartledge, AG Leventis Professor of Greek Culture at the University of Cambridge and Annabel Brett, Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Cambridge.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, what makes a good society? How should it be governed and who should be allowed to live in it? What are politics for?

And are we naturally political animals? These are old questions. Thomas Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Aquinas and Nicola Machiavelli are just a few who've asked them. But they all have one thing in common, and that's a book by the Greek philosopher Aristotle. It's called Politics, a two and a half thousand-year-old collection of notes

that have cast a long shadow in political philosophy. In the politics, Aristotle tried to establish why human beings live together and how best they should do so. With me to discuss Aristotle's ideas and his influence are Paul Cartledge, A. G. Leventis, Professor of Greek Culture at the University of Cambridge,

and G. Hobbes, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Warwick University, and Annabel Brett, Senior Lecture in History at the University of Cambridge. Angie Hobbes, the first thing Aristotle tries to establish is why human beings live together at all. Can you explain his answer? Yes, he says that man is naturally a political animal. And by that, he doesn't mean that we are geared by nature to go around putting political leaflets through doors. He means that if we're going to flourish, if we're going to prosper, we need to actualise our naturally and distinctively human faculties,

particularly our intellectual and moral faculties. But especially our moral faculties cannot be actualised outside the social context of Apollus. So when he says that man, and the Greek word in fact means human, humans are naturally political animals, he means that we're the kind of animal naturally designed to live together in a police, in a community. A polys community. Exactly.

Exactly, in a city state. And that's the context in which we can flourish. So the polices there is engineered to enable us to flourish. This classification is part of his method, isn't it? Can you elaborate that a little bit, the Aristotelian method of classifying species, classifying thoughts, classifying ideas? We were classified our species as because we fitted into this particular stratum. That's right. Aristotle trained as a biologist.

And pre-Darwin, he believes that species, are sort of eternally fixed and have propensities and faculties that need to be actualised and exalised for all eternity. And yes, he tries to discover what the human animal is like, what we can do, what we need to do, what's going to enable us, exactly. But the interesting thing really is why he thinks we are naturally inclined. He brings in the idea of nature. Can you elaborate on that?

We naturally, we, as this particular, naturally go towards a policy estate. We need to do. We go to that. I've said enough, after you. Yes, well, he's entering a debate which was set up the previous century by some travelling philosophers called sophists. And sophists such as Antiphon said that there was a big distinction between nature and culture, as they termed it,

between nature or fussists and culture, convention, law or nomos. And according to Antif, he says that humans are best served if we follow nature and not culture, that societies and conventions and laws are artificial, they're shackles, they're kind of pin us down, they're fetters. And what we need to do is break free from all this and live according to nature. Aristotle enters into this debate and says, no, no, they've got it all wrong. There isn't this big divide between nature and culture.

We are naturally designed to live in cultures. and this dichotomy is a false one. So was this argument going on? Can we imagine it going on in, as it were, in Athens at the time, in the schools, in the streets? Oh, we know, yes. I mean, Aristotle is following. Plato, who also picks up from Protagoras and Antiphon and others' sophists.

Absolutely yes. And Aristotle says, look at what Apollos a city state is. He says, look at its origins. It has two natural origins, two natural origins, two natural, pairs of human association. One is the pair between male and female for the purpose of procreation. The other is the pair between master and slave for the purposes of mutual preservation. The polis stems out of these two natural associations which start off. They form a household. Households group together and spin off and form villages. Villages eventually grouped together and form the Polis.

So the Pollyce says Aristotle is the natural, end of these two earlier natural associations. And nature, says Aristotle, is itself an end. So for all these reasons, the Pollyce, the city-state is a natural organism. He almost talks of it as if it's a living being. And we're operating in a city-state environment. There are about 1,000 city-states at the time. The Greek Empire is going from present-day Georgia over to Spain.

And so that is his model time. And again, he thinks about 100,000 people is the limit, doesn't he, how this thing can operate properly? Paul Cutledge, what about Aristotle's own experiences of cities? And I've mentioned the spread of cities, the spread of the Greek empire, the number of city-states, the differences between them and so on. And he himself has brought up in a city-state until he was 17, not Athens. Yeah, there's a paradox about Aristotle

because he spent most of his adult life in Athens, and he could not, I think, have achieved what he did had he not. On the other hand, he never became a citizen of Athens. And as I say, since the work is fundamentally about citizenship, Angie calls it a city state, I sometimes think citizen state would be a better word, because though there is a state, there is a formal set of rules, what matters for Aristotle is who is to actually make the decisions, who's to share on an equal basis, and he decides it's citizens.

But to go back to himself personally, he comes from northern Greece, from a place called Stegaira or Stagiaros. and so in the Renaissance, he was referred to, you know, we all know Aristotle, the Stagirite. So if you come across that, hot Stagirites is the citizen of Stagara, and he never lost that. You don't get deprived of your citizenship unless you do something terrible, even if you leave your city. So he becomes a metic, which means, hey, somebody who changes their residence,

and he becomes a resident alien in Athens. His own home city, while he was in Athens, was actually physically destroyed. and thereby hangs quite a big tale because Aristotle's dad was a doctor and as Angie says he learns his first sort of training is in zoology and biology but his dad was doctor not for a Greek or not for a city state but for a king

of Macedon so Aristotle comes with a bit of baggage because in his adult lifetime Macedon and Athens are destined to fight each other and of course Macedon wins. And Aristotle is a sort of ambiguous figure in Athens terms because he's linked to this Macedonian background. So that probably is enough to set us on the way. We've missed a rather big name in that which is named Alexander the Great.

Wait to prompt you on this, Paul. No, this is a very fair point, but I mean, it is a secondary point. That's to say, Aristotle was quite well established by the time that his, it's not actually Aristotle's father's employer, but a son of that king of Macedon, namely Philip of Macedon, who is also the father of Alexander the great. Philip hired Aristotle to come up north, to spend a year or so, simply teaching mainly Alexander, of course, but also some mates of it. So it's a very formative period.

Aristotle is about 40, and Alexander's about 13. So this is a sort of mentor relationship, which lasts throughout. I mean, we can perhaps come back to what Aristotle thought about Alexander and what Alexander thought about Aristotle later on. But you're absolutely right that for a crucial period in Alexander's formative years, Aristotle was his teacher. And of course, as Alexander took the ideas, we're told, with books and scholars. We'll come back to that.

Absolutely. But we're talking about a man who runs, we use the Latin word lyceum at our school. And he runs it in a way that he has, as I, I understand 158 city states are researched by scholars, let us call them, students who work with him. And from that he draws his conclusion. So he's got a research base from the city states, 158 out of about 1,000. And one of that must be Sparta, which is quite important, although he's rather worried about it. Can we use Sparta in the context of what he's getting from this research examination?

We certainly can. I mean, he's based in Athens, and Athens and Sparta have a very sort of difficult relationship. Believe it or not, they were actually allied briefly in the 4th century because they have mutual enemies, one of whom is Macedon and another of whom is Thebes. But Sparta had been, its thought, the origin of, in a way, reflection on politics, political arrangements of what we now call a utopian nature. In other words, for some non-Spartans, Sparta was a kind of ideal city, one that you possibly want to model yourself on. or at any rate be inspired by and possibly introduce what would tend to be quite radically revolutionary,

almost reforms in your own city. So if you're going to do 158, which is, as you say, roughly about a sixth, you're bound to do Sparta. And actually Sparta is pretty much bound to be one of your first. So he might even have sent out more than one of his pupils, several pupils. Unfortunately, the work that they produced doesn't survive as such. What we have are quotations in later sources such as Plutarch. And, of course, wouldn't it just be history's fate, that the one of the 158 that does survive

is the one about which we in a way know most in other ways, are you Athens? You know, if only Sparta had survived or Thebes had survived, but I should just add that there is at least one non-Greek city among the ones that Aristotle researched in this way. And that's Carfidge. We don't want to go there, but it's fun that he thought of Carthage as a kind of city-state.

Annabel Brett, can we use Sparta, though, to talk about some of the, when we're talking about the constitution of this idea, your city and his politics, because the things that he liked about Sparta and things that he really did not like, let's start with women, that he didn't like the way that the Spartans treated women because his views of women would. Can you just go into that?

Yes, well I think that he felt along with other contemporaries that Spartan women had too much license and therefore sort of power within the city state and Aristotle felt that women Well, his position on women is quite nuanced in fact I mean as he begins to set it up in politics one He sees the pairing between man and wife There's some kind of pre-political form of association

And there is kind of reading of Aristotle Aristotle's politics, which suggests that the household is a kind of apolitical sphere or pre-political. But actually, if you read book one carefully, it becomes clear that the position of women, they do have a political role in Aristotle's politics. He says, for example, that both women and children should be educated with an eye to the constitution, because it's from the household that future citizens will come. So the household is not a sort of apolitical arena. It's not directly a political space. it's not a space of citizenship per se,

but it is a space in which the politics reaches down, if you like. And Aristotle also says that the rule of a husband over a wife is a political form of rule. Now he doesn't mean that a citizen form of rule, because citizen rule is characterized by alternating the rule between equals, whereas rule of husband over wife is permanent. But still, he can't treat her as a child or a slave or command her in that way.

He has to command her in or rule her in a political way. But on the whole he thought that women did not have the great gift of reason that certain men had, and that meant that they had to be eliminated from positions of authority. And the problem with the Spartan women is that there were licentious, bossy, guide of hand. Let's leave them aside for the moment. Let's stick to what he was saying, who should rule. Then we'll talk about the forms of rule, who should rule. Yes.

And why? Yes, so it's briefly on women. I mean, it's not that he feels that they don't have reason. He feels that their reason is not what he calls Curion, so authoritative or dominant or sovereign, within them. And it's for this reason that they like to be carried away by their passions. And therefore, that they can't really be in a ruling position. But it's not that they have no reason. And this is why you can rule them politically.

So, yes, Aristotle feels that citizenship should be limited to those who have this ruling, this reason, sort of reasoning faculty dominant within them. and that means adult males because children only have it in sort of potentially. But that doesn't mean that that might lead us to expect that citizenship should be for all adult male heads of household. But that's actually not the case. It may be that in some constitution citizenship is all free adult male heads of households, but in other constitutions it may not. So Aristotle tries to find a definition of citizenship, which is, if you like, politically neutral.

What understanding of citizenship can we think of. of which will cross both a democracy and an oligarchy or any other kind of constitution. Can I just come in, sorry, I'm not trying to interrupt you, I just want to move on slightly, but we've got the women that out of ruling. Yes, I'm sorry to be, you know, appear to be rude here, but then we've got the slaves, a lot of slaves.

Now, there are different sorts of slaves, and he thinks, can you just give us briefly his idea of slaves and why his particular idea of slaves and what their position was? Right. Because they're natural slaves, aren't those he calls them? Yes, that's right.

Well, his main theoretical interest is in natural slaves. I mean, he engages with the nature law debate with regard to slavery as well. Is it something that is by nature or is it purely by convention or by law? And what Aristotle wants to establish is that there are something called slaves by nature. And these are people whom he sometimes seems to characterize as having no deliberative faculty at all, people who are not able actually to counsel themselves and therefore require to be directed by others. and he thinks that there are naturally such people who are, if you like, born to serve. And he makes them...

And find fulfillment in that, he seems to find. Well, that's right. I mean, the slave cannot find happy... The natural slave cannot find happiness in the sense that the master can, because the slave does not have this reason in the realisation of which human happiness and human flourishing consists. So to the extent that the slave has a good, it's realized by aiding and assisting in realising the masters,

good and this is why the slave is a tool or a part of the master. He doesn't have an independent good but yes, insofar as the slave can flourish, he flourishes in the sense of being directed by a master and Aristotle says that if these natural

conditions between master and slave obtain then there is a kind of friendship and mutual advantage going on in that sort of pairing. So by that process of elimination, Angie Hopp, is what we end up with as the persons who are are now discussed as ruling the place

in different sorts of constitutions are male, educated, free, which means to a certain extent, wealthy. Right. And then Aristotle, again, in these marvellous classifications, comes in, he breaks down societies into three types, which you've endured, amazingly, haven't there?

They're monarchy, aristocracy, and polity, and in their corrupt forms, their tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy. So can you address that for A few moments. Yes, I mean, again, he's bringing in his biological taxonomical training here and all the researches that his assistants have done on all the various constitutions that Paul was talking about.

He says there are two basic questions you need to ask, who rules and on whose behalf. And he says the three, if you answer those, you get three correct, as you said, the three correct constitutions of monarchy, aristocracy and polity where good people rule on the behalf of the state as a whole. These are good because the people are virtuous in each case.

Indeed. Educated and virtuous. Absolutely. And they also have, what we haven't touched on yet, they have to have sufficient leisure time to be able to participate directly in the deliberative and judicial functions of the state and to acquire the necessary education

in order to participate directly in an intelligent and reflective way. So, exactly. But the leisure time actually implies wealth And one of the interesting things I was reading through this again is that He thought the corruption of monarchy into tyranny and as a oxygen to oligarchy

Was when wealth became more of a pursuit In the state than virtue And that was the corrupting factor I thought that was fascinating It is fascinating, yes Because wealth must almost Sorry, wealth must always be seen solely as a means to an end The end is always virtue

I mean, the ultimate end of the state is to enable its citizens to flourish and to provide the good life for its citizens. But Aristotle argues quite rapidly in the politics because he's building on arguments that he's developed at length in the Nekomachian ethics, he argues that the good life must be the life of virtue. And as I said, in the ethics, there are detailed arguments to try and make that identity that we cannot flourish unless we actualise all our faculties, including our moral and intellectual ones.

Given Paul Cartley that Aristotle is purchased in the sort of fonds at Oregon of democracy there in Athens, democracy takes a bit of a beating, doesn't it? It does, but Aristotle would say before you talk about democracy, let's talk about various kinds of democracy. This is his taxonomic self-operating again. And he subdivides democracy into four. And the worst, so in other words, the best might be actually quite close to the worst kind of oligarchy. So you get sort of lots of balances and checks.

But the worst kind of democracy, he never states this is what Athens actually has. There is another work, the one we mentioned, this constitution of Athens, which does say that Athens is, of course, a democracy. And in Aristotle's time, it gets more and more democratic, which has puzzled some of us historians. But that's another issue. The last or the ultimate form of democracy, from what he says about it, looks most like the kind,

that Athens in his day had. And as you rightly say, he says some unflattering things about it, because what is particularly bad about it is when the people, Demos means the people as a whole or the mass of the ordinary, the poor people, they rule instead of the laws, which I want to say unfair of Athens, because the Athenians were extremely hot on the notion of rule of law, and they actually drew a distinction between a general law, which is permanent, which is never ad hominem,

which is not the same as taking a decision on a particular occasion on a particular issue, which was actually voted by a specially designated group of lawmakers. I mean, the Athenians in Aristotle's day were much actually more worried about illegality, unconstitutionality, than they had been in the 5th century, the century before. Angie? Yes, Paul, I wanted to ask you, would you agree that one of the reasons Aristotle portrays democracy in an unflattering light in the politics as one of the corrupt constitutions is because

he doesn't see it as the people governing for the good of the people as a whole, but for the good of a particular factional class interest, that it's very, very class-based and wealth-based. This is the poor people governing for the good of the poor people. Well, interestingly, his whole analysis, his anatomy of politics is what we today would call a class-based analysis. Because at one point he says famously that one could imagine the situation theoretically, where the majority are rich theoretically, right? But it wouldn't be democracy.

Because they're rich, it would be an oligarchy, because what is the essential essence of oligarchy is wealth, what is the essential essence of democracy is poverty. And the two classes are, as it were, at each other's throat. And he wants a resolution. And, Albert. Yes, I wanted to say that one thing we haven't said about political, rule is that it's vital to political rule that it's in the interest of the ruled.

This is what distinguishes it from master slave rule, which is in the interest of the ruler. So the slave, it's rule, the slave may profit a bit, but it's basically for the interest of, whereas political rule is defined against master slave rule. And the problem with democracy, oligarchy and tyranny is that they are rules that are in the interest of the dominant group, i.e. either the poor or the rich or the tyrant. And this is what's corrupt about them, makes them. wrong forms of or deviated forms of constitution. So the corruption isn't so much in the idea of wealth.

The corruption is in the idea of who is being served by the rulers. I mean, on that, I think what Paul was trying to say is that these two are related. I think what Aresden wants to say is that wherever the good, or the criteria that is sought by a constitution, whatever it's ruling ethos and the basis on which it allows people to be citizens, wherever the criterion for citizenship is not virtue, there you have corrupt. because virtue is the only thing which can act in the common interest of us all rather than subordinating others to our own good. Can I say that other thing?

Because actually what we've left out so far, and it's good to bring it in here, that the book previously politics was his ethics, and he took it for granted in these notes, because these were delivered as notes of these books, and came out as notes, that actually people read ethics and knew about ethics, and the virtuous life was the life to be sought for, and virtue was the driving factor in these states, and that was their high ambition of any policy. Can you, before we move on, Annabel,

can you tell us a little bit about the contrast between Aristotle and Plato? I turn off the thing to ask, isn't it, this time in the morning. There you go. Plato is a great teacher. The great Trinity, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle. Aristotle, I understand, was much more of a pragmatist.

Yes, yes. I mean, there are lots and lots of ways that you can handle the contrast between Aristotle and Plato, I'm sure, but let's take the question of method. And this question of the human good and how we find out the human good. So the ethics tells you what the human good is. It's the life of virtue, which is a life in accordance with reason, which is the faculty that distinguishes man from all the other animals

and from natural slaves. Now, Plato had felt that Plato too had thought that the city should be ruled in the light of the idea of the good. But for Plato, you couldn't access to knowledge of what the good was. and therefore practice of a good city wasn't available solely sort of down here in this realm where we all operate. The philosopher in order to know the good has to kind of climb out of this cave of the city, up to this ideal realm of forms, see them shining in the light of the good, ultimately see the good and then come back down into the cave, armed with the knowledge of the good

and craft a good city and the likeness of the forms, whereas Aristotle felt that there is no way of climbing out of this cave of the city to find out what the good is. We find out what the good is collectively here and now as part of a collective moral enterprise that we undertake with our fellow citizens. So it's always a situation specific. And pragmatic compared to Plato, yeah. Absolutely.

I mean, you have to bear in mind particular circumstances. You know, Aristotle says in book four of the politics, you may not get the ideal. That doesn't mean that you should abandon politics forever. It's how can we approach what is good for us in these particular circumstances in which we are now. Paul and Andrew. Yeah, there's a famous fresco, which I always think of by Raphael,

and it has Plato and Aristotle next to each other. And it's probably very unfair, but nevertheless, Plato is pointing up to the heavens, and Aristotle sternly is not looking at Plato and pointing, that's the bottom line is the bottom line. So you start from what you know through sense perception, then you move up to the idea of theorisation, and then possibly you can apply your theory.

Yes, I just wanted to add that, It's always intrigued me that so many of Aristotle's criticisms of Plato in the politics are demonstrably unfair, particularly of Plato's Republic. He's a bit more gentle on the laws. And I've never worked out whether Aristotle just hasn't bothered to check his facts in the Republic or whether he wasn't paying attention to Plato or whether he's just deliberately... You mean Aristotle pay attention at the back in the way? Well, exactly, exactly. Because... I treasure that, Andrew.

For instance, for instance, for instance, You know, Aristotle criticises the community of wives and children of the two guardian classes in Plato's Republic, saying this is going to be a disaster, there's going to be unwitting patricide, there's going to be unwitting incest and so on. Now, in fact, Plato had foreseen those problems and had tried to counter them in the proposals that he made. And time and again, Aristotle does this.

And one wonders if he's just doing what indeed Plato did with political text. which is just used them entirely for his own ends. And I should also add that if anybody thinks that Aristotle is always the pragmatic expedient down-to-earth philosophy, they only need go and read his metaphysics and his work on the soul, and they'll see a much more imaginative... We've got enough for him. I just want to say, I mean, I think that Aristotle does say something very penetrating and really rather brilliant about Plato's Republic in Book 2 of the Politics,

which is that Plato's got the end. entire principle of the political wrong. For Plato, the ideal for the policy is to be as much one as possible, so it's unity. Whereas Aristotle says that unity destroys the police. A policy is not about unity, it's about diversity in community. And this is precisely what constitutions are supposed to do to accommodate plurality and diversity in a kind of constructive way if they're a good constitution. I was going to make different sort of point falling on from Angie that Aristotle is also interested in something like utopianism of two kinds. One is a pragmatic kind, what is the best possible, given what we know about humans in society, in

politics, how can we get as close to that? And he has his own version of a practical, he thinks, version. But he also has, and in this sense he is a pupil of Plato. He also has an ideal ideal, which is one goes beyond even what we've achieved so far to, and then one of the things he does, this is what prompted this thought. He is keen on communal institutions, including common meals. He just thinks that, for example, the Spartans have got the wrong way of doing it, but nevertheless the principle of actually eating together as a society. I mean, it's slightly impossible these days. But the notion is central to his notion of education. But I've leapt on there to the end of the politics. We've been looking so far at the first sort of third of the

politics. There's then the middle section, which is all about there's terrible strife, which I hinted at, and then he suggests how you can avoid strife or how you can heal strike. And then there's the final section on utopia. Can we dive into the section into how we've got who runs it, the free educated leisure

available men. We've got the city state and we've got the master slave. We know where the women are. We know that it's to do with the pursuit of virtue, which might seem impossibly high-minded, but that's what it is to do with. And is it over, is it, and then

we have to make it work, obviously. through laws. Now can we talk about how he wanted it to work? Starting with you, Paul. Well, different sorts, remember I said different sorts of democracy, different sorts of oligarchy, and he does think that different societies have different tempers, so that

whereas an extreme oligarchy might fit a particular society which has so many citizens and is on such and such terrain and has had such and such history, extreme democracy would fit another society, though he doesn't like either of those. I mean, what he likes is,

Aristotle being the philosopher of the golden mean, not too much of this and not too much of that. So whatever he thinks is very, very good, is going to form either a balance or a mixture. And both those concepts were around from the late 5th century on. But the ideal society, pragmatically, not theoretically, but pragmatically is a bit of oligarchy, a bit of democracy, a bit of monarchy,

or a bit of not oligarchy, but aristocracy, to give it the nice word. That's his notion of what he calls confusingly polity, which is the general word for citizenship. And so scholars, I mean, Andrew will come in, Annabel. What exactly Aristotle meant by that is a really interesting question, I think, but that's his pragmatic, realisable best state. Yes, I mean, Paul, he always makes it clear, doesn't he,

that were there a supremely virtuous individual to come along or a supremely virtuous group of individuals, then you could have a monarchy or an aristocracy, which would be above the law. He says that quite clearly. But he says in the very likely absence of such a supremely virtuous individual group, then we will need to go for polity. And the way he wants the polity to work in practice, isn't it,

is by bringing in the middle class as much as possible. You're neither very, very rich nor very, very poor. Exactly, exactly. And he thinks that you're going to have a more stable, society which is going to get more general acceptance if you have a middle class, which again, not too rich or too poor. He wants there to be laws which limit excesses of wealth and poverty. He wants there to be state-controlled education, so everybody is educated for citizenship

and people share practices and values. And that was old and radical. Absolutely key. And he thinks that a middle class are going to be, he thinks they'll be more rational and he thinks they'll be less prone to faction perhaps optimistically. Anna Belbrough? Yeah, I mean, I think there is a question. I mean, a problem about the virtue monarch in Aristotle, isn't it?

Because Aristotle has seemed to co-define the sphere of the political and the sphere of law. And in book five of the ethics where he's talking about citizen rule, which is this turn-and-turn about rule of equals, he associates that with rule by law. And with the virtue monarchy, it seems to say, actually, we could have a political structure because he's clear that virtue monarchy is a political constitution, that doesn't have the rule of law.

And so scholars actually wonder whether in allowing for the virtue monarch, this might be a kind of toadying up to Alexander. Here is where some contextual stuff about Alexander actually does come in, and that it's actually antithetical to the understanding of citizen rule, an active citizen participation in rule, which he previously seems to have developed as part of the structure of the political per se. Andrew. That's all true, and it's so interesting, isn't it,

that Alexander is the sort of the eminence gris off stage throughout the politics. But there's also the point, it seems to me, that by stressing right from the beginning that humans flourish best in a polis, either a city-state, or as Paul has nicely put it, a citizen state, that of an absolute, absolute limit of 100,000 people and preferably less. But there's also, exactly. There's also a covert criticism, isn't there, of everything that Alexander and his father, Philip of Macedon,

we're trying to do because they are precisely emasculating the city states at this time and really reducing their power and the Macedonian Empire is really taking over. So there's also, I think, quite a firm criticism of a lot of Alexander's agenda going on. Two things, can I just ask? Can I come in here, Paul, ask you two things. First of all, just to make it clear that these ideas are being put forward at a time when the civil strife, the civil wars, Alexander is tearing across Persia, and so we're at a time of great turbulence.

And so there's a sense of harking back to an idealised past, there is that sense inside the whole thing? Is that right? No, absolutely right. Now, how were his ideas received then, and how did they push through in the next, just say a couple of centuries after that? Well, as you say, he founded a school,

which has a very, very long descendants, and it's called the Lyceum because it's named after a grove in Athens it's sacred to Apollo the wolf, wolfie Apollo, Le Ceyonne, Lyce in French today. But this was a sort of research centre, sort of like the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, I guess, and it attracted extremely powerful people,

typically from outside, not so much from Athens. And his successor was a man called Theophrastus. And Theophrastus is best known to us. for his characters, which were used by a famous playwright called Menander, a pupil of Theophrastus. So immediately after Aristotle's own death, which was somewhat forced upon him, he had established a very firm foundation of a school which would have descendants. And I hand over to my more expert colleagues on what precise forms the descent took.

They're looking at this. But let me do it and put you in the clear on that. Let me ask them. Angie. With pleasure. Because they run for a while, as Paul has indicated, and then almost more interesting is that the Roman, they're scarcely mentioned in Roman times.

So century after century after century, in about the 8th or 9th century, Aristotle is not in, sorry about this phrase, he's not in the frame, is he? He's not a reference. He's not used. Well, that's right. I mean, there's a wonderful story,

which I hope is true. It probably isn't that most of Aristotle's, text really were sort of, they were lost, they were in a wine barrel and somewhere in the Troad or something, they really went kind of missing until the first century BC when there was an addition by Andronicus of Rhodes. Well, that's one version, another is that they were available to the library at Alexandria. I'd like to get into AD in this discussion. Okay, we'll shoot on into AD. Yes. And then we start by, yes.

It doesn't really emerge. Sorry about this, this is crude, but this is one of my jobs. it doesn't really emerge the 8th century in the great Arabic translation movement. They're turned into Arabic and then a couple of centuries later they're translated in the Latin and they reach Thomas Aquinas, the sort of pivotal theological, theologian and also philosopher of the early Middle Ages, Annabelle. And he absorbs Aristotle. He somehow makes an equation between Aristotle, Aristotelism and Christianity. And from then on Aristotle is a great striding figure through the next centuries. Is that more or less right? Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

I mean, so the politics is finally translated into Latin, really just before Aquinas writes his major work, the Summa, with its thesis of man governed by natural law. So what basically Aquinas does is to take this Aristotelian thesis of the good as the end, this teleology of the good, and implant it into a Christian framework of eschatology, a final end governed by God. And so what he does is to take this idea that we are directed by reason

and can direct ourselves by reason, and implant that into a universe which is directed by a rational God to its ultimate end. So he finds a space for the Aristotelian political within the Christian structure of a human life that goes beyond the political to our ultimate home, which is with God. So it's because of this teleological sense that he finds in Aristotle, this movement towards the good, that the human city can have a place en route to our final good, which is God.

Do you, Paul Rodley, did you see him as a, From then on, from the early Middle Ages, into the Renaissance, as being a dominating figure, a figure, a figure in the history of the Lottomac. Well, yes, no, I mean, because also there's a neoplatonic tradition that's running alongside, and Aristotle's inheritance is, of course, platonic. But this is an issue which surfaces again, more particularly in the Renaissance,

which again I hand over to my expert colleagues on my left. Well, I mean, he certainly influenced Machiavelli, which might surprise us, because Machiavelli is not telling his prince how to be virtuous, but he's telling him how to keep his, keep power, keep power. But what's so interested Machiavelli, and we know this from his discourses on Livy, is all the advice that Aristotle gives in book 5 and book 6 of the politics

on how to maintain power in constitutions and how to maintain the stability of constitutions. And Aristotle even gives the Tarant some advice on how to maintain power. Now, why Aristotle is doing this is for a different reason from Machiavelli. Aristotle, I think, is hoping to push the Tarant a little more in the direction of rational virtuous kingship

and also maybe saying, if you know the Tarant's tactics, that's a good insurance policy against his ever emerging in your state. But Machiavelli sees all these rules for maintaining your power as a tarant and things, wow, great. and definitely take some of those on. And then, of course, when we get to Thomas Hobbs, again, who's quite critical of Aristotle and the schoolmen in several ways,

but we get the whole debate about whether the state is natural or not. And of course, Hobbs takes a very different line from Aristotle. Hobbs also thinks the state is wonderful, but not because it's natural, but precisely because it's unnatural and a cure for nature. Paul, can I ask you, do you think that the society has, proposed by the goods, the societies as proposed by Aristotle, are in any way attractive or viable? Are we talking about authoritarian societies, really?

Well, by our standards, all ancient Greek communities would have been thought unacceptably directive because they did have a notion of what the human and the social and the political good were and they weren't afraid to enforce it through their laws. And partly the history of liberalism, that is the distinction between what a state which could have threatening powers over individuals, that division opens up from the Renaissance on, whereas the ancient Greeks tended to think that individuals were secondary, that no matter how powerful in a way, the community was more important. And therefore that sort of dichotomy today of private virtue,

as opposed to public virtue, was very much under-emphasized and it was potentially negative in antiquity. Today it's very positive. We should do our own thing up to a point. But one of Aristotle's criticisms of extreme democracy is that precisely in an extreme democracy, people do what they want. They live as they like. It's actually an unfair criticism. But nevertheless, it implies the norm, which is that the community comes first, and you must abide by its general rules. Because there were laws about everything.

I mean, playing the fluid was bad. Absolutely. It was about what sort of sex you should have and when and so on and so forth. I think it's really important to Aristotle's politics that, He insists that being co-citizens together is not simply a matter of mutually being under one law that protects us from injustices from each other. He says that's to make the state into what he calls a defensive alliance, which maybe protects us from injustice but can't make us virtuous, isn't concerned with human flourishing. So, I mean, I think what's interesting today is this very active notion of citizenship that he has as participation in rule and that mutual participation in political deliberation

as part of our virtuous life and part of how we find out what the human good is. So it's a much more active notion of citizenship. Andrew? I'm afraid I have to ask a final question. But can you see his influence in political philosophy or in states now? I'm afraid you've got 30 seconds.

Yes, all the discussion at the moment about training for citizenship. He thinks that we need to educate people to be citizens. The debate at the moment about whether we're giving our children and indeed our working adults enough active, intelligent, leisure time in order to fully develop our human faculties and capacities. The debate over whether there should be curbs

on excesses of wealth and poverty. Absolutely yes. Well, thank you very much, Angie Hobbes, Annabel Brett and Paul Cartledge. And next week we'll be talking about recent developments in neuroscience. Neuroscience, goodness me. Good morning. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.uk forward slash radio four.