Property, Citizenship and Social Stability in Aristotle’s Politics
I. It is somewhat popular, some might say necessary, among both scholars and casual readers who aim to engage in a philosophical defense of private property to employ historical examples and arguments. Such efforts are sometimes supported by references to Aristotle’s defense of private property, particularly that which appears in Book II of the Politics. It is here that Aristotle critiques the “communism” of Plato’s Republic and introduces a number of arguments in defense of private property that continue to influence its apologists to this day. For instance, it was Aristotle who was probably the first to set down in writing the “tragedy of the commons” argument, which he surmised as “that which is common to the greatest number has the least amount of care bestowed upon it”. Other critiques of communism, as well as defenses and positive arguments for private property, follow thereafter.
I believe that an attempt to present Aristotle as sort of champion for private property in general is flawed. Throughout the Politics we find so many constraints and caveats placed upon private property that we are left with an ideal society in which it is heavily restricted and moderated for the common good. Aristotle was not blind at all to the potential dangers, both to the individual and to society as a whole, inherent in what we would now call property rights. A rejection of common property (and as we will see, it is not a categorical rejection) and even a list of the positive benefits of private property do not constitute a wholesale endorsement of the property rights that modern thinkers believe must be associated with private property to render it meaningful. Aristotle’s ideal state, the “true” form of state, is one in which the common good is prioritized above the subjective desires of any person or class. It is also one in which the citizens are freed from the struggle for daily wants. All citizens must own property, but of course not every person can be a citizen. As I intend to show, however, Aristotle’s reasons for the exclusion of slaves, women, and common workers from the political community are largely anachronistic and do not impair our ability to gain a useful insight into modern debates on private property and property rights. Indeed it will be shown that Aristotle grappled with two rather important sociological dilemmas that still demand our attention today: first, whether human behavior is rooted within individuals themselves or their social context (innate desires versus the conditions of life), and secondly the tensions between a rapidly expanding citizenry and the internal stability of the state. A study of Aristotle’s thought on these topics is important because, in my view, he is the first in a long line of political philosophers – including Machiavelli, Rousseau, and Marx - who approaches these issues from the most useful and realistic social and historical perspective.
II. Economics in the Greek context is household management; each household is said to be a self-sufficient economy resting upon a master-slave relationship. In the ancient world a second form of economic activity arises, the art of “wealth getting” or what we today understand as commerce. For Aristotle the former was the necessary and natural (and therefore good) form of economic activity, while the latter was a perversion, the manifestation of human desire driven to dangerous excess. Aristotle condemns the arts of commerce in terms that seem to resurface in works such as The Communist Manifesto, and the subsequent defense of private property that he later employs can in no way be read as an endorsement to the unrestricted accumulation of personal wealth. In fact he goes so far as to suggest that people who become to rich and who use their wealth to influence the political process should be “driven clean out of the country”. Thus the first important limitation on private property is established.
Aristotle’s objections to the unrestricted accumulation of personal wealth stem from his distinction between “living”, and “living well”. An individual life and a state based upon excellence do not demand the possession of wealth and goods “to a useless extent”. It is the man who only seeks to live, but not live well, who sees in the art of wealth-getting a means by which to gratify his endless desires. A hedonistic life based merely on the satisfaction of desire is a perversion of nature and ultimately a danger to the state. Such a person will inevitably put their selfish interests ahead of the common good and seek to remake society in his own image. With regards to the state, Aristotle makes a similar argument – it is not founded merely for the purposes of life, but for a good life, and a state obsessed with acquiring wealth will inevitably fracture under the weight of class conflict.
Having established that the right to property by no means entails the right to limitless self-gain, it remains to be seen what sort of property Aristotle did endorse. There appears to be some tension which is only partially resolved in Aristotle’s view of the relationship between citizenship and property. One the one hand, we often see that he is skeptical of the common people, going so far as to suggest that the best democracy would be the one in which the people had the fewest chances to actually participate. He does however concede that if the people are not “utterly degraded” they may be able to manage their own affairs. How then do the people rise from a state of degradation to a more dignified state in which they may be able to fully participate in public life?
III. Aristotle gives two different answers at two different points. In Books I –III desire is the ultimate cause of human behavior and especially misbehavior. Aristotle’s defense of private property is, with a few exceptions, not a positive defense but rather a purely pragmatic one that acknowledges that common property is incompatible with individual desire. Hence his admonishment of Phaleas of Chalcedon, who equalized property in his state: “it is not the possessions but the desires of mankind which require to be equalized, and this is impossible, unless a sufficient education is provided by the laws”. In Aristotle’s view an equalization of possessions will only prevent petty crimes arising from material want – men will still however desire honor and power. Men, as he says, do not become tyrants for want of food, but in order to attain these non-material objects of desire. The answer is not to redistribute property but to ensure a proper education through proper laws. If the desires of men are molded, then their ambitions will also be held in check. It is at this point that Aristotle declares that common use of private property would be the best state of affairs:
Property should be in a certain sense common, but, as a general rule private; for, when everyone has a distinct interest, men will not complain of one another, and they will make more progress, because everyone will be attending to his own business. And yet by reason of goodness, and in respect of use, ‘Friends’, as the proverb says, ‘will have all things common’. Even now there are traces of such a principle, showing that it is not impracticable, but, in well-ordered states, exists already to a certain extent and may be carried further.
Thus regardless of whatever else may be said about it, Aristotle views private property as a form that generally coincides with our unrefined, uncultivated natures while a form of communal property corresponds to just the opposite. Those who have as their motivation “goodness” will be natural communists, and unlike many modern-day apologists for private property, Aristotle believed that such a motivation need not be innate but in fact could be achieved through education and habit.
A somewhat different solution is provided in books IV-VI. Here the degradation of the masses, as well as the avarice of the wealthy, is not merely their default state, but rather a result of their impoverished or excessively wealthy status. In Aristotle’s somewhat impassioned warnings against social polarization, the emphasis clearly shifts from desires to the conditions of life. It is not reasonable to expect either the extremely poor, or the extremely wealthy, to “follow the rational principle”, i.e. to act in accordance with the common good. Rather Aristotle expects that extremes of wealth and poverty create either “great and violent criminals” or “rouges and petty rascals”. It is here that Aristotle presents moderate living not merely as a good in and of itself, i.e. the sort of living that corresponds to a life of excellence, but rather as a life and death principle for any state. The best political community is one in which the middle class outweighs both the wealthy and the poor. Hence he writes,
Great then is the good fortune of a state in which the citizens have a moderate and sufficient property; for where some possess much, and the others nothing, there may arise an extreme democracy, or a pure oligarchy; or a tyranny may grow out of either extreme- either out of the most rampant democracy, or out of an oligarchy; but it is not so likely to arise out of the middle constitutions and those akin to them. (emphasis added)
This is only one of the many instances Aristotle will make on the absolute importance of harmony for the survival of the state. Later he argues that great increases in any portion of the state will lead to dangerous imbalances that undermine its stability. But how is this harmony to be achieved? The answer lies in the particular way in which property is distributed. As it should be clear by now, a rough equality of property is in fact necessary to the survival of the state. This means that the ideal state has no conception of unrestricted property rights. Everyone must prosper relative to everyone else in order for the state to maintain itself. Aristotle’s earlier admonishment of Phaleas, in light of his writings on social polarization, now appears to be more of a riddle than a persuasive argument. Must a good education precede the equalization of property, or should the equalization of property precede a good education?
IV. This dilemma only gives rise to another. Regardless of the terms in which Aristotle viewed the ideal monarch, he explicitly declares that no one individual is so superior to his fellows that he ought to rule over them. As he writes, “if some men excelled others in the same degree in which the gods and heroes are supposed to excel mankind in general… it would clearly be better that once for all the one class should rule and the others serve. But since this is unattainable… it is obviously necessary on many grounds that all the citizens alike should take their turn of governing and being governed”. But we know that many people in Aristotle’s polis will be excluded from citizenship. The primary reason for this is that citizenship is bound up with political participation, which is in turn bound up with a life of leisure. The leisure of the citizen is therefore premised on the lack of leisure for the slaves, the women, and the mechanics/artisans and sometimes the farmers.
It is therefore difficult to gauge whom exactly Aristotle is referring to when he speaks of “the poor”. Presumably he means the poor citizenry, or perhaps an ambiguous social layer that stands perpetually with one foot in the camp of citizenry and the other somewhere outside of it. Regardless, Aristotle’s exclusionary criteria seem to weaken a bit when discussing the problem of social unrest and the danger it poses to states. Having established that those excluded from citizenship are those who by “nature” or custom are also excluded from property and therefore leisure, there is still the matter of general poverty and all of its potentially destructive consequences. That is perhaps why we find an ancient version of a “path to citizenship” in book VI which at first seems a bit surprising:
Where there are revenues the demagogues should not be allowed after their manner to distribute the surplus; the poor are always receiving and always wanting more and more, for such help is like water poured into a leaky cask. Yet the true friend of the people should see that they are not too poor, for extreme poverty lowers the character of the democracy; measures should therefore be taken which will give them lasting prosperity; and as this is equally the interest of all classes, the proceeds of the public revenues should be accumulated and distributed among its poor, if possible, in such quantities as may enable them to purchase a little farm, or, at any rate, make a beginning in trade or farming.
Although it is not explicitly declared, what other conclusion can be drawn from this passage other than that the measures needed to prevent an excess of poverty are also those by which the citizenry is necessarily expanded? This expansion obviously has its limits; there can only be leisure for some if most have none at all. Slavery and the total subjection of women are taken for granted. The important point is that society will be structured in such a way as to extend citizenship to as many people possible. Where there are new opportunities for trade and farming, the state ought to play an active role in establishing the poor as self-sufficient property owners. It is in this way that “the poor”, or at least those among them theoretically eligible for citizenship, rise above their degraded status.
But surely this is not what Aristotle was getting at, some may be tempted to object. Perhaps not, but at any rate there appears to be a certain amount of dissonance between Aristotle’s ideal state and the state which necessarily emerges from the efforts of legislators to ward of revolutionary impulses. The ideal state looks only to the common good, while the sustainable state always seems forced to place the immediate interests of the poor ahead of those of the wealthy. That is why when all is said and done the solution to the caprice of the wealthy is to run them out of the city while the solution to the plight of the poor is to enable them to rise above their poverty. It is undeniable that Aristotle wanted to limit citizenship, but again there is a delicate balancing act taking place. It is inconceivable that the same poor people whom Aristotle wants to grant the means of a “lasting prosperity” would never want to become citizens themselves. Eventually we reach a point where a good education and good laws return to the foreground as the elements required for social stability, especially in a scenario where the number of citizens drawn from the common people threatens to outpace the “notables” and middle class.
Ultimately a reasonable conclusion emerges from everything that has been considered thus far: an equalization of property is how a viable democracy is attained; a good education is how it is preserved. Such a society is far from ideal – Aristotle characterizes it as “disorderly” as opposed to “sober”. But it appears to strike the correct balance between what is necessary and what is ideal.
V. That being said, there does not appear to be a solution to Aristotle’s dilemma regardless of how greatly the sphere of citizenship is extended and how universal education becomes, since even the most viable system Aristotle can conceive of is still premised on the poverty and powerlessness of the great majority of society’s non-citizens. His prescriptions for the relief of the poor through the granting of property ownership obviously cannot extend to slaves, women, and probably most mechanics, artisans, etc. – in short, the vast majority of the population. Citizenship cannot be extended to them, since leisure, or more generally, free time is a basic requisite of entry into political life, to say nothing of the cultivation of excellence.
But as was mentioned in the introduction, these are limitations of a historical character. Aristotle’s defense of a “natural” slavery may simply be the ideological icing on an essentially materialist cake. Slaves, as instruments of production, are necessary to the sustaining of life. Consider what Aristotle writes in book I in the midst of his exposition on the topic: “…if every instrument could accomplish its own work, obeying or anticipating the will of others, like the statues of Daedalus, or the tripods of Hephaestus… chief workmen would not want servants, nor masters slaves”.
Thus in a way, Aristotle inadvertently forecast the demise of slavery with the advent of modern industry. Of course machines still require human labor to transform raw materials into finished articles of consumption. But the continual improvement of the productivity of labor ushered in by industrial capitalism meant that ever-diminishing amounts of human labor would be required for the production of those goods. This is a historical process which continues down to the present day. But its political implications cannot be fully realized in a society premised upon what Marx called capitalist private property. It is through a historical path that takes humanity down the road of capitalism and ultimately to a kind of socialism that Aristotle’s dilemma is finally resolved. Three passages from respective works by Marx and Engels provide, in my view, an invaluable contribution to fully grasping the dilemma which appears in the Politics. The first and second from chapter 32 of Capital volume I and chapter 3 of The Germany Ideology:
The capitalist mode of appropriation, the result of the capitalist mode of production, produces capitalist private property. This is the first negation of individual private property, as founded on the labor of the proprietor. But capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of Nature, its own negation. It is the negation of negation. This does not re-establish private property for the producer, but gives him individual property based on the acquisition of the capitalist era: i.e., on co-operation and the possession in common of the land and of the means of production.
[The Communists] are very well aware that egoism, just as much selflessness, is in definite circumstances a necessary form of the self-assertion of individuals. Hence, the Communists by no means want to do away with the "private individual" for the sake of the "general", selfless man. That is a statement of the imagination.
These passages should be read in conjunction with Aristotle’s synthesis of private and common property in book II, which I quoted previously in section II of this paper. Contrary to what many may be inclined to believe about Marx – and undoubtedly much of the confusion arises from a certain looseness with terminology throughout his works – the ultimate goal of (Marxian) socialism is the synthesis of individual property and common usage, or put another way, self-interest and the common good, the same balance sought after by Aristotle. It is also in this way that a great moderation in property, so essential to the internal stability of states, is accomplished. Everyone occupies the “mean” or middle position; no one is in a position to gain disproportionately to their individual efforts, yet everyone is ensured the opportunity to gain as much as their individual efforts will yield. One of Marx’s lasting contributions to social science is his discovery of how such efforts can be quantified by society – through socially-necessary labor-time.
But this synthesis does not come about, as Aristotle believed, through good laws and good education alone. It requires material conditions which he believed could only exist as a form of magic, i.e. the infrastructure of modern industry which is a reality for us today. It is therefore worthwhile to consider what Engels wrote on the connection between property, freedom, and political participation. What makes his comments all the more interesting is that they emerge from a polemic in which Engels is taking up the very question of the institution of slavery in the ancient world. Against his opponent Eugene Duhring, who had “turned his nose up at Hellenism because it was founded on slavery”, Engels writes,
We may add at this point that all historical antagonisms between exploiting and exploited, ruling and oppressed classes to this very day find their explanation in this same relatively undeveloped human labour… Only the immense increase of the productive forces attained by modern industry has made it possible to distribute labour among all members of society without exception, and thereby to limit the labour-time of each individual member to such an extent that all have enough free time left to take part in the general—both theoretical and practical—affairs of society. It is only now, therefore, that every ruling and exploiting class has become superfluous and indeed a hindrance to social development, and it is only now, too, that it will be inexorably abolished…
Here the most important resource of all required for political participation, more than any tangible thing – free time – becomes for the first time in history within the reach of every member of society. Education and laws do not lose their significance but the universal availability of free time means that these requisites will also be within the reach of the masses.
In closing, I hope it is clear that the aim of this paper was not to diminish Aristotle by finding perceived “holes” in his theory and filling them in with insights only available to modern thinkers. On the contrary, modern thinkers such as Marx and Engels saw in Aristotle a source of inspiration, since he was able to penetrate so deeply into the same social questions that continue to present themselves to us today.
