Aristotle and the republican paradigm: A reconsideration of pocock's Machiavellian Moment

Review of Politics

Volumn 58, Issue 4, 1996, Pages 677-698

  Nadon, Christopher ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 0009237355     PISSN: 00346705     EISSN: 17486858     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0034670500020428     Document Type: Article

References (76)

1. Louis B. Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought since the Revolution (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1955).
2. J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), pp. 423,527,435-36. Further references to this work will be made in the body of the text.
3. See also, "The Machiavellian Moment Revisited: A Study in History and Ideology," Journal of Modem History 53 (1981): 71;
4. "Between Gog and Magog: The Republican Thesis and the Ideologia Americana," Journal of the History of Ideas (1987): 336-339, 342;
5. "Virtue and Commerce in the Eighteenth Century," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 3 (1972): 127.
6. Joyce Appleby, Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 124, 136, 139, 290.
7. Ronald Hamowy, "Cato's Letters, John Locke, and the Republican Paradigm," History of Political Thought 11 (1990): 273, 276.
8. Jean-Fabien Spitz, "La face cache'e de la philosophie politique moderne," Critique 45 (1989): 307, 311, 333.
9. "The pioneering student of the republican vision of community, Pocock asserted that an appeal to community was integral at the crucial Founding moment of American nationhood. . . . This claim struck a resonant chord among some historically inclined political intellectuals eager for the news that liberal individualism has not been the only mainstream voice in American history. The claim that republican community in one form or another was the (or a) dominant political idea in late eighteenth century is now the ascendant view among intellectuals and scholars" (Robert Fowler, The Dance with Community [Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1991], p. 27, emphasis added; cf. p. 65).
10. Consider also a recent textbook on political ideologies: "Drawing on the writings of Aristotle . . . the Renaissance republicans argued for a revival of civic life in which public-spirited citizens could take an active part in the governance of their independent city or country. The key concepts in this argument were liberty, virtue, and corruption, and nowhere were these concepts deployed more effectively than in the writings of Niccolo Machiavelli" (Terence Ball and Richard Dagger, Political Ideologies and the Democratic Ideal [New York: Harper Collins, 1991], p. 31
11. emphasis in the original). Stephen J. Salkever, Finding the Mean: Theory and Practice in Aristotelian Political Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), p. 230.
12. J. C. Davis, "Pocock's Harrington: Grace, Nature and Art in the Classical Republicanism of James Harrington," The Historical Journal 24 (1981): 683.
13. Iain Hampsher-Monk, "Political Languages in Time-The Work of J. G. A. Pocock," British Journal of Political Science 14 (1984): 90,99, 111.
14. Vickie B. Sullivan, "Machiavelli's Momentary 'Machiavellian Moment': A Reconsideration of Pocock's Treatment of the Discourses," Political Theory 20, no.2 (1992): 309.
15. Spitz, "La face cache'e," p. 318.
16. Appleby, Historical Imagination, p. 21.
17. See, e.g., Benjamin Barber, "Unscrambling the Founding Fathers," New York Times Book Review, 13 January 1985;
18. and Ronald Dworkin, "Liberalism," in Liberalism and its Critics, ed. Michael Sandel (New York: New York University Press, 1984), p. 72.
19. According to Alasdair Maclntyre, "The crucial moral opposition is between liberal individualism in some version or other and the Aristotelian tradition in some version or other" (Alasdair Maclntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), p. 241.
20. Cf. Quentin Skinner, "The Republican Ideal of Political Liberty," in Machiavelli and Republicanism, ed. G. Bock, Q. Skinner, M. Viroli (Cambridge: University of Cambridge, 1990), pp. 293ff.
21. See also the frequent citations of Pocock in William M. Sullivan, Reconstructing Public Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982).
22. For Pocock's relation to communitarianism see J. C. Isaac, "Republicanism vs. Liberalism? A Reconsideration," History of Political Thought 9 (1988): 351-55, 373-377
23. See, Pocock, "The MM Revisited," p. 72.
24. Here Pocock states that "the only question worth scholarly debate [raised by The Machiavellkn Moment] is whether languages and ideas have moved in the manner, and operated in the contexts, which I have attempted to describe
25. Ibid., The Machiavellkn Momentp. 55.
26. Pocock believes this can be done only by respecting the opposition between liberalism and "classical or Machiavellian republicanism" (Machiavellian Moment, pp. 545, 423).
27. For examples of how Locke can be understood in a nonadversarial relation to Machiavelli, see Pierre Manent, An Intellectual History of Liberalism, trans. Rebecca Balinski (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), chaps. 1-4;
28. and Michael Zuckert, Natural Rights and the New Republicanism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).
29. For two outstanding demonstrations of the failure of the traditional "liberal synthesis" to capture the full moral vision of even Locke's liberalism, see Nathan Tarcov, Locke's Education for Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984);
30. and Steven Kautz, Liberalism and Community (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995).
31. For the interchangeable use of the terms "civic humanism" and "classical republicanism" see Pocock, "MM Revisited," 49.
32. While Appleby and Isaac have criticized Pocock's sharp division of ideologies into distinct republican and liberal paradigms, they both accept his characterization of Aristotle as a wholehearted republican. Joyce Appleby, "Republicanism in Old and New Contexts," William and Mary Quarterly 43 (1986): 29,33-34;
33. Appleby, Historical Imagination, pp. 21,282.
34. Isaac, "Republicanism vs. Liberalism," pp. 353,356,375.
35. For Pocock's response to Appleby, see Pocock, "Between Gog and Magog," pp. 344-346
36. Machiavellian Moment, pp. 537-538, where Pocock calls Tocqueville's critique of egalite des conditions "basically Aristotelian.
37. "The dereliction of one citizen, therefore reduced the others' chances of attaining and maintaining virtue, since virtue was now politicized" {Machiavellian Moment, p. 75, emphasis added).
38. See also J. G. A. Pocock, "What Is Intellectual History," History Today 35 (1985): 52-53.
39. J. G. A. Pocock, "Languages and Their Implications," inPolitics, Language and Time (New York: Atheneum, 1971), p. 25.
40. See note 5, above.
41. CL Rousseau, Social Contract, 2. 7.
42. See Bernard Yack, The Problems of a Political Animal: Community, Justice, and Conflict in Aristotelian Political Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 12-14.
43. Aristotle, Politics, trans. Carnes Lord (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 1280a30-1280b40. Further references to the Politics will be made in the body of the text.
44. See also Aristotle's analysis of the motives behind the participation of democrats and oligarchs at 1293a7-10 and 1309a3-7. Cf. Plato Republic 347a-e.
45. For two different arguments that Aristotle did not consider active political participation essential to full human development see Richard Mulgan, "Aristotle and the Value of Political Participation," Political Theory 18 (1990): 204, 207-208
46. and Cames Lord, "Politics and Philosophy in Aristotle's Politics," Hermes (1978): 346-47;
47. Education and Culture in the Political Thought of Aristotle (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), pp. 352-353
48. Mulgan claims Aristotle rejected the necessity of active participation in the name of a "mixed ideal" of philosophic activity plus communal or "social living," an attitude consistent with the emerging "quietism" of political life after Alexander. Lord thinks Aristotle's rejection is based on the self-sufficiency of philosophic contemplation. The precise resolution of the relation between political and intellectual virtue is not necessary, I think, to maintain my narrower point, since, for Aristotle, neither consists in willing the universal.
49. Pocock's treatment of Aristotle is the most notable exception to what J. H. Hexter has praised as his practice of "not try[ing] to translate the political terminologies men once used into the ones with which late twentieth-century readers are familiar" (J. H. Hexter, On Historians [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979], pp. 265-266).
50. Cf. also Pocock's description of the "angst" suffered by certain Greek and Roman intellects (Machiavellian Moment, p. 31), and his practice of putting a key-word or concept into the mouth of an author when "it helps if we insert it" (e.g., pp. 189,533).
51. See Politics 1279b33-1280a6.
52. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 17.
53. Cf. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (Bungay: Penguin, 1963), p. 276.
54. For Pocock's acknowledged debt to Arendt, see Machiavellian Moment, p. 550.
55. The extent to which Pocock's reading of the Politics owes more to Arendt than Aristotle can be seen by comparing her loose paraphrase of Jefferson's proposal for a ward system (On Revolution, pp. 251-55)
56. with Machiavellian Moment, pp. 66-75.
57. See Harvey C. Mansfield, Machiavelli's Virtue (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 319 n. 30;
58. and Paul A. Rahe, "Thomas Jefferson's Machiavellian Political Science," Review of Politics 57, no.3 (1995): 479 n. 81.
59. W. R. Newell, "Superlative Virtue: The Problem of Monarchy in Aristotle's Politics," Western Political Quarterly 40 (1987): 169-170
60. Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr., Taming the Prince (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), p. 39.
61. Robert C. Bartlett, "Aristotle's Science of the Best Regime," American Political Science Review 88, no.1 (1994): 149.
62. Newell, "Superlative Virtue," pp. 175-176
63. Mansfield, Taming, p. 41.
64. Mulgan, "Participation," p. 210.
65. Cf. 1256a30-38, 1256b22-25 where Aristotle treats piracy and hunting human beings as a means of acquisition on par with hunting, shepherding, and farming.
66. Given the extent to which Aristotle identifies polity with the regime based on military virtue, an aspect of polity ignored in The Machiavellian Moment, it becomes necessary to re-examine Pocock's claim that Machiavelli's great innovation within the republican tradition was "the militarization of citizenship" (pp. 213,200,218).
67. More importantly, this allegedly Machiavellian "innovation" is also among the most prominent themes of Xenophon's Education of Cyrus (see Book 1. 5 and Book 2), a work which goes unmentioned in The Machiavellian Moment despite it being the only book Machiavelli explicitly recommends in the Prince for further reading.
68. Aristotle Politics 1255al4-17,1288a38-41,1295a25-32,1325b38,1331b40-a2;
69. Nicomachean Ethics 1178a24-b24, 1098al0-20, 1108a23-31.
70. James Madison, Letter to Jefferson, 8 February 1825
71. The Republic of Letters, vol.3, ed. James Morton Smith (New York: Norton and Company, 1995), p. 1924.
72. Salkever, Finding the Mean, pp. 230-231
73. Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, pp. 175, 207-08, 316-17.
74. See Sullivan, "Momentary Moment," 314.
75. Machiavelli does use traditional teleological language, but for the non-traditional purpose of showing how "form" must be imposed on recalcitrant "matter" through a continuous effort of the human will. See Machiavelli, Discourses, 1.16-17,3.1,1.1.
76. For an elaboration of the motives and consequences of this break, see Pierre Manent, La cite de Vhomme (Paris: Fauard, 1994).