Democracy and distribution aristotle on just desert

Political Theory

Volumn 26, Issue 6, 1998, Pages 784-802

  Frank, Jill ^a  

^a HARVARD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 22444454631     PISSN: 00905917     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0090591798026006002     Document Type: Article

References (65)

1. These approaches prevail in contemporary democratic theory as well.
2. Mogens Hansen, The Athenian Assembly in the Age a/Demosthenes (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987) and The Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991); Martin Ostwald, From Popular Sovereignty to the Sovereignty of Law: Law, Society, and Politics in Fifth-Century Athens (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).
3. Sheldon Wolin, "Norm and Form: The Constitutionalizing of Democracy," in Athenian Political nought and the Reconstruction of American Democracy, ed. J. Peter Eubcn, John R. Wallach, and Josiah Ober (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 29-58, 37 (hereafter N&F); 'Transgression, Equality, Voice," in Dânokratia: A Conversation on Democracies, Ancient and Modern, ed. Josiah Ober and Charles Hendrick (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 63-90 (hereafter TEV); "Fugitive Democracy," in Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, éd. Seyla Benhabib (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Universify Press, 1996), 31-45 (hereafter FD). See also Benjamin Barber, "Foundationalism and Democracy," in Democracy and Difference, and C. Douglas Lummis, Radical Democracy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), who advocate this approach to democracy though they do not write about fourth and fifth century Athens.
4. Josiah Ober, Athenian Revolution: Essays on Ancient Creek Democracy and Political Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 31; "Introduction" (with Charles Hendrick), in Demokratia. See also Ellen Meiksins Wood, Peasant-Citizen and Slave: The Foundations of Athenian Democracy (New York: Verso, 1988); "Democracy: An Idea of Ambiguous Ancestry," in Athenian Political Thought, 59-80. 5. Wolin, TEV, 63, 85; N&F, 44.
5. Jeremy Waldron, "The Wisdom of the Multitude: Some Reflections on Book HI Chapter 11 of the Politics," Political Theory 23 (1995): 563-84,570, footnote omitted (hereafter WM). For other treatments of the politics of Aristotle's philosophic practice, see Martha Nussbaum, "Saving Aristotle's Appearances," in Language and Logos: Studies in Ancient Greek Philosophy Presented to G.E.L. Owen, ed. Malcolm Schofield and Martha Nussbaum (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Jonathan Barnes, "Aristotle and the Methods of Ethics," Revue internationale de philosophie 34 ( 1980): 490-511,510. For examples of scholarship focusing on Plato's philosophic practices and their democratic potential, see Meiksins Wood, Peasant-Citizen and Slave, 170-1, identifying the questions addressed by Plato's philosophy as exemplifying a "democratic phenomenon"; and Josiah Ober, "How to Criticize Democracy in Late Fifthand Fourth-Century Athens," 153-4; J. PeterEuben, "Democracy and Political Theory: A Reading of Plato's Gorgias" 199,203; S. Sara Monoson, "Frank Speech, Democracy, and Philosophy: Plato's Debt to a Democratic Strategy of Civil Discourse" all in Athenian Political Thought. 7.1 supplement translations of Aristotle's texts by H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982) and Da/id Ross, revised by J. L. Ackrill and J. O. Urmson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980) in the case of Nicomachean Ethics (hereafter NE), and H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977) and Benjamin Jowett, edited by Stephen Everson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996) in the case of the Politics, with my own translations.
6. Bernard Yack and Stephen Salkever are right, I think, to insist that Aristotle not be read as a prescriptivist in The Problems of a Political Animal: Community, Justice, and Conflict in Aristotelian Political Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993) and Finding the Mean: Theory and Practice in Aristotelian Political Philosophy, esp. chap. 5 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), respectively.
7. Read in this way, it is clear that Hannah Arendt, pace Dana Villa in Arendt and Heidegger: The Fate of the Political (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 42-52, owes much to Aristotle in her account of action as that which initiates "new unprecedented processes whose outcome remains uncertain and unpredictable," The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 231-2.
8. My book-in-progress, titled "Democratic Excellence," amplifies this argument, elaborating the productive homology it sets up between the soul and the city, and works out its implications for contemporary democratic politics by tracing it through Aristotle's treatments of human nature, the polity as a "unity of the different," and the political practices of property and citizenship.
9. See Politics 1282bl5ff and Nicomachean Ethics 1131alOff.
10. Waldron, VM, 572.
11. Martha Nussbaum's Aristotle scholarship is vast. Section 3 focuses particularly on two of her articles that speak to the practice of distributive justice most directly: "Aristotelian Social Democracy," in Liberalism and the Good, ed. R. Bruce Douglass, Gerald M. Mara, and Henry S. Richardson (New York: Routledge, 1990), 203-52 (hereafter ASD); "Nature, Function, and Capability: Aristotle on Political Distribution," in Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, ed. Julia Annas and Robert H. Grimm (supplementary vol.) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 145-84 (hereafter MFC).
12. Waldron, WM, 572.
13. Ibid., 571.
14. Ibid., 564, drawing on Politics, Book III, chap. 11 and claiming, \VM, 565, that Aristotle applies this doctrine to judicial, legislative, and executive functions.
15. Waldron. WM, 563,566,569-71,565.
16. Ibid., 572.
17. Ibid., 573.
18. Ibid., 573-4.
19. Ibid., 572, citing David Keyt, "Aristotle's Theory of Distributive Justice," in A Companion to Aristotle's Politics, ed. David Keyt and Fred D. Miller Jr. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 238-78. Note Waldron's slippage from "rather than" to "not just."
20. Waldron, WM, 574-5,578.
21. Ibid., 574.
22. Ibid., 574, restricts his modeling of political participation on property to what he calls "political" property-"the distributable good that consists of the right to participate in politics"-which he thinks "makes perfect sense of the idea of common use." I agree that holding office is a good example of what Aristotle has in mind when he speaks of property as "holding as one's own for common use," but as I argue in "Democratic Excellence," Aristotle takes this mode of ownership to apply to all property, what we think of as everyday private property as well as what Waldron calls "political" property.
23. For Aristotle's discussion of liberality as a virtue of property, see NE 1120a35-l 120bl, where he argues pace T. H. Irwin's interpretation in "Generosity and Private Property in Aristotle's Politics," Social Philosophy and Policy 4 (1987): 37-54,43,52, for the necessity of taking from one's own; see also Aristotle's arguments against Plato's endorsement of the system of common property and family (Politics 1261bl8-1264b25).
24. Aristotle's discussion of friendship based on virtue as the love of another that depends crucially on self-love in NE Books VIII-IX is another instance of his insistence on the necessity of one's own (i.e., self-love) for the very possibility of sharing with others.
25. Waldron, WM, 572.
26. See Yack, Problems of a Political Animal, 150-7, for a particularly helpful discussion of this point.
27. Waldron, WM, 575.
28. Attention to states of affairs or institutions does not entail violating Aristotle's insistence on referring justice of institutions to the justice of individual agents. Waldron's account of Aristotelian distributive justice resonates in many ways with the interpretation of Aristotle John
29. Rawls offers in A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971). However, unlike Waldron's interpretation, Rawls's, though "explicitly centered on states of affairs," is "implicitly derived from an understanding of just characters": Yack, Problems of a Political Animal, 153.
30. Waldron,WM,578.
31. Ibid., 568-9, recognizes this in his refusal to read Aristotle as a utilitarian; see also 582, n. 17.
32. discuss Aristotle's insistence that a well-constituted polity be a "unity of the different" where unity is not the same as seamless harmony and difference is not diversity, in "A Unity of the Different: Aristotle on Political Community and Friendship," delivered at the 1998 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association.
33. I offer a more detailed analysis of the relation between democratic pluralism and individual difference in "Aristotle on the Practice of Property," delivered at the 1997 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association.
34. Nussbaum, MFC, 146.
35. Nussbaum, ASD, 228; Nussbaum, NFC, 150; "to make available to each and every citizen the material, institutional, and educational circumstances in which good human function may be chosen," ASD, 203; to "securfe] to its people... the necessary conditions for a full good human life," NFC, 149.
36. The two are internal capacities that make a person in a state of readiness to choose varying valued functions and external capacities composed of internal capacities conjoined with external material and social conditions. Nussbaum adds a third, "B capabilities," since internal and external capabilities alone allow a whole set of exclusions from citizenship and therefore from the receipt of political distributables, which Nussbaum thinks amounts to an unjust application of Aristotle's theory of justice. To render it more inclusive, she suggests that distributables ought to be allocated to anyone with the capability for a capability.
37. To which Nussbaum adds health care and appropriate labor relations.
38. Nussbaum, ASD, 228; see also Nussbaum, NFC, 160-72.
39. Though Nussbaum also says that Aristotle "sometimes seems to adopt a meritocratic conception of distribution," NFC, 168, n. 24.
40. Nussbaum, NFC, 169.
41. Ibid., 145-6.
42. Nussbaum, ASD.
43. Ibid., 214 though at 246, n. 34, Nussbaum recognizes the difficulty in distinguishing capability from actual functioning.
44. Ibid., 238, so that though it is normative it is nonnormalizing because open and intuitive, 219.
45. Ibid., 23 8. For a good discussion that emphasizes how choice (pro-hairesis) for Aristotle is always in some sense pre- or "fore-chosen," see Salkever, Finding the Mean, 69-71. See also Jean-Pierre Vemant, "Intimations of the Will in Greek Tragedy," in Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, éd. Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet (New York: Zone Books, 1996), 56-80.
46. See NE Book III, chap. 5 and Book V, chap. 8 on voluntariness and responsibility for one's character.
47. This is Judith Shklar's phrase in TTie Faces of Injustice (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 17-20.
48. For such a criticism, see Barbara Cruikshank, "The Will to Empower: Technologies of Citizenship and the War on Poverty," Socialist Review 23 (1994): 29-55.
49. Nussbaum, ASD, 204, noting the double or bi-directional sense of the word "of in a "Political government of free and equal citizens."
50. Waldron, WM, 575, notes that the common use of political property requires specific virtues. Nussbaum, NFC, 170, notes that since "Aristotelian virtues are... dispositions concerned with the reasonable use of external goods," moral and nonraoral values and virtues together make up the relevant realm in which to pose questions of justice in political distribution. Exactly how excellence is relevant, though, is unclear.
51. Yack, Problems of a Political Animal, chap. 5.
52. Ibid., 165-6.
53. Ibid., 165-6.
54. Ibid., 166.
55. Also, Yack would probably emphasize the place of deliberation in Aristotle's political philosophy while I stress the place of action.
56. Aristotle sometimes uses another word for energeia: entelecheia (Metaphysics 1050a22). Entelecheia, from en-lelos-echein, signifies having, echein (the root also of hejcis, habit) what is aimed at, an end ortelos, in, en, oneself. Entelecheia shows more clearly the noninstrumental aspect of Aristotle's account of activity, the way in which activity has its end in itself and thereby resists being put in the service of external ends.
57. See, for discussion ofhexis, Salkever, Finding the Mean, 79-81.
58. If I show in this essay that, at the end of the day, Waldron and Nussbaum interpret Aristotle in a more rule-bound and formalist way than they suggest, their positions should not be elided. For an exchange that illuminates key differences between their positions on the relation between theory and practice, see Jeremy Waldron, "What Plato Would Allow," 138-78, and Martha Nussbaum, " 'Lawyer for Humanity': Theory and Practice in Ancient Political Thought," 181-215, both in Theory and Practice: NOMOS XXXVII, ed. lan Shapiro and Judith Wagner Decew (New York: New York University Press, 1995).
59. As Delba Winthrop puts it: "A citizen is a citizen in being a citizen," "Aristotle and Political Responsibility" Political Theory 3 (1975): 406-22,407.
60. In this sense, "democratic practice is proleptic to political theory" in Aristotle too: see Ober, Athenian Revolution, 11. Thanks to Patchen Markell and David Kahane for pushing me on the relation between internal and external standards and to Jennifer Pitts for offering the term "internal standard."
61. Though only "in a sense" since, as we have seen, habits are altered by actions and therefore they too are changeable.
62. Wolin discusses this passage in support of his formalist and rule-centered reading of Aristotle in N&F, 47.
63. See pages 795-6, for discussion.
64. Aristotle makes the same point in his treatise on justice in Nicomachean Ethics book V when he insists that equity, a matter of human judgment, is necessary to correct for law's inability to accommodate the particularities of human activity owing to law's generality (NE 1137b 13-25).
65. Notice that, on this reading, because multiple habits and actions make up excellence, the conception of sovereignty advocated here is plural. Ober objects to the use of the term "sovereignty" to characterize democratic rule, owing to the fact that, historically, sovereignty developed to characterize unitary or monarchical rule. He accepts the use of sovereignty if it is reparsed as self-rule by a plurality, which is how sovereignty has been re-parsed here: see Ober, Athenian Revolution, 120-1.