Decolonizing Politics. Robbie Shilliam
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duress. It seems as if some Athenians resented his familial connections to Macedonia. Return to Stagiera was not wise; Aristotle’s birthplace had recently been destroyed by Philip II and its residents sent into exile or sold into slavery. Instead, Aristotle was welcomed to Atarnesu, a settler-city on the coast of Asia Minor (in present-day Turkey), by an old student of Plato. Having married his wife Pythias there, Aristotle moved the family to the island of Lesbos.
In 342, Philip II invited Aristotle to tutor his son, the future Alexander the Great. Aristotle returned to the palace at Pella for two years, introducing the young Alexander to the study of politics and writing for him two works on the subjects of monarchy and colonies. Thereafter, Aristotle journeyed home to Stagiera in time to witness the conquering of Athens by Philip II and the formation of a new federation of Greek cities – the League of Corinth – under Philip’s influence.
After Philip’s assassination and the ascent of his son Alexander, Aristotle returned to Athens for a second stay, during which he wrote his most influential treatise on the study of politics. He did, though, keep his Macedonian associations, including a friendship with Antipater, Alexander’s viceroy, who held supreme command over the League of Corinth. After Alexander’s untimely death, and with anti-Macedonian sentiment again sweeping through Athens, Aristotle left Athens for the last time. He retired to Chalcis, the colony-city where his mother’s family held estates, and died there soon after.
Is not the political world of Aristotle uncanny to us? It is surely familiar in many ways: most present-day nations have colonial pasts; states across the world enact laws that make immigrants second class in comparison to first-class citizens; xenophobia easily sways political debate; and people flee wars to become asylum seekers and refugees. But it is also an unfamiliar world: we do not imagine colonial politics to play out in Greece, and Greece is supposed to be the ancient root of the European Union, not the center of non-European inter-imperial politics.
Above all, this uncanniness leads us to suspect that empire is an unexceptional political phenomenon. We might have to face the possibility that our foundational understandings of the political world are filtered through colonialism far more than we might imagine to be the case. Consider this. When he wrote his treatise on Politics, Aristotle had already moved from his original colony-city to become a permanent alien. He then effectively became an asylum seeker and subsequently moved between two imperial powers. Even if he was relatively privileged, Aristotle’s life was also that of a sojourner, escapee, resident alien – not that of a settled, rights-holding, “native” citizen. Acknowledging this uncanniness allows us to re-orient toward Aristotle and his analysis of politics.
Many of the textbooks you might come across will introduce Aristotle as the first teacher of political science. Through his writings, you will be told, Aristotle proposed that man was a “political animal,” that the nature of this animal was to seek out the “good life,” that this life required systems of justice, and that the polis was the exemplary organization by which such normative aspirations could be met. Textbooks will also tell you that Aristotle described a wide array of political orders as well as the best methods by which to investigate and evaluate the actions of politicians and regimes.
Aristotle did cover this ground; no one is lying to you. But perhaps the problem lies in the ways in which textbooks condense Aristotle’s study of politics to a framework centered upon the citizen of the polis. It goes something like this: the lawmaker crafts legislation, especially a constitution that preserves order over the various inhabitants of the polis; politicians govern through the laws, customs and educational institutions that uphold the constitution; and, in pursuit of the good life, citizens hold a right to participate in political deliberation.
To be fair, textbooks will often mention along the way the inadequacies of Athenian justice when it came to women, slaves, and barbarians. Sometimes a note of caution might be struck over Aristotle’s apparent disdain for barbarians, his claim that some people are “natural slaves,” and that women are inferior to men. But textbooks will still tend to separate Aristotle’s “ideal” model from its “real” politics.
By the “ideal” I mean a framework that focuses on the citizen in relation to the polis, such that the logic of this relationship is self-sufficient and exclusive of imperial entanglements. By the “real,” I mean the wider imperial and colonial contexts in and through which the very practice of citizenship gained meaning for Aristotle. Does this separation of the “ideal” and the “real” quell that unsettled feeling? Does it make Aristotle comfortably familiar again? I hope not.
Because in light of the contextualization we just undertook it seems conceptually inadequate to separate the polis from empire, and the non-citizen from citizen. The logic that Aristotle used to bind the citizen to the polis is not self-sufficient and exclusive of imperial entanglements. What if we started from the premises that Aristotle’s polis was intractably modeled on the small settler-colony of his birth, and that his focus on democratic deliberation was at root an attempt to redress the harms of imperial expansion? (see Dietz 2012).
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not claiming that Aristotle was what we nowadays call a “decolonizer” of political science. He wasn’t even a revolutionary. He was conservative in the literal sense. That is, Aristotle wished to conserve the possibility of living in a just polis, but one that for him was modelled on the small settler-colony of his birth. Crucially, Aristotle believed that imperial expansion and the wars that served such expansion had radically curtailed that possibility. This was not only the case when it came to evaluating the barbarians of the Persian empire but also with regard to the trajectory of the Greek city leagues under the ambitions of both Athens and Macedonia (see, in general, Tuplin 1985). For Aristotle, empires by and large produced despots; and even citizens had to slavishly serve despots.
Aristotle’s position could not have been a comfortable one from which to write a treatise on politics: he sought to dialogue with Athenian citizens, living among them, but not as one of them. Aristotle’s philosophical provocation to them was something like this: “here is what you believe and practice; here is the logic to it; knowing this, do you think you should reappraise your beliefs and practices?” Indeed, his conception of politics itself was designed to address precisely such an intimately unsettling question.
Let’s start with Aristotle’s most famous statement: “a human is by nature a political animal” (Aristotle 2017, 4). But what does he mean by nature? As Jill Frank (2004) explains, nature for Aristotle signals “what happens usually and for the most part.” The nature of humans can neither be accidental – which would make that nature inexplicable – nor defined in terms of necessities – which would make that nature unchangeable. Rather, nature is stable enough to be studied, but variable enough such that any study will be imperfect.
Naturally (usually and for the most part) we humans care for each other, whether that be through friendships or families (Salkever 2014, 71). What’s more, says Aristotle, like most animals we are endowed with voluntary action, that is, we can choose to act. However, our capability to choose is a unique one. Unlike animals we can make choices by first using reason to evaluate all the possible courses of action (Aristotle 2014, 38–40).
If we put these concerns for sociability, agency, and reason together, then human nature can be explained in Aristotelian terms as a collective deliberation toward choosing the best course of action by which to attain the good life. Of course, such deliberation involves judgment. And for this reason, judgment is more of an art than a science, requiring practical wisdom, that is, insight applied to particular situations. For Aristotle (2014, 105–106), then, the study of politics cannot be simply the scientific analysis of universal laws but must always be a deliberative discussion about what might be best for the polity in any given time and place.
Still, deliberation requires leisure time and therein lies the rub. Those who plant the fields, raise children, clean households, and manufacture goods do not have any spare time. Therefore, politics can only be undertaken by virtue of a hierarchical division of labor that enfranchises some men as active citizens over and against other people in their household such as women, workers, slaves etc. Here we return to face Aristotle’s conservatism, but in a different light: he wishes to