Clifford Angell Bates, Jr.: The Centrality of the Regime to Political Science. Warsaw: Wydawnicra Universytetu Warsawskiego, 2016.
This is exactly the kind of book that has long needed to be written, a book correcting the tendency of political scientists to reduce politics to sub-political categories—race, class, and gender being only the latest iteration of the practice. In so doing, political scientists have supposed it more scientific to make political science apolitical, confusing the political with mere partisanship. It is as if America’s civil-social egalitarianism—its democracy, in Tocqueville’s sense of the word—has inclined students of politics to such atomizing reductionism. Bates stoutly refuses to go along, aiming to restore the classical idea of the regime to its rightful place in political thought.
I look forward to a second edition. The excellencies of this one are vitiated by a few missteps; they are easily corrected. Meanwhile, the first edition is well worth inclusion in the reading list of any introductory university course in political science.
Bates begins by rightly distinguishing the modern state—that modern invention of Machiavelli, who intended it as an instrument for his projected conquest of ‘Fortuna’ and of nature—from the longstanding polis or ‘city-state.’ He goes too far, however, in contending that Machiavelli’s lo stato actually replaces the regime. He contends that the fundamental contrast isn’t between the state and the polis but between the state and the regime. The modern state, according to its philosophic progenitors, amounts to an act of human will aiming at a unified whole; this is indeed no regime. The modern state aims at being a “truly one united whole” having a supposed ‘general will.’ True enough, but it would be much better to say that Machiavelli himself distinguishes two regimes in the modern state—principalities and republics, rule of the one and rule of the many—and that his silence about regimes of the few, of aristocrats and of oligarchs, bespeaks his intention to centralize political communities, to get rid of those intermediary rulers through whom the regimes, the rulers, of ancient city-states and empires, along with those who tried to rule the more recent feudal ‘states,’ had needed to filter their authority in order to govern the people.
This has meant that all modern states have needed bureaucracies of some sort, agents of the regime of those states, and that bureaucrats’ loyalties to the regime are often suspect, as they maneuver themselves into a position of quasi-independence within the states. In so doing, bureaucrats become elements of the regimes of modern states, a status that has bedeviled presidents and prime ministers but also tyrants and despots—making bureaucracy a regime problem that cuts across all regimes in modernity.
How did political communities begin? After all, there remain places in the world in which extended families or clans count for more than any association of families, and even well-established modern states often see important family networks achieving predominance. Bates agrees with Aristotle in considering the family or household to differ from the polis in kind and not merely in size, the polis being the most authoritative form of association among humans. Oddly, he claims that Aristotle’s Politics never shows “how or why the polis became authoritative,” although Aristotle clearly describes the inadequacy of the family to the task of achieving a self-sufficient human life. But in foreclosing an (as it were) intra-Aristotelian account of political authority, he turns to an excellent and older source, Aeschylus’ Oresteia trilogy; in this he cogently follows the scholarship of Heinrich Meier, who sees the political significance of the Greeks’ shift from worshipping the gods of the Underworld to the worship of the Olympians. “As Meier contends, the discovery of the political occurs when political life through community derived decisions override family/kinship derived decision processes.”
In the first play, the Agamemnon, the great military leader of their Greeks, returning to his city, Argos, after defeating the Trojans, brings home “many great prizes,” not the least being Cassandra, a Trojan princess. His wife, Clytemnestra, has proven no less unfaithful, forming a erotic-political alliance with Aegisthus, Agamemnon’s “political enemy.” She justifies her animosity in view of Agamemnon’s sacrifice of their daughter, Iphigeneia, whom he made an offering to the gods as a means of winning their aid in the war. Clytemnestra murders her husband and king in revenge, enabling Aegisthus to accede to the throne. The citizens of Argos—really the subjects of the usurping royal couple—can think of nothing more than to wait for Agamemnon’s son, Orestes, “to remove the newly imposed tyranny.” “Although the citizens can easily rise up and kill both murderers, they lack the authority or sanction” to do so. Only the son has divine sanction to take vengeance on his father’s killers. “The city of Argos is thus reduced to the household of Agamemnon, where only the head of the household has authority to pursue policy”—ruled, as it is, under the authority of the gods of the Underworld, the Furies, the gods of families.
Orestes does return, and does kill his mother and stepfather, on command from the Olympian god, Apollo. The goddess Athena calls a jury trial of Orestes, and persuades the Furies, who would otherwise continue the family revenge-cycle, to integrate themselves into a new political order. The Furies pursue Orestes because he killed his mother, whereas his mother merely killed her husband, no blood relative. (This is the significance of the Biblical injunction, that a woman shall leave her parents upon wedding her husband, and they “shall be one flesh”—constitute a new ‘blood tie.’) “The household bonds, expressed as kin loyalty, force one to a cycle of revenge, in order to right wrongs done to the family. There is no end to vengeance and no peace. The desire for peace, which is needed for the fulfillment of human happiness (eudaimonia), entails that one rise above one’s own—kin ties—to some other claim that is more authoritative. This other claim is that of the polis.” “Human beings must associate with more than their own kin in order to live well.” “The old gods are aligned with the household and the new gods are aligned with the city”; if human beings intend to live well, they must change their gods—or rather add some who are capable of making peace with the old gods. Human beings must become citizens.
The old gods don’t surrender easily. They hate the city, partly because they denigrate speech. “They will not let any mere words dictate to them,” the building-blocks of the law by which the city will be ruled, or rather through which the new gods will rule in the better interest of the citizens. More, the Furies are too powerful to be forced into line. Apollo unwisely uses words in an attempt to “exclude, reject, or spurn the Furies,” who are far too spirited to bow to the contempt of the Olympians. But Athena “offers them a new and more important role to play in the new dispensation. She offers them beauty and a role in defending the political community, whereas Apollo merely desires their downfall.” Bates calls this “an appeal to the vanity of the Furies,” but it is really an appeal to their thumos, their spiritedness. For Aristotle, it is well to notice, the bond between husband and wife is political, based on oaths, on choice, not merely on ‘biology’—generation or ‘blood.’
With respect to the political, Bates observes, Aeschylus identifies two cities with two different regimes. Argos is an elected kingship, Athens “some form of limited democracy.” Once elected, an Argive king passes on his title to his son. In murdering her husband and installing her lover as the monarch, Clytemnestra changes the Argive regime to tyranny. “It is tyrannical in that it both violates the law, nomos, of succession of the title of king from father to son and is rule over unwilling subjects.” That is, under the Argive regime “it is too easy to confuse the household of the king with the city”; “the inaction of the citizens of Argos and their awaiting Orestes to set things right shows that in Argos there is no distinction between household and city,” and that the lack of this distinction inclines the citizens (really subjects) to passivity. Political assassination is really anti-political, striking at the household—in which bond between husband and wife constitutes the one, limited, political dimension of life—and “also at the basis of all non-violent human association,” and “therefore the possibility of human flourishing—happiness.” The rule of sheer force emulates not the political, consensual, husband-wife bond in the family, nor the kingly rule of parents over children—rightly aimed at the good of the children. The rule of force emulates rather the rule of master over slave, a form of rule performed for the good of the master not the slave, the familial equivalent of despotism in the city. And tyranny is even worse than despotism, lacking even legal status and “treating persons as though they are merely slaves.”
This last formulation is odd. Are slaves not persons? Persons treated as if they are not persons, but machines, to be sure, but by nature persons nonetheless. Aristotle does of course identify a human category of ‘natural slaves,’ those whose best work is not self-directed because they are incapable of reasoning and need to be commanded by those who are capable. Aristotle suggests that such persons are fewer in number than one might want to think, if one is a master of slaves. Bates’s later critique of Abraham Lincoln should probably be considered in this light.
“If Argos were truly a city, the citizens themselves could have set affairs right and avoided the fate of Orestes. But Argos is not a city and the chorus are not citizens, rather they are subjects of the household and are totally without authority in this matter. This is why after Orestes takes vengeance on the murderers, the dramatic action must leave Argos and go to Athens.” That is the setting of the final play in Aeschylus’ trilogy.
The Athenian regime is a form of the rule of ‘the many.’ Even the goddess Athena “defers to the city.” Being the goddess of reason, Athena will not challenge the Furies directly. “In originally agreeing to having Athena hear the case, the Furies submitted their case to be judged by a deity who was a third party, not directly involved in the case. however, by deferring the authority of the case to the city, Athena defers divine sanction to political sanction. Or she establishes the legitimacy of decisions by the political body concerning such matters, whereas before these matters were contained within the moral realm of the household.” Athena casts her vote in favor of Orestes, indicating that marriage, which is political, trumps parenthood, which is ‘blood.’ For their part, the Furies will redirect their thumotic energy toward defending the city; unlike Apollo, Athena understands that “the political community as such needs the power of the Furies so that the city is able to defend itself”; “the alliance of the Furies to the city is intended to strengthen the city as the source of human fulfillment,” moderating the love of one’s own by widening it to the city, the home of speech, which recognizes marriage instead of parenthood as the fundamental familial bond because it is oath-based, not blood-based. Like Socrates, Aeschylus sees that the other extreme claim, that speech alone suffices to constitute the city, will not do. “Coercion or force is to be understood in this particular context, as the exercise of law,” putting teeth into the mouth that speaks. Accordingly, the Furies must “be tamed and managed rather than eradicated.” What Nietzsche would call the Apollonian must be supplemented not so much by the Dionysian but by the Furious, all under the rule of the reasonable, which reasonably sees its own limitations.
Under this dispensation, justice no longer means vengeance but the rule of law. The city, with its laws and juries, “will indeed do what the Furies did—right wrongs and protect the family.” But it won’t right wrongs “with the same ruthless and destructive manner of the Furies,” which leads to an endless cycle of retaliation. “Rather, the justice of the city will be a compromise between the peace, which is an essential precondition for human happiness, and the demands that wrongs be righted and those who commit them be punished.” The terms of this compromise mean that “not all acts of injustice will be sought out and punished; rather, only those that threaten to destroy the peace or happiness of the human association.” To go further “would be irrational and harmful to the greater human good,” destroying many good things “to remove one single evil.” “Moderation is now to be the qualifier of justice.”
Aristotle ranks moderation among the principal virtues, and it is to “the continuing significance of Aristotle for social and political science” that Bates now turns. Often criticized for having ignored the empire under which he lived and concentrating his attention on the Greek poleis, by now subordinate to Macedonia, Aristotle in fact did no such thing. As a citizen of Stagira living as a resident foreigner in Athens, Aristotle had to watch his step when it came to commenting on contemporary politics. Further, his emphasis on the polis has a heuristic purpose. It is in the small polis, not the big, sprawling, polyglot, multi-city empires that the regime is most clearly visible. The empires of his time had regimes—monarchies of one sort or another—but except for the annual exaction of tribute, one’s city didn’t much feel the pinch of rule. Day-to-day governance continued to occur within the city; that was what mattered in the lives of imperial citizen-subjects.
The regime or politeia “is something separate and distinct from the polis but gives shape and direction to the polis.” Bates links its definition to Aristotle’s four ’causes’: in its material character, every regime has institutions and offices; in its formal character, it “looks different” from other regimes; its efficient cause is the ruling body or politeuma of the city; its teleological or final cause is its view of justice or right. This may be a bit too schematic. Aristotle identifies four dimensions of a regime: its politeia strictly speaking, its form or institutional structure; its ruling body or politeuma; its way of life or Bíos ti; and its end, its purpose, its telos. Its ‘formal’ cause therefore is its institutional structure; its ‘material’ cause is its ruling body; its ‘efficient’ cause or archē is its founding. The way of life relates to the purpose as the means to an end.
“The politeia is that which orders all the parts that constitutes the given political community” or polis. “Therefore, no politeia, no political community.” He proceeds to summarize Aristotle’s quantitative and qualitative criteria for regime classification: the one, the few, and the many; good and bad. These result in six basic regime types or species; although Bates says that Aristotle subtly undermines this simple classification, it is more accurate to say that he refines it, identifying ‘subspecies’ within each type. Bates carefully distinguishes Aristotelian from Hobbesian political science. “Contra the teaching of Hobbes and the modern teaching that follows from his understanding of government representing the whole body politic as such, and not merely a ruling part, Aristotle’s teaching about the nature of political rule is that a part of the political community acts on behalf of the whole (either for its own sake or for the common benefit).” Each polis has parts, especially the few who are rich and the many who are poor, each typically advocating a regime, including a way of life, which serves its own interest, both claiming to serve the interests of the whole. Political rule itself “is divided on the basis of functions suited to each political community: deliberating, deciding, implementing what’s been decided, and adjudication of legal cases arising as a result of those decisions and acts of implementation—law being “relative to the type of politeia.” Regimes change, but there is no fixed cycle of regimes, as propounded by Plato’s Socrates (probably for heuristic purposes) and more literally by Polybius. Regimes change because no one regime, even the good ones, will lack enemies who scheme against it. But this doesn’t make politics a futile endeavor. Far from it. “In contrast” to such modern utopians as Karl Marx, “Aristotle’s writings suggest the attempts to overcome politics or escape from it would fail, or end in despotism.”
Why was Aristotle’s understanding of politics as regime-centered brushed aside by later political philosophers? Imperialism challenged the value of political rule itself. Although the polis superseded the clan and the tribe, as Aeschylus shows, the empires overwhelmed many poleis with sheer military force, and ruled the cities despotically (if often desultorily) after their conquests. “Empire tended to emerge prior to the polis as a heterogeneous construct of numerous peoples/tribes (ethnoi) conquered by the armed followers of a tribe and its leader.” As in Argos, a family rules an empire; politics strictly speaking, ruling and being ruled mutually, finds little or no purchase. Following Aristotle, the Roman empire emerged from a republican regime, the res publica. The first, republican, Roman empire “incorporat[ed] local elites into Roman citizens,” but the regime changed in typical fashion, as anti-republican factions arose within it. Once consolidated under Augustus, the empire “was led to create newer forms of rule: (1) Caesar, Kaiser, tzar; (2) princeps, which in Latin is First Citizen… the term Augustus took rather than the title of Rex.” Finally, after Augustus died the later monarchs dropped the pretense of republicanism altogether, calling themselves imperators or emperors—issuers of commands, imperatives, the edicts of one-way rule, not of reciprocal ruling and being ruled. With no serious regime rival or rivals, Roman political thought began to neglect the regime question, and it began to fade from political science altogether.
By the Middle Ages it is no longer clear that thinkers knew Aristotle’s Politics, at all. Jewish, Christian, and Muslim philosophers got their sense of regimes from Plato and Polybius, and thus never had the Aristotelian inclination to deliberate openly over the character of regimes. Further, the Christian doctrine of the separation of sacred from secular government understandably preoccupied the best minds. It was therefore not until Thomas Aquinas in the Thirteenth Century that Aristotelian regime theory was recovered, but necessarily in a ‘Christianized’ manner; Thomas “does not give us Aristotle qua Aristotle, but an Aristotle that has been cleaned up and made compatible with Christian teachings.” For example, in following Aristotle’s argument that the rule of a good king is desirable but improbable, given “the objections to absolute kingship made by Aristotle,” particularly its instability, Thomas goes on to say that the kingly rule of God will solve that problem, once God returns earth, then transforms the cosmos itself, making a new heaven and a new earth. Aristotle might have doubted that promise, had he lived to hear it.
Starting with Machiavelli and his “modern concept of the state,” political science moved even farther from Aristotelianism. Machiavelli “does not use the concept of the politeia or anything remotely similar to it.” By this, Bates means that the moderns understand lo stato as “a product of will,” whether it be the will of the founding prince or the “collective will” of the individuals who form that state according to a ‘social contract.’ Because willed, the modern state “must have a unitary character,” inasmuch as a divided or schizophrenic will cannot be “good or healthy,” as will. The ruling institutions or forms of the modern state “are merely tools that are created by and serve on behalf of the sovereign will,” in contrast to “the concept of political community articulated by Aristotle—where the political community composed of the fundamental parts—the household and other communities—give [the political community] body.” In the polis, unlike the modern state, these “many discrete parts” enjoy “commonality” thanks to “their shared life together, and perhaps a shared benefit or utility from that life together.” But for Machiavelli, Hobbes, and their followers, the political community “is not by nature but is instead a humanly made construct.” For Hobbes, the ‘body politic’ that is Mighty Leviathan amounts to “a metaphor” for the relationship between the monarch and his realm; the sovereign isn’t any one, existing monarch but “the embodied will” that authorizes the existence of the political community. Hence the emphasis on the will in Rousseauian and Kantian ethics and politics, and eventually the shift away not only from natural right, not only from such natural-rights substitutes as Rousseau’s general will and Kant’s categorical imperative, but to the elaboration of historical right in Hegel, in whose writings “the modern state reaches its intellectual peak” as an entirely impersonal instantiation of the impersonal ‘Absolute Spirit,’ a being that encompasses natural even humanly willed right, explaining all of these theories as moments in its own unfolding.
If the modern state is a willed construct of the individuals who consent to it, then the substantial political bodies in the world no longer consist of families and intrastate factions but of the states themselves, which pit their wills against one another in a war of all against all. Since sovereign wills refuse to relinquish their sovereignty while at the same time wishing for the peace that the polis afforded when it subordinated the families and their Furies, “the establishment of modern international law becomes the only means by which the concept of natural right can remain in any way meaningful for the modern state.” Such writers as Grotius, who applies Aristotelian natural right to international relations, and Vattel, who applies Lockean natural right to them, attempt to moderate the Hobbesian state of international war. Such conceptions were challenged, however, when historicist notions of nation-states, “cultural and racial/ethnic” constructions “that people cannot control” because they are the result of laws of historical development, replaced the ‘willfulness’ of social-contract theory. Bates wrongly charges Abraham Lincoln with fostering this notion in America; he is on firmer ground in assigning the responsibility to the Progressives and, it might be added, the Social Darwinists before them, their ontological if not socio-economic twins.
The managers of political science’s “behavioral revolution” in the twentieth century found even Hobbesian materialism insufficiently materialist, with its willed social contract. “The scientific pretensions of later moderns as well as their materialism and reductionism led to a reaction against the willing agency of the modern Hobbesian state”; for them, real science tracks “the various impersonal forces of mass society acting and interacting with each other through the various institutionalism that historically emerged in each socio-ethnic grouping.” Eschewing all ‘qualitative’ claims as unscientific ‘value judgments,’ behaviorists retain his numerical regime criterion (one, few, many) and then calculate the level of measurable political ‘participation’ in relation to the numerical criterion. As democrats, they often betray a tendency to prefer the rule of the few, with high participation levels, as “rule for the common advantage,” but they aspire to ‘value-free political science.’ More recently, political scientist with such as Charles Tilly and Theda Skocpol have added an institutional dimension, concentrating their attention on the state, which they consider an independent variable in political outcomes, rather like an Aristotelian formal cause. “But when we look at much of the regime analysis of those who came to champion the ‘Return to the State,’ all too often they employed many of the same overly democrat5ic and pluralistic assumptions” of the behaviorists. For them, ‘democracy’ “no longer is to be considered a form of regime, but rather as a universal human political form that all human communities should strive to achieve.” With great effort, today’s political scientists have scrambled back to quasi-Hegelian statism without the ontology that justifies it.
None of these modern forms of political science is genuinely political. Instead of beginning with the household, with its already-political relationship of husband and wife and its grounding in real human associations aimed at achieving the real human end of eudemonia or “liv[ing] fully as a human being,” modern political science begins with individuals. It is atomistic or, at best, atomistic within a structuralist framework. By contrast, Aristotelian political science “does not understand the political community as a unitary composite that must be homogenized and centralized.” Rather, for Aristotle, “the regime is fundamental to a political community because it is that which holds it together as a whole; a whole composed of discrete parts.” This is the reality of political life, Aristotle’s therefore the truer science.
The problem is that modern states have regimes, too. It makes a difference to me if I live in contemporary France or Germany, in a commercial republic, or in contemporary China, an oligarchy. A second edition of this book should correct the argument in light of that obvious fact, thereby showing that Aristotelian regime theory ‘works’ for modern states as well as for city-states.
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