Aristotle in America: Why Democrats are Republicans and Why Republicans are Neither

V. Private Enterprise and Public

When Pierce Butler and James Wilson debated how quickly a member of Congress, following his term in office, might be employed by the Federal government, much more was at stake than the influence wealth or personal connections might exercise over taxation and regulation. At stake were two competing visions of what it meant to be an active citizen in a republic. Broadly speaking, as republicans, both Butler and Wilson would have agreed with Aristotle that a representative within a republic was not the same thing as the head of even a large private household. And, yet, practically speaking, both Butler and Wilson were heads of large households; or, to use Aristotle’s terminology, oikonomia (i.e., private enterprises). Wilson, the lawyer and real estate speculator, might even be termed a “dependent” since he depended upon others to pay him for his services. Is it not likely that Wilson would therefore promote legislation that favored his real estate speculation? And would this not then violate his oath to act solely in the public’s interest? If so, then what about Wilson’s colleague to the south?

For Butler, who owned and depended upon the labor of slaves, the problem was somewhat more complicated. For, as we will see in a moment, Butler could claim—as many southern planters did claim—that, although his private enterprise entailed that someone labor, he personally was not that someone. And because Butler lived off of the labor of others, he personally was a man of leisure. So long as there were buyers for sugar cane, or tobacco, or rice, or whatever a planter chose to plant on his lands, the planter himself could feign disinterest in crass economic self-interest. Indeed, since most planters who were of Butler’s caliber would have several managers taking care of their business, in addition to their wives, it was with some justice that wealthy planters could claim only a casual interest in money at all.

And, in matter of fact, as we cast our sights back to the fifth century BCE, and to the Athens of classical Greece, we can well understand why southern planters viewed themselves, their way of life, and their values as a near complete embodiment of res publica, of the common weal. So much so, that most wealthy southerners could help but view their colleagues to the north—the bankers, lawyers, merchants, and land speculators—as direct threats to the very ideals of republican self-government.

Not surprisingly, the archetype for their understanding had been published two and a half millennia earlier by none other than Aristotle. It looked something like this. If a person had to work in order to survive, then it was clear that he or she was not free. But, if a person is not free, then their judgment is impaired by the cares and concerns of everyday life. Such a person cannot impartially judge what is good or evil, right or wrong, but is always pushed to esteem good and right only those things that are in fact determined by necessity. The free woman or man, by contrast, enjoys independent judgment—judgment free of personal, private, and hence arbitrary desires, interests, or needs.

But, of course, Aristotle realized (as did Butler and Wilson) that if I am not working, then someone else is. The price paid for my freedom from want is another person’s need.

Given this intimate and necessary relationship between dependence and independence, the common wealth or republic must be a very unusual place indeed, since all of its members and its leaders are independent and free. To explain this unusual arrangement, Aristotle set out from that place which is least free: the natural order. Nature is least free because everything that occurs within nature occurs by necessity. Thus, for example, while Aristotle knew that men could and did love men and that women could and did love women, he also knew that nature had established that reproduction required a man and a woman. Similarly, although equality governed in a republic, Aristotle recognized that equality was unnatural, that by nature individuals were unequal.

Aristotle captured the unfreedom displayed in the natural order by calling attention to four necessary pairings: between male and female, ruler and ruled, and master and slave.

The union of male and female is essential for reproduction; and this is not a matter of choice, but is due to the natural urge, which exists in the other animals too and in plants, to propagate one’s kind.  Equally essential is the combination of the natural ruler and ruled, for the purpose of preservation. For the element that can use
its intelligence to look ahead is by nature ruler and by nature master, while that which has the bodily strength
to do the actual work is by nature a slave, one of those who are ruled. Thus there is a common interest uniting master and slave.

Lest we become sidetracked, Aristotle is not advocating slavery in this passage, least of all for the republic. Rather is he calling attention to the fact that in nature, outside of the republic, difference overshadows equality. But that is not all. Aristotle is also reminding us that the household, the oikos, is as much a part of the natural order as any other part of nature and is therefore subject to the same relationships of domination, submission, inequality, and difference as are all other parts of the natural order.

No parents, for example, extend equal rights, privileges, and responsibilities to their children. This, Aristotle reminds us, is not only because parents are more powerful than their children, but also, more importantly, because parents enjoy more experience, have acquired a more comprehensive understanding of the world, and because they know far better than their children what tasks all members of the household need to perform in order for the household to function as it should. Similarly, since the private enterprise (the oikonomia) is an extension of the private household (the oikos), no employers extend equal rights, privileges, and responsibilities to their employees. This is because employees enter and work within their employer’s household only at the employer’s invitation. In the household, as in the private enterprise, relations between parents and children, as between employers and employees, are by nature unequal.

This, however, still does not explain how we get from the unequal, hierarchical relationships that characterize nature to the equal, politically achieved relationships that characterize the republic. To get from natural inequality to republican equality, Aristotle invites us to reflect on what in Greek is called the telos or purpose of human beings. Human beings, says Aristotle, differ qualitatively from other kinds of creatures. For, whereas the purposes of other kinds of creatures are dictated by nature, the highest purposes for human beings can only be achieved with other human beings in community. Thus, whereas all other animals can achieve their highest end in isolation from or even in conflict with one another, human beings require the polis, the political community.

The final association, formed of several villages, is the state [polis]. For all practical purposes the process is now complete; self-sufficiency has been reached, and while the state [polis] came about as a means of securing life itself, it continues in being to secure the good life. Therefore every state [polis] exists by nature, as the earlier associations too were natural. This association is the end of those others and nature is itself an end; for whatever is the end-product of the coming into existence of any object, that is what we call its nature—of a man, for instance, or a horse or a household. Moreover the aim and the end is perfection; and self-sufficiency is both end and perfection.

What at first may appear slight of hand turns out to be common sense. Unlike the rest of nature, whose highest ends and purposes are exhausted in inequality, difference, domination, and subservience, human beings highest end and purpose—and, hence, their nature—can only be achieved in the republic. The republic, therefore, from the vantage-point of nature is unnatural. Yet, from the vantage-point of human nature, it is in the republic that humanity fulfills its highest calling.

Human beings are self-sufficient only in community with others like them, only in the polis. And it is from this that Aristotle famously concludes: “It follows that the state [polis] belongs to the class of objects which exist by nature, and that man is by nature a political animal.” But, what then happened to the inequalities and distinctions to which Aristotle had just called our attention: male-female, ruler-ruled, master-slave?

To be sure, these distinctions were, are and will remain natural. Like all animals, human beings must provide for themselves. They must labor to produce and reproduce their kind. And, so, like all other things in nature, human beings too are subject to the sphere of necessity. But it is not this quality that makes us human. Rather, what makes us human, according to Aristotle, is the polis and, in fact, the republic, where, rising above our base animalistic needs and desires, banding together with one another, we achieve that independence and freedom that on our own we could never have realized.

What this means, however, is that the oikos, the household, and oikonomia, the private enterprise through which the household produces and reproduces itself, is nothing more than a means through which human beings are to reach their highest calling in a republic of equals.

The economy and household exist in order to make it possible for human beings to achieve their highest end as citizens within the republic. Or, as Aristotle puts it, “the polis has a natural priority over the household and over any individual among us.” And, then, in an analogy that has well weathered the passage of time, Aristotle points out, “for the whole must be prior to the part. Separate hand or foot from the whole body, and they will no longer be hand or foot except in name, as one might speak of a ‘hand’ or ‘foot’ sculptured in stone.” Human beings, at their best, when they achieve their fullest potential are naturally unnatural. They do what no other animals do and are completed and fulfilled in a manner unlike all other animals.

It is clear then that the polis is both natural and prior to the individual. For if an individual is not fully self-sufficient after separation, he will stand in the same relationship to the whole as the parts in the other case do. Whatever is incapable of participating in the association which we call the polis, a dumb animal for example, and equally whatever is perfectly self-sufficient and has no need to (e.g. a god), is not a part of the polis at all.

To be sure, human beings are also natural. Parents need to guide and govern their children. Private employers are not obligated to hire every applicant—in effect inviting them into their private household—irrespective of their qualifications or experience. Not all individuals enjoy the same aptitudes, abilities, or experience.

But were we to build our political form around these distinctions, differences and inequalities, we would then achieve not a republic, but a despotism. And, in this, we would be no better than other animals who have no choice but to obey their instincts.

We can now better appreciate why Aristotle refused to equate the ruler of a republic and the manager of a private enterprise. The two are not only vastly different from one another. They are in some sense opposites. The republic is founded on unnatural relationships among equally endowed, able, and empowered citizens; the private enterprise is based on natural relationships of domination and submission, i.e., despotism. Yet, Aristotle goes even further, rejecting the idea that the polis and the oikos, politics and economy, are simply two, equally important, dimensions of public life. To the contrary, the oikos and oikonomia by definition stand outside of public life, whereas the life of equal citizens together by itself embodies and fulfills humanity’s highest aims and ideals.

So, how were the framers of the Constitution to fit these two ways of life, the way of politics and the way of business, together in a single republic? Or, more pointedly, how were these businessmen—some merchants, others lawyers, some planters, others land speculators—how were they going to “form a more perfect Union” that protected and advanced republican values and institutions?

To answer these questions, we will need to enter into what could be called both Aristotle’s and the Founders’ heart of darkness: slavery.