RULING THE HOUSEHOLD

What has come down to us as the first book of the Politics is not immediately enticing, either as political philosophy or, certainly, as literature. It opens with a very abstract description of Aristotle’s basic unit of political analysis, the city or polis. This would not be such a bad start were it not immediately followed by some obscurely aimed remarks about how wrongheaded it would be to identify expertise about cities with the expertise required to run a household. We then get a description of families mysteriously growing “naturally” into cities. This is followed by the infamous defense of the justice of enslaving some members of the species and keeping all females in subservient roles. An outline of the evils of trade and commerce appears to conclude with a serious recommendation to acquire monopolies. The book on the whole thus appears to be a jumbled collection of impenetrable arguments for conclusions that range from the merely odd to the thoroughly repugnant. Most readers find it very easy to put, or throw, down. Nevertheless, although there is no getting around the facts that

some of Aristotle’s conclusions here are wrong and all of his arguments genuinely difficult, careful study will be repaid. The difficulty of the arguments is largely (although admittedly not

entirely) due to their subtlety. It is, moreover, important to understand the thought behind ugly political ideas as well as inspiring ones, particularly when the former have the sort of long subsequent influence these unfortunately have had. The first book is also, despite or perhaps even because of its difficulties, an excellent introduction to Aristotle’s thought. The methods of inquiry demonstrated here are characteristic; the content, particularly in its description of the relation between individual citizens and their political communities and in its teleology, provides a vivid picture of Aristotle’s view of the world. As far as the structure of the book goes and the place of its

discussion in the work as a whole, one might as well take seriously the narrative that appears in the text and leave it at that. The discussion about the political community is begun by analyzing it and thereby distinguishing it from other communities; the parts of the polis need to be understood, if the city itself is to be. The parts of cities are to be found by looking at the development of cities. Since cities are constituted primarily out of households, households and their functioning are to be discussed. The basic relations making up the household are those of master-slave, husband-wife, and father-child, all of which have to be understood. The household was traditionally thought of not only as the main locus of wealth accumulation but as primarily aimed at precisely that. Indeed, although matters turn out not to be so simple here in the Politics, Aristotle himself lists wealth as the aim of household management in the opening paragraph of the Nicomachean Ethics in the course of some general remarks about ends. (It is thus not an accident that the Greek word usually translated as “household management” is oikonomia, hence “economics.”) This is then the natural place for the Politics’ discussion of wealth. The book on the whole thus constitutes a reasonable beginning of the examination of the political good to follow by outlining the nature of the polis and its constituent parts.