Reconciling Injustice and Necessity: The Statesman in the Practical City

Reconciling Injustice and Necessity: The Statesman in the Practical City

When Socrates builds up a “city in speech” from ideals, he allows himself the option of overlooking the more distasteful features of real human cities simply by omitting them from the argument. His is a city whose primary purpose is to shed light on the soul of an individual, and its role as a metaphor allows it to contain logical conclusions which run wholly counter to the feasible practices of men. Aristotle permits himself no such luxury when he sets out to describe politics from the top down; he cannot overlook such thorny issues as slavery and empire because they exist as significant features in the constitutions of men and must be dealt with by statesmen, to whose needs Aristotle is particularly sensitive. Unlike Socrates, he cannot simply label these things unjust in the abstract and remove them from the ideal city. Aristotle, in his own description of an ideal constitution, is scrupulously practical, even when practicality prevents him from endorsing what would seem to be the logical conclusions of his own arguments. His treatment of empire in the Politics, like his treatment of slavery—empire’s small-scale cousin—reflects this ability to reconcile a concept of absolute justice to the inevitable injustices of political life.

It is not immediately obvious what Aristotle’s verdict on empire is. The institution seems to simultaneously violate several of his premises for a good city and promote others, and Aristotle sets up a comparison of the arguments for both sides to address this tension. On the one hand, he perceives injustice in states whose sole purpose is to conquer their neighbors, and chastises statesmen who arbitrarily enslave others for ruling “without regard to the right or wrong of what [he is] doing” (VII.ii.13) . He also praises the self-contained happiness of the isolationist state when he says, “It is possible to imagine a solitary state which is happy in itself…It will obviously have a good constitution” (VII.ii.16). However, both these lines of reasoning are incomplete condemnations of empire. The first implies only that the statesman is ultimately accountable to right and wrong in his actions and must consider this standard in his decision-making, not that imperialism is in itself always on the side of wrong. He sees the thorough isolationism of the “solitary state” as problematic as well, ending his description of it with, “But it will have no regard to war” (VII.