Public Policy – Philosophy Forum
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Assignment –
Summarize the most important political philosophy-related ideas contributed by Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero. How did these ideas impact political philosophy? How would
you characterize the worldview(s) underlying these philosophies? Give at least 1 example of Platonic, Aristotelian, and Ciceronian influence in modern public policy.
Instructions –
formatted in current Turabian style, and must consist of well-reasoned, contemplative,
and substantive posts and replies, rather than mere ipse dixit. These
threads and replies must provide citations to the sources of or support for
your ideas as well as any quoted materials and/or borrowed ideas. 400–500
words. Must include at least 3 references to the course readings and 1 Scripture reference
in addition to any other sources you wish to include. Scriptural excerpts with citations are required.
Textbook Readings –
Strauss & Cropsey: Introduction, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero
Strauss, Leo , and Joseph Cropsey. History of Political Philosophy . 3rd ed. Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 1987.
The Greco-Roman Political Philosophy
The normal method of studying political philosophy involves reading the great works of political
philosophers while trying to understand their original context and the meaning of their
conclusions for our ideas about politics. Nearly all such courses begin with Plato and Aristotle.
Plato and Aristotle
Plato
Plato (c. 428–347 BC) is perhaps the most important political philosopher in history; there are
those that assert that all of political philosophy since Plato, starting with that of his student
Aristotle, has been a response to Plato’s ideas. Plato was born into the aristocratic class of
democratic Athens just following the Peloponnesian War. This war was fought between Athens
and Sparta; Athens, a commercial empire with democratic politics at home, represented the
cutting edge of Greek intellectual innovation while the Spartans were the defenders of the
Homeric tradition of military virtue and the remains of tribal kingship. Though the Spartans were
victorious in the military conflict, they failed to stop the spread of the Athenian ideas. Athenian
Greek philosophy was carried forth by Alexander in the Hellenic conquest that we mentioned in
the previous section.
Plato’s family had been involved in the temporary oligarchy established by the Spartans; this
oligarchy was overthrown and the democracy reestablished. Plato’s path to political life would
have been complicated by this family history, but, in addition, his personal history is dominated
by his association with his teacher and mentor, Socrates. Socrates is the personification of the
Plato’s political philosophy, literally and figuratively. Socrates is the central character in many of
the Platonic dialogues that act as the literary form of Plato’s political philosophy, and the events
of Socrates’ trial and death by democratic Athens were the key formative events in the
intellectual development of the young Plato.
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Plato is the model political philosopher: he provides moral descriptions of the individual and
social realities and he gives reasons for the realization and frustration of human moral and
political development. While his works are various and sometimes contradictory, his Republic or
Politeia usually is presented as the hallmark of Platonic moral and political development.
Plato’s Republic
Plato begins the Republic with a dispute among Socrates and several young men about the nature
of justice. Justice, to the Greeks, was the all-encompassing concept of the moral character of the
individual and the individual’s place in the social and political contexts. Socrates, in his
inimitable style, shows how each of the various rival theories of justice is lacking. Finally, his
interlocutors demand more from Socrates than questions; they want to know Socrates’ positive
theory of justice. We can take this as the cue from Plato that he is about to sketch his own
political theory.
Plato’s Socrates is not overly concerned with the origin of politics; perhaps, that is why his
critical student Aristotle spends so much time developing a theory of political origins as we shall
see. Socrates suggests that the social and political condition is a response to the inefficiency of
man as a solitary being: man has physical wants that cannot be provided adequately by himself
and therefore the political context forms around man’s desire to fulfill material wants. However,
this is the basest motivation for politics and corresponds to most existing political forms in the
world: the injustice we see is the result of each selfish individual striving to maximize his
physical pleasure. Those few persons who sense there is something more to justice and politics
than acquisition find it in the other two political pursuits: military glory and philosophy. If
personal desire of the individual was left unchecked, the world would be a war of all against all;
Plato suggests that justice must depend on a group of humans capable of compelling physical
obedience and peace. These spirited individuals that find meaning in conquest for the sake of
glory other than pecuniary gain are called guardians by Socrates. Now we can see the beginnings
of a moral development of the individual and the city: the worst individual is the one given only
to his physical desires and the worst city is the one in which everyone is only concerned with
satisfying these desires, the better city is one in which some guardians exist to temper the
injustice of the appetitive persons. However, the spirited persons are not capable of grasping the
highest of human pursuits, philosophy. Philosophy consists in the knowledge of the true nature of
things and engaging in philosophy tempers both the appetitive and spirited components of the
soul. The best city, the kallipolis of the Republic, is the one in which philosophers rule to benefit
of all and each individual is trained to the fullest attainment of knowledge possible to them. Not
all humans are capable of philosophy, so there must be a gradient of political participation: those
most given to the appetitive portion of the soul will be those tasked with physical production, the
spirited will be the defenders of the city’s physical security, and philosophers will set the policy
of the city. Sadly for Plato, most real cities are hostile to philosophers and therefore are given
over to great injustices; e.g. the trial and death of Socrates in Athens.
Plato’s theory in the Republic is a masterpiece of form and content. His treatment of the city as a
moral project is perhaps the best example of political philosophy in history. Plato’s theory is
tremendously important to Christian Political Thought. His theory is foundational in its novelty
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and historical appearance, but it is also significant for its critique of all existing political forms as
moral failures. Later Christian political philosophers such as Augustine used this indictment to
suggest that Plato had an intuition that man is destined for perfection not in this world but
somewhere else, the City of God. Without the disclosure of this knowledge from supernatural
revelation, man can only find this world to be one of frustration and sorrow. Indeed, as
Chesterton (cf. the Everlasting Man) and other Christian apologists have suggested, the highest
philosophy of the late classical world led to despair rather than joy. It was not until that
philosophy was melded with the supernatural good news of the Gospel that man could find a
political theory that expressed a transcendent joy.
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Aristotle
If Plato was the master moral philosopher of the Greeks, then Aristotle was the foremost
encyclopedist of that philosophy. He was pragmatic and less concerned than Plato with moral
excellence of humanity; Aristotle wanted to collect what was known about man from current and
historical observation. Aristotle was Plato’s student but he was also his greatest critic. Aristotle is
of great importance to our investigation of Christian Political Thought in that his system of
classification was used, in collaboration with Christian theology, to construct the Late Medieval
Synthesis; this synthesis was the immediate ancestor of the modern period of political
philosophy.
Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics
Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Politics are his statement of the moral nature of humanity
and his political theory. These two works essentially form a unity of his theory of humanity,
individual and social. Happiness forms the goal of human existence for Aristotle; but how to get
it? In the Ethics, Aristotle surveyed the various Greek theories of human happiness: pleasure
seeking, glory, fame, friendship, etc. He suggests that the key to human happiness is to have “just
enough” of everything; both having too little and too much of anything is an abuse for Aristotle
and leads to dysfunction. For example, humans need private property to satisfy their physical
needs. However, happiness does not consist solely in acquisition; rather, one needs enough to
have time for contemplation. Those without enough will be unable to make time for
contemplation; those with too much have a warped morality otherwise they would have stopped
engaging in acquisition when they had enough for the higher good of contemplation. Like Plato,
Aristotle suggests that philosophy is the highest human activity and that only those capable of
philosophy, economically and intellectually, can realize happiness.
Aristotle’s Politics is the earliest encyclopedia of political forms as they were known to the
classical world. He mentions the simple modes of tribalism and Eastern divine monarchy and
suggests that these are too simple to express the complex needs of fully developed human
beings; i.e. neither are men only members of families nor gods or drones for the glory of gods.
Aristotle’s Origin of Politics
Aristotle constructs an inductive argument to prove the natural necessity of politics; he moves
from the simplest human social case to the next more complex one until he has arrived at the
political form in which all of humanity’s needs are met. He starts with the seemingly trivial case
of the individual in complete isolation. The individual is insufficient because he cannot even
provide for the longevity of humanity through procreation; additionally, since there is no one else
with the isolated individual, there cannot be a social form by definition. The next case is the
nuclear family; this case provides for procreation and a simple form of rule between parents and
children. However, since by Aristotle’s contemporary observation, humanity does not consist of
only of members of the same nuclear family, there must be a case greater than the nuclear family
for a fully human life and happiness. The tribe forms the next case: the nuclear family after
several generations. The tribe provides for most of the physical needs of humanity since there
can be a greater division of labor in the tribe than the nuclear family as there are more people.
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Nonetheless, again Aristotle notices that there exists a form of human social organization greater
than the tribe, so the tribe cannot be the final human social form. But, he knows from Homer that
the Greeks existed for a great period of time as a loose agglomeration of tribes that started to
come together when they found a means of association that could give them common purpose:
this is politics. In the political association, the various pre-political tribes or villages have found a
means of creating an identity superior that of blood and purely common ancestry.
The polis, the site of this association, is the summation of human social reality and it is the place
where all of humanity’s individual and social needs can be realized. The description of the
various forms that this association can assume is the only task left to Aristotle’s theory of
politics.
Aristotle’s Political Taxonomy
Aristotle’s taxonomy of political forms depends on the number of magistrates. There are three
forms of politics: monarchy, aristocracy, and polity. Each of these forms seeks the public good or
happiness of its members; degenerate forms, in which the private good is substituted for the
public good, exist for each form: despotism, oligarchy, and democracy. The simplest political
form is monarchy, rule by the one. Monarchy owes its existence to the tribal patriarchy and its
more developed use under despotism in the Eastern examples, especially Persian despotic
monarchy. Pure monarchy gives way to something else, even when the term king is used, when
others begin to participate in the political authority. Aristocracy is the rule of the polis by the
few; ideal aristocracy is the rule only by the virtuous. Polity, sometimes mistakenly called
democracy, is the constitutional rule which is a balance of oligarchy and democracy; this requires
some explanation. How can the most prevalent form of rule in the Greek poleis by Aristotle’s
own admission be a mixture of two degenerate forms? The answer lies in Aristotle’s pragmatism
and commitment to observation. He surveyed dozens of existing Greek constitutions and noticed
that the most successful ones were those in which the rich oligarchs formed the core of the office
holding class and the poor were given substantial institutional means to influence the behavior of
the oligarchic leaders. He suggests that the unique contribution of the Greek politics was the
discovery of institutions that preserve this balance and maintain a moral flourishing of the
individual and the community. Aristotle’s concept of virtuous citizenship captures this balance:
the ideal citizen is the member of the polis capable ruling and being ruled by the constitutional
forms of that polis. Revolutions happen when the balance is lost; democratic revolutions result in
unrestrained liberty and anarchy while oligarchies cause these revolutions when the rich exclude
the poor from a reasonable political participation.
Together, Plato and Aristotle represent an important milestone on the road to Christian Political
Thought. Christian political philosophers have continued to speak in the nomenclature of the
Greek political theory until this very day. However, the Greek political theory, in its Platonic and
Aristotelian forms is incapable of expressing a universal politics because it is restricted to the
interactions of people living within the close proximity of a city or polis. The flow of history
necessitated some innovations on this theory; specifically, a concept of citizenship larger than
that in a particular city was lacking.
Alexander and the Hellenic Cultural Empire
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Alexander the Great, 356–323 BC, a student of Aristotle, conquered the Greek city-states, and
used that conquest as a springboard to propel a military and cultural colonization of nearly all of
the eastern Mediterranean. While he died shortly after his military conquest, the cultural effects
of his exploits long outlasted him: the Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament, the
Septuagint, that was heavily used by the authors of the New Testament, which also was written
mostly in Greek, give evidence that Greek language and philosophy had become cultural norms
by the time of our Lord\’s advent. Much of the political and religious history of Judea just prior to
our Lord\’s birth revolved around the resistance of devout Jews, like the Maccabees, to the Greek
speaking heirs of Alexander\’s empire and then the Romans, who displaced the existing political
structures while leaving the mostly Greek cultural forms intact.
Rome
Rome began like all the other tribal villages of the ancient world. Its first inhabitants practiced a
simple form of divine monarchy, complete with a religion that celebrated its sacred origins, and
it grew as it successfully subdued other close villages. Early in its history, it began to move away
from the divine monarchy towards a synthetic Aristotelian constitutionalism in which the rich
play the preeminent leadership role but the poor have significant political rights and
participation. If the Greeks gave Christian Political Thought it philosophical categories, the
Romans gave it is legal reasoning. The Romans are distinct in history in their proficiency with
the law; both in its creation and administration. What is the law? Law is exactly the mediation
that is necessary to overcome differences in identity that promote a common life. The Greeks
discovered law capable of building a citizenship identity at the level of the polis; the Romans
created law that was capable of administration over an empire. The justice of the city became the
justice of the empire; not perfect justice, but durable justice. The balance between justice and
imperial potency finds its expression in Cicero and the later imperial Stoics such as Marcus
Aurelius.
Cicero
Marcus Tullius Cicero (c. 106–43 BC) is known to history for many reasons: his rhetorical
eloquence in written and oratorical forms are without peer, his experience in practical politics is
significant to show the heights a philosophical man of modern means could reach even in the
classical world, etc. But for us, he is the transmitter of the Greek philosophical categories to the
Latin Romans and therefor the Western Latin Christians and he was the doomsday herald of the
rise of the Roman Caesar that was to establish a universal empire into which the Gospel
exploded and revolutionized.
Cicero was one of the most accomplished men of letters in history. Nearly on the strength of his
learning and eloquence alone, he rose from a middling equestrian Roman family to become the
chief magistrate in the dying Roman Republic. His rise is testament to the importance of law to
the Roman civilization. Cicero made his name as a lawyer and it gained him admission to the
Senate. The Roman Republic, as described by Polybius and Cicero himself, was a synthetic
constitution in which the oligarchic class of optimates exercised most of the power through the
control of the top magistracies and the deliberative Senate, which was officially powerless but in
reality controlled the policy of the magistrates. The magistrates officially were chosen by voting
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in the Public Assembly by a weighted process controlled mostly by the optimates; however, the
plebeians, or Roman citizens of very little wealth and property, were given a vote in the
Assembly. As a synthetic constitution, this arrangement functioned well when the optimates
ruled in the public interest as judged by the plebeians. Unrest and revolutions occurred when the
plebeians felt oppressed and united under the banner of a demagogic patrician or optimate.
Cicero lived during the greatest period of republican turmoil that culminated in the permanent
revolution of the Roman Republic under Julius Caesar; following Julius Caesar and his heir
Augustus, the republican forms remained in name only. Rome had become a monarchy in
everything but name. Cicero’s lament for the dying republican form and his prescription for its
fix are contained in the Republic and the Laws. Cicero’s choice of these titles is itself homage to
Plato; in fact, Plato’s work is known to us as the Republic because that is Cicero’s designation.
Additionally, the dialogic form used by Cicero conscientiously copies that of Plato. In the
Republic and the Laws, Cicero suggests that the optimates had lost their virtue: the reason and
will to discern the public good and put it into practice. Rather, the optimates were usually the
oligarchic Roman constitution to enrich themselves to the detriment of the plebeians. As a
student of Aristotle, Cicero knew that such a course could only end in a popular revolution that
resulted in anarchy or the concentration of power in a popularly acclaimed despot.
He was vindicated by the events that cost him his life and revolutionized the Roman Republic in
the way just described.
Stoics
The Greek philosophical descendants and students of Plato and Aristotle that lived during the
imperial period following Alexander’s conquest had tried to extend the philosophical categories
beyond the polis and to make them universal. The Stoics were the most significant and
successful school of Greek thought in this vein; Cicero considered himself a Stoic. In order to
find a conceptual category to extend the political philosophy of the Greeks to all of humanity, the
Stoics posited the ideas of Natural Reason and Natural Law. Natural Reason is the divine gift to
all of humanity to know what is the inherent right and dignity of the individual and the means by
which that dignity could be realized in the political association. Individual political associations
are indeed limited to certain local circumstances and therefore they each have unique positive
written laws; but, since Natural Reason is universal to humanity, the Natural Law provides an
abstract, universal standard of human dignity by which these written laws can be judged. With
the Natural Law, empire can be more than just conquest and rapine; moral imperium can be
defended if the conquerors can demonstrate that they exist but to preserve the Natural Law and
its moral dictates that can be apprehended by everyone with the use of Natural Reason.
Roman Citizenship at the Time of Christ
The Stoic school had a profound influence upon the Roman extension of citizenship. As
mentioned previously, the Romans had established dominance over the Mediterranean world in
the two generations preceding Christ’s advent. They brought with them the universal citizenship
taking shape under the Roman political development; this citizenship did not afford a great
amount of participation in the politics of Rome, but it was an important element of universal
political identity and, more importantly, the basis for a set of legal rights for individuals claiming
citizenship status. The Apostle Paul was a Roman citizen by birth and he was afforded certain
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legal rights that eventually led to his appeal to Caesar and fatal visit to Rome. The Jewish
diaspora, the proliferation of the Greek language and its philosophical categories, and the Roman
legal tradition with its nascent concept of meaningful universal citizenship all prepared the late
classical world for the explosion of the Gospel out of Jerusalem. This dissemination and the
synthesis that it spawned are the signal event of human history and we are the heirs of the
struggle and victory that ensued, religiously and politically
Grading Rubric –
All
required topics and/or questions are addressed in the thread in a thorough, thoughtful,
and analytical manner with the student’s position clearly evident.
20
Clear,
logical flow to post, stayed on topic.
15
Major
points are stated clearly and effectively.
15
Major
points are supported by the following:
Authoritative, cited sources
where appropriate or needed (at least 3 references to the course
readings and at least 1 Scripture reference);
Appropriate metaphors,
analogies, and/or examples; and
Well-reasoned, logical
arguments, appropriate in light of sources cited.
10
Appropriate
word count, spelling, grammar, and current Turabian format. (400–500 words)
