Abstract

This is a study in the politics of virtue. We will look into the political consequences of the attempt publicly to promote and cultivate virtue in citizens. Stability, self-government, and the avoidance of an imperial foreign policy are the political topics to be explored. Aristotle's Politics provides an excellent basis for such a study. The classical regimes were much more directly concerned with leading their citizens to happiness by making the citizens virtuous than the liberal nation-states of today, which protect individual freedoms and rights. Aristotle defines the polis as that political community which aims at the good life by making the citizens good and just. ;Plato's dialogue Protagoras will help us define political virtue, and recognize the problems Aristotle faced in defending and amending a notion of public virtue. In Chapter Two, we consider Aristotle's method of seeking knowledge about human affairs, noting parallels with early German phenomenology. Chapters Three through Six supply the core of our argument about Aristotle's "liberalism." The first part of the argument presents the political problem of political virtue as Aristotle understood it in the Politics. Chapter Three uncovers the connection between the longing for public virtue and civil unrest or stasis. Chapter Four probes the connection between the pursuit of political virtue and absolute rule or tyranny. The second part of the argument looks at typical "liberal" political doctrines through which Aristotle responded to the problem of political virtue. In Chapter Five, we tackle the change in outlook Aristotle hoped to bring about in the political actor through a new education--the outlook of moral virtue. In Chapter Six, we consider how political institutions promoted by Aristotle's political science--the rule of law, ostracism, political rule, the mixed regime, and democracy--also aim to restrain the typical excesses of the longing for virtue. We end our inquiry with a close examination of the most important passage on the relationship of virtue and politics in Aristotle's work, the concluding chapters of Book X of the Nicomachean Ethics