Читать книгу Decolonizing Politics - Robbie Shilliam - Страница 8

Aristotle was born in Stagiera, a typical Greek colony-city. Before the wars with Persia (499–450 bce), it was commonplace for Greek cities to send out settlers to found new cities. The hundreds of small autonomous cities produced in this colonizing movement provided the lattice of Greek politics. For instance, Aristotle’s mother came from Chalcis. Chalcis and another city, Andros, together sponsored the settlement of Stagiera almost 300 years before Aristotle’s birth in 384 bce. You’ve no doubt heard of Aristotle’s ideal model for a political community. Well, his description of the “polis” – its shape, size and substance – was remarkably similar to the colony-city of his birth.

Let’s be under no illusion: Greek colonization – like all colonization – was a conflictual and often bloody process. Nonetheless, in the “archaic” period (the hundreds of years before the Persian Wars) Greeks colonized in a manner similar to most groups of people who inhabited the shores of the Mediterranean. Greeks were all too aware that they shared these ancient shores with empires to the Asian east and African south – empires that were often older, wealthier, and more powerful than them. Therefore, although colonizers themselves, Greeks did not necessarily consider themselves to be superior beings. Their settlers did not even feel the compulsion to eradicate the foreign gods of the lands that they colonized. Such gods were mapped onto figures that already comprised the Greek pantheon; either that, or their pantheon received new members.

One of the ways by which Greeks oriented themselves to this world of colonies and empires was by contrasting themselves to “barbarians.” You’re probably thinking about the derogatory nature of this term. Actually, in the archaic era “barbarian” straightforwardly referred to a non-Greek speaker. How about xenophobia? You’ll be aware of the hatred of foreigners usually implied by that term. But in the archaic era, “xenoi” referred to a “guest-friend” (see Malkin 2004). Evidently, the Greeks did not think themselves as fundamentally superior to the multicultural empires with which they shared the Mediterranean.

All this changed during the Persian Wars. Athens rose to become the hegemon of the Delian league, a collection of Greek cities that faced the imperial armies and navies of the Persian empire. As these autonomous cities came increasingly under Athenian rule, so were their distinctive identities sidelined by a new cultural identity of imperial belonging: Hellenism. At the same time, “barbarian” came to be associated primarily with Persians, who were described as a sensual and effeminate race of men. “Hellenic” thus came to reference a superior masculine civilization to the lesser barbarians that threatened it.

But the consolidation of imperial power by Athens invited challenge beyond the Persians. Macedonians, who lived north of Mount Olympus, spoke a Greek dialect and worshiped gods from the Greek pantheon. They were, though, considered by Greeks to be barbarians. Regardless, by the time Aristotle was born, the imperial designs of Macedonia also began to threaten Athens and its leadership of the Delian league. As it happens, Aristotle’s father served as a court physician to the Macedonian king Amyntas II during his short reign. Aristotle himself most likely spent some of his early childhood in the Macedonian palace at Pella. These connections would cause persistent trouble for him in later life.

So, Aristotle was born into a colonial world increasingly shaped by inter-imperial competition. On his mother’s side he inherited the Greek settler project of founding independent colony-cities. On his father’s side he inherited a connection to the court of an expansionary imperial power.

That said, much of Aristotle’s own life would be spent in Athens as an immigrant, or what we would nowadays call a “permanent alien” or “permanent resident.” James Watson (2010) helpfully points out that the Greek term for immigrant – metic – originally referred to a person who changed his dwelling from one land to another. In the archaic period, before Athenian hegemony and when distinctions between Greeks and non-Greeks were less fraught, metic women could marry Athenian men and their children would become Athenian citizens. Even during the war with Persia thousands of people arrived in Athens fleeing military invasion and most subsequently gained citizenship. But all this changed when Athens won the war under the leadership of Pericles.

In 451 bce Pericles introduced a law that limited the conferring of citizenship only to children of two Athenian parents. Effectively, the law ruled out the granting of citizenship to immigrants. With this, the status of metic was drastically redefined. True, unlike slaves – and most households had them in Athens – metics were at least free. Nevertheless, metics could not own land, vote in the assembly, serve as a magistrate, or represent themselves in court without a sponsor. Unlike citizens, metics had to pay a poll tax and failure to do so could lead to enslavement. Despite this inequity, metics had the same obligations as citizens to serve in the army and navy. After the end of the Persian war, approximately one third to one half of the free population in Athens were metics.

At the age of seventeen, Aristotle moved to Athens and there attended Plato’s academy for nineteen years. Aristotle’s experiences in Athens were defined by his metic status. For instance, when setting up his own school in the Lyceum area of Athens, Aristotle could not buy land but had to rent the property. He even confided to a friend that “the same things are not proper for a foreigner as they are for a citizen: it is difficult to stay in Athens” (Anagnostopoulos 2009, 9). Tellingly, in his writings Aristotle often referred to Athenians as “they” rather than as “us” (Dietz 2012, 284).

In fact, Aristotle was cast more than once as an anti-Athenian self-hating Greek sympathizer of Macedonia. Anti-Macedonian sentiment intensified when, under Philip II’s command, the Macedonian army began expanding into the territories of the Delian league, which were under Athenian leadership. Soon after Plato’s death, Aristotle left Athens under some duress. It seems as if some Athenians resented his familial connections to Macedonia. Return to Stagiera was not wise; Aristotle’s birthplace had recently been destroyed by Philip II and its residents sent into exile or sold into slavery. Instead, Aristotle was welcomed to Atarnesu, a settler-city on the coast of Asia Minor (in present-day Turkey), by an old student of Plato. Having married his wife Pythias there, Aristotle moved the family to the island of Lesbos.

In 342, Philip II invited Aristotle to tutor his son, the future Alexander the Great. Aristotle returned to the palace at Pella for two years, introducing the young Alexander to the study of politics and writing for him two works on the subjects of monarchy and colonies. Thereafter, Aristotle journeyed home to Stagiera in time to witness the conquering of Athens by Philip II and the formation of a new federation of Greek cities – the League of Corinth – under Philip’s influence.

After Philip’s assassination and the ascent of his son Alexander, Aristotle returned to Athens for a second stay, during which he wrote his most influential treatise on the study of politics. He did, though, keep his Macedonian associations, including a friendship with Antipater, Alexander’s viceroy, who held supreme command over the League of Corinth. After Alexander’s untimely death, and with anti-Macedonian sentiment again sweeping through Athens, Aristotle left Athens for the last time. He retired to Chalcis, the colony-city where his mother’s family held estates, and died there soon after.

Is not the political world of Aristotle uncanny to us? It is surely familiar in many ways: most present-day nations have colonial pasts; states across the world enact laws that make immigrants second class in comparison to first-class citizens; xenophobia easily sways political debate; and people flee wars to become asylum seekers and refugees. But it is also an unfamiliar world: we do not imagine colonial politics to play out in Greece, and Greece is supposed to be the ancient root of the European Union, not the center of non-European inter-imperial politics.

Above all, this uncanniness leads us to suspect that empire is an unexceptional political phenomenon. We might have to face the possibility that our foundational understandings of the political world are filtered through colonialism far more than we might imagine to be the case. Consider this. When he wrote his treatise on Politics, Aristotle had already moved from his original colony-city to become a permanent alien. He then effectively became an asylum seeker and subsequently moved between two imperial powers. Even if he was relatively privileged, Aristotle’s life was also that of a sojourner, escapee, resident alien – not that of a settled, rights-holding, “native” citizen. Acknowledging this uncanniness allows us to re-orient toward Aristotle and his analysis of politics.

Many of the textbooks you might come across will introduce Aristotle as the first teacher of political science. Through his writings, you will be told, Aristotle proposed that man was a “political animal,” that the nature of this animal was to seek out the “good life,” that this life required systems of justice, and that the polis was the exemplary organization by which such normative aspirations could be met. Textbooks will also tell you that Aristotle described a wide array of political orders as well as the best methods by which to investigate and evaluate the actions of politicians and regimes.

Aristotle did cover this ground; no one is lying to you. But perhaps the problem lies in the ways in which textbooks condense Aristotle’s study of politics to a framework centered upon the citizen of the polis. It goes something like this: the lawmaker crafts legislation, especially a constitution that preserves order over the various inhabitants of the polis; politicians govern through the laws, customs and educational institutions that uphold the constitution; and, in pursuit of the good life, citizens hold a right to participate in political deliberation.

To be fair, textbooks will often mention along the way the inadequacies of Athenian justice when it came to women, slaves, and barbarians. Sometimes a note of caution might be struck over Aristotle’s apparent disdain for barbarians, his claim that some people are “natural slaves,” and that women are inferior to men. But textbooks will still tend to separate Aristotle’s “ideal” model from its “real” politics.

By the “ideal” I mean a framework that focuses on the citizen in relation to the polis, such that the logic of this relationship is self-sufficient and exclusive of imperial entanglements. By the “real,” I mean the wider imperial and colonial contexts in and through which the very practice of citizenship gained meaning for Aristotle. Does this separation of the “ideal” and the “real” quell that unsettled feeling? Does it make Aristotle comfortably familiar again? I hope not.

Because in light of the contextualization we just undertook it seems conceptually inadequate to separate the polis from empire, and the non-citizen from citizen. The logic that Aristotle used to bind the citizen to the polis is not self-sufficient and exclusive of imperial entanglements. What if we started from the premises that Aristotle’s polis was intractably modeled on the small settler-colony of his birth, and that his focus on democratic deliberation was at root an attempt to redress the harms of imperial expansion? (see Dietz 2012).

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not claiming that Aristotle was what we nowadays call a “decolonizer” of political science. He wasn’t even a revolutionary. He was conservative in the literal sense. That is, Aristotle wished to conserve the possibility of living in a just polis, but one that for him was modelled on the small settler-colony of his birth. Crucially, Aristotle believed that imperial expansion and the wars that served such expansion had radically curtailed that possibility. This was not only the case when it came to evaluating the barbarians of the Persian empire but also with regard to the trajectory of the Greek city leagues under the ambitions of both Athens and Macedonia (see, in general, Tuplin 1985). For Aristotle, empires by and large produced despots; and even citizens had to slavishly serve despots.

Aristotle’s position could not have been a comfortable one from which to write a treatise on politics: he sought to dialogue with Athenian citizens, living among them, but not as one of them. Aristotle’s philosophical provocation to them was something like this: “here is what you believe and practice; here is the logic to it; knowing this, do you think you should reappraise your beliefs and practices?” Indeed, his conception of politics itself was designed to address precisely such an intimately unsettling question.

Let’s start with Aristotle’s most famous statement: “a human is by nature a political animal” (Aristotle 2017, 4). But what does he mean by nature? As Jill Frank (2004) explains, nature for Aristotle signals “what happens usually and for the most part.” The nature of humans can neither be accidental – which would make that nature inexplicable – nor defined in terms of necessities – which would make that nature unchangeable. Rather, nature is stable enough to be studied, but variable enough such that any study will be imperfect.

Naturally (usually and for the most part) we humans care for each other, whether that be through friendships or families (Salkever 2014, 71). What’s more, says Aristotle, like most animals we are endowed with voluntary action, that is, we can choose to act. However, our capability to choose is a unique one. Unlike animals we can make choices by first using reason to evaluate all the possible courses of action (Aristotle 2014, 38–40).

If we put these concerns for sociability, agency, and reason together, then human nature can be explained in Aristotelian terms as a collective deliberation toward choosing the best course of action by which to attain the good life. Of course, such deliberation involves judgment. And for this reason, judgment is more of an art than a science, requiring practical wisdom, that is, insight applied to particular situations. For Aristotle (2014, 105–106), then, the study of politics cannot be simply the scientific analysis of universal laws but must always be a deliberative discussion about what might be best for the polity in any given time and place.

Still, deliberation requires leisure time and therein lies the rub. Those who plant the fields, raise children, clean households, and manufacture goods do not have any spare time. Therefore, politics can only be undertaken by virtue of a hierarchical division of labor that enfranchises some men as active citizens over and against other people in their household such as women, workers, slaves etc. Here we return to face Aristotle’s conservatism, but in a different light: he wishes to preserve the hierarchical order of settler-colonies that makes politics, and thus the good life, possible.

Recall, though, Aristotle’s understanding of nature as a condition that usually and in the main attains, and is neither random nor necessary. This understanding affects how he conceives of hierarchy. There is a subtle but important distinction between arguing that (a) hierarchy is usual and claiming that (b) certain peoples by necessity and essence occupy certain places in that hierarchy.

And think of all the paths that Aristotle has traveled in his life by the time he writes his Politics. He has moved from a citizen of a colony-city to a resident alien of another city, to a barbarian-sympathizer, to an asylum seeker, to an academic in the court of empire, and back to a resident alien again. All his life he has moved into and through different hierarchies. Given this lived experience of politics, it is reasonable to suppose that Aristotle is trying to sensitize Athenian citizens to the fact that the hierarchical world they live in is changeable. Citizens, too, might not be essentially superior to anyone else. The great can also degenerate.

Take, for instance, one of Aristotle’s most infamous discussions concerning the “natural slave.” As scholars such as Michael Heath (2008) have argued, what distinguishes the citizen from the slave for Aristotle is a very distinct and exacting condition: the practical inability to take part in deliberating on predetermined ends. Aristotle does not mean to imply that the slave is incapable of deliberation, which for him would be the case with a child. Rather, for most of the time and in most cases the slave cannot practically enter into deliberation with others in an independent manner.

Basically, the definition of a natural slave is what the citizen categorically is not. This is no surprise, given the fact that Aristotle’s ideal for the household is a division between citizens and slaves. So long as that division enables citizens to take part actively in politics, that is, deliberation toward the good life, then slavery is ultimately a good thing. The peace and prosperity enjoyed by the master even trickles down to benefit his slave.

We’ll return to these assumptions shortly. But why might Aristotle be making such an argument in his own context? If we refuted the assumption that certain people are essentially born slaves, then anyone might become a slave if the political system they inhabit practically forbids deliberation for the sake of the good life. And Aristotle defines slavery, you’ll recall, as the opposite of citizenship. Consequently, imperial ambition, whether homegrown in Athens or imposed by Macedonia or Persia, might corrupt the polity, foreclose independent deliberation, and produce slavish citizens who must serve despots.

We can also think about the distinction between citizen and barbarian in like manner. Aristotle is influenced by earlier work that attributed the diversity of human capabilities to the effect upon semen production caused by climactic conditions. Yes, it is that graphic. In this model, as Julie Ward (2002) shows, the mild climate in Asia produces gentle, timid folk, while the cold climate in Europe produces wild, belligerent folk. As luck would have it, the Greek climate falls in between the two (Aristotle did not conceive of the Greeks as European) and so produces a balanced disposition of rationality and courage.

Are some people fated by climate to be barbarians? Perhaps, if only that Aristotle considers Greek peoples to display the same range of dispositions internally – European, Asiatic and Greek. So there has to be something additional to geographical location that makes a people barbaric. Actually, Aristotle rarely uses the term “barbarian” except descriptively. He is far more interested in examining the analytical difference between “ethnos,” which he characterizes as a group existing without a common purpose, and the “polis,” a group who share a conception of the good life (Ward 2002). Aristotle defines the Persians as an ethnos: he does not believe that the despotic structure of empire allows for a deliberative, shared conception of the good.

Therefore, in Aristotle’s conception, the difference between peoples is principally, albeit not solely, decided by their political regime. By this logic, there is nothing in nature that prevents Greeks from losing their civilization and becoming similarly barbarous. Pursuing the road to empire might lead to precisely such a loss.

But, once again, it’s important to note that Aristotle’s defense of the polis against imperial degeneration is at the same time a defense of the model colony-city – a small, autonomous, and hierarchical society. This conservative defense not only requires Aristotle to make a distinction between slave, barbarian, and citizen, regardless of which peoples might populate such distinctions at any time. It also requires a defense of the patriarchal household that provides the opportunity for male heads of those households to be citizens.

Once more, let’s be careful with our reading of Aristotle. He does not claim that males represent the apex of the species, nor that the essence of humanity lies in sex differentiation (see Henry 2007). But he does identify the primary difference of sex in terms of the ability to produce semen. When it comes to species reproduction, females provide only the inert matter, while males sculpt the form. Shaping and changing human nature – that’s a man thing. When that shaping occurs through politics, as is the nature of humans – this too is a man thing.

In modeling the small self-determining colony-city, Aristotle presumes that the nature of politics is best served by patriarchal hierarchy, although not imperialism. But is a hierarchical polis the only regime through which humans can deliberate in order to attain and preserve the good life? Put another way, has nothing of value for the good life ever been thought of or said by those who exist at the bottom of or outside of that hierarchy: metics, women, slaves, and barbarians?

This is the kind of question that I’ll be returning to in every chapter and especially in the book’s conclusion. For now, it’s important to realize that such a question would be outside the logic of Aristotle’s critical conversation with Athenians. Slaves have no capability to collective deliberate, barbarians, no culture through which to do so, and women no semen. By this reasoning, who would ever presume that these lesser subjects could conceptualize the good life differently – perhaps even more reasonably and justly? Which leads to another question: what goes un-thought of due to Aristotle’s constraining logic?

There exists a strong possibility that Aristotle’s discussion of the natural slave is directed against a social movement that, shortly before his time, regarded slavery as an affront to natural law. An influential rhetorician called Alcidamas had claimed that “the divinity … left everyone free, nature made no one a slave” (Cambiano 1987, 31). This claim still resonated across Aristotle’s political landscape. How large was this anti-slavery movement? Who comprised it? What did slaves think of it, and did they contribute intellectually to a conception of the polis that did not accept the moral worth of patriarchal hierarchy, as Aristotle did? Might their thoughts and actions have resonated so much in Aristotle’s age that he felt they required a response (see Burns 2003)?

It is difficult to reconstruct in any detail the anti-slavery movement in fifth-century Athens. Perhaps ancient Greece is too far away. But our own colonial and imperial legacies are not. 1492, the year in which Columbus began the imperial conquest of what we now call the Americas, is as close to us as the Roman building of Hadrian’s Wall is to Aristotle’s birth. The time between our current decade and the formal end of most European empires is actually less than the span of Aristotle’s lifetime. Expanding our geographical and historical vistas to match an inquiring imagination helps us to think politics anew.

For instance, it is not only possible to trace a tradition of black abolitionism in the Americas; we can also reconstruct African conceptions of the good life predicated upon the outlawing of slavery. In 1965, Youssouf Tata Cissé transcribed an Oath of the Mande Hunters that had been orally recounted since 1222 in the region of West Africa now encompassed by Mali (Nesbitt 2014, 11). The Oath arose at a moment of great flux in the region. Expanding empires brought war, and war brought captives that became slaves. Slave trading in West Africa was connected to global trading routes from the 620s onwards.

In response to this turmoil, the Oath of the Mande Hunters declares that “every human life is a life,” and that “no one life is superior to any other” (Neocosmos 2014). The Oath defines a human being in some detail as a corporeal body that requires subsistence and which is also animated by an independent spirit. This independence of body and spirit affirms specific rights of the human to dispose of her own person as she sees fit, to act in the way she wishes, and to utilize the fruit of her labor as she decides. For these reasons, the Oath asserts that both hunger and enslavement must be banned. While the Oath is supposed to apply to Mande peoples in particular, it is proclaimed “for the ears of the whole world.”

The Oath is best understood as part of a shifting tradition of inquiry into fundamental conceptions of human nature and politics. It is enunciated in an intentionally universal register, one that matches that of Alcidamas: all humans have equally valuable and valid lives. Furthermore, the rights the Oath affirms are “negative” in the sense that no one can take away a human’s independence, as well as “positive” in the sense that resources must be distributed among humans. In these ways, the Oath of the Hunters provides a conception of the good life that, unlike Aristotle’s, cannot abide slavery and must be based upon an equitable satiation of human needs and human spirit beyond household hierarchies.

The Oath is said to appear three hundred years before the beginning of the so-called Atlantic “slave trade,” and over five hundred and fifty years before the American Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. Neither Declaration, as celebrated as they are, matched the radical universality and equity of the Oath, although the revolutionary constitution of Hayti in 1805 certainly did. Remember that the Oath is orally recounted in various forms across this time span. It does not simply disappear, although it is not heard by all. Nowadays you might hear it in the proclamation that Black Lives Matter. Who, then, invented the idea of human freedom?

In our own time, some scholars have claimed that decolonizing the study of politics can only be a vulgar act of racial silencing, i.e. a muting of white European men just because they are white, European and men. I would hope you might now agree that decolonizing politics presents a far deeper challenge to us all: how expansive do we dare to make our conversation about politics? How deeply do we wish to critique what is presented to us as convention? How democratic do we wish our study of politics to be?