The Notion of the Political
Social contract theories propose that the human being is born in a state of selfishness and disorder—the “state of nature”—and the only way to correct the evil proclivities of man is by binding men through a social contract, whereby they surrender some of their rights and freedoms to live in a political community ruled by an authority (chosen by men) to mete justice and punish violations of the contract. In effect, the social contract theory suggests that the ruler of a political community is the arbiter of right and wrong and dispenser of the community’s good. For Hobbes, man tends to do evil and distrusts other men. Man’s initial condition is one of isolation, separate from other men. But Aristotle had already foreseen this refutation and said that “he who by nature and not by mere accident is without a state, is either a bad man or above humanity… [he is] tribeless, lawless, hearthless [homeless]” (1253a1-6). In a word, the theory posits that prior to the contract, there is no inherent law of morality, so anything goes.
Even as early as the time of Socrates, there were already hints of social contract theory principles. In Plato’s Crito, he narrates how Socrates was unwilling to heed to Crito’s plead for him to escape prison and flee to another city. Socrates was intent on remaining in Athens, accepting his impending death, because he was an Athenian and felt himself bound by Athenian law: “he who has experience of the manner in which we order justice and administer the State, and still remains, has entered into an implied contract that he will do as we command him” (Crito 51e). But this attitude, which absolutizes Athenian law, forgets that there exists a hierarchy of laws, of which state (or positive or human) law is most subordinate to all others (cf. ST I-II, q. 91, aa. 1-6).
A better approach is provided by Aristotle. He posits that the state, the polis, is “a creation of nature and prior to the individual” and thus, when a person comes into being, “a social instinct is implanted in [him]”(1253a25-30). But the polis as a creation of nature is, in the first place, contingent on man’s being by nature a political animal, for “the nature of a thing is its end” (1252b30-1). As for man, political life is his end and therefore his nature, as Aristotle says in the Ethics, because political life is co-implicated in man’s happiness, that is to say, in the attainment of contemplative life—the highest of all human activities (1177a11-18). Furthermore, he holds that “the best life, both for individuals and states, is the life of virtue… [because] the happiness of the individual is the same as that of the state” (1324a5). The political community, Aquinas comments, is therefore what “seeks the supreme human good, since it aims at the common good, which is superior to, and more god-like than, the good of an individual, as Aristotle says at the beginning of the Ethics (Commentary on the Politics, I, 1[2]).
But in realm of the concretely real, it seems that that conclusion can only be applied analogically. A man may be a good citizen and be virtuous in political life, but that does not necessarily mean he is a good man, that is, a morally upright individual. He may lack moral virtues but possess what Aristotle called “political virtues” (cf. 1281a5). The contrary may be true, too: a man may lack political virtues yet remain morally virtuous. This incommunicability of virtue from one category to another, from the political to the moral and vice versa, though not absolute and often has exceptions, is in a way articulated by Aristotle: “the virtue of the good citizen and the virtue of the good man cannot be absolutely the same” (1277a20). But Carnes Lord refines this Aristotelian idea. Lord says that “[t]he best way of life for the city is not the speculative life simply,” i.e., contemplative life, “but rather the closest approximate to that life which is possible on the level of politics” [emphasis added] (Lord 353).
In any case, Aristotle’s main point stands: what is good for the polis must likewise be good for the individual (whether or not only analogically), thus, man is by nature a political animal, a zoon politikón. It is interesting that Aristotle uses zoon, zoe, and not the other word for life, bios. The word zoe—(biological) life—seems to suggest that man’s being political is not an addendum to his nature, as something posterior to his existence, but is embedded in the very structure of the human being. Since man’s orientation to the good permeates all of his activities and dispositions (cf. 1094a1-5), it means that his political activity and inclinations are intrinsically ordained to his good, and to his highest good which, for Aristotle, is the contemplative life.
References
Aristotle. “Nicomachean Ethics.” The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon. New York: The Modern Library, 2001, 935-1126.
———Politics. The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon. New York: The Modern Library, 2001, 1127-1324.
Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologiae. https://www.newadvent.org/summa/
Friend, Celeste. “Social Contract Theory,” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://iep.utm.edu/soc-cont/
Lord, Carnes. “Politics and Philosophy in Aristotle’s ‘Politics’.” Hermes, no. 106, 1978: 336-357. https://www.jstor.org/stable/4476065
Plato, “Crito.” The Internet Classics Archive. Translated by Benjamin Jowett . https://classics.mit.edu/Plato/crito.html
Francisco S. Pantaleon is currently an instructor in the University of Asia and the Pacific (UA&P), where he received his M.A. in Humanities. He specializes in the thought of Julián Marías.