The Aristotelian Alternative to Machiavelli’s Treatment of Faction

• In Event: Early Modern Responses to Socratic Political Philosophy

Abstract

The perennial struggle between society’s elites and the masses has, in the experience of Western liberal democracies, begun to rear its ugly head again. What seemed to be a struggle relegated to the dustbin of history has become, for many in America and across the West, the defining threat to internal political stability. Yet the basic framework underlying the tension between coastal elites and “middle America” is nothing new to the human experience. Indeed, our present factional or class conflict reminds us in a sense of Machiavelli’s formulation from Book One of the Discourses on Livy: “in every republic, there are two diverse humors, that of the people and that of the great, and that all the laws that are made in favor of freedom arise from their disunion” (D.I.4.16). In short, Machiavelli presents the power struggle between the people and the great as the most pressing domestic issue that any would-be prince or leader of a free republic must face. And indeed, for him, the best way forward for a free republic is not to resolve or eliminate factional conflict, but to supercharge it—to ensure that each of society’s classes remains strong enough (and fearful enough) to pose a threat to the other. This civil peace, of course, rests on a knife’s edge, though we in America today might be inclined to see nothing better, more sustainable, or more harmonious.

Yet if we turn our attention back to classical political philosophy, we can begin to see an alternative. In Aristotle’s Politics, neither the best regime simply nor the best practicable regime rests on a knife’s edge. On the contrary, they are both marked by their stability and internal peace. And when we consider that Aristotle too was live to the problem of faction—he devotes almost all of Book Five of the Politics to the topic—we begin to wonder how he could have arrived at such a vastly different conclusion from Machiavelli. Aristotle gives us a clue as to his distinctive approach with this reflection: “Factions originate, then, from small things and not about small things, but it is about great things that people start factions” (Politics V.5; 1203b17-19). So in turning back to classical political philosophy as a distinct alternative to Machiavelli and the early moderns, this paper seeks to address the following questions: What are these “big things” and “small things” to which Aristotle refers? Does Machiavelli observe these same causes of faction and does he agree on their status as big or small? What precisely is the difference between their diagnoses? In the end, this paper argues that the key difference between these two thinkers has to do with the relative emphases they place on justice. Whereas for Aristotle, justice is a big thing—if not the biggest thing—when it comes to factional conflict, Machiavelli hesitates to raise justice to the heights at which it sits in classical political philosophy. In doing so, I suggest he overlooks a key teaching of the ancients.

Author

• Evan Cree Gee, University of Texas, Austin