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position of radical relativism, he is unable to generate anything like a universal conception of
citizenship beyond some minimal commitment to “virtue,” however broadly defined.
In part as a response to historicism both in contemporary interpretations of Aristotle
and in political theory generally, a second group of naturalist Aristotelians argues for a return
to Aristotle’s project of exploring the universal and natural foundations of political
community. Here I have in mind especially Martha Nussbaum’s work.
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Naturalist
Aristotelians do not necessarily see nature (and our knowledge of it) as providing completely
certain or determinate rules for action; instead they see nature as providing a set of outside
limits or minimal thresholds for assessing the quality of individual human lives and regimes.
Nussbaum refers to Aristotelian foundations as “thick but vague”; I would say, in a similar
spirit, that they are strong but flexible.
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Naturalist Aristotelians build on at least four of Aristotle’s uses of the idea of nature,
or physis, in his political thought:
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•
First, Aristotle talks about nature as universal moral order. In Book V of the Ethics, for
example, Aristotle distinguishes between that which is just by nature and that which is
just by convention (or nomos). Just as fire burns the same way in Persia as in Athens,
natural justice is unwritten and is the same everywhere, (NE, 1134b18-1135a5). Aristotle
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See, for example, Martha Nussbaum, “Aristotelian Social Democracy,” Aristide Tessitore, ed.,
Aristotle and Modern Politics (University of Notre Dame Press: 2002), 47-85. Another important
naturalist Aristotelian is Stephen Salkever, Finding the Mean: Theory and Practice in Aristotelian Political
Philosophy (Princeton, 1990), and especially Salkever (1986). For a critical response to Nussbaum, see
Richard Mulgan, “Was Aristotle an ‘Aristotelian Social Democrat’?,” Ethics 111 (October 2000), 79-
101.
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Nussbaum (2002).
11
For a similar overview, see Ernest Barker, The Political Thought of Plato and Aristotle (Dover, 1959),
219-225.
Convention