Aristotle (384–322 BCE)

Aristotle was a Greek philosopher of Macedonian descent. His studies of physics, biology, psychology, metaphysics, logic, rhetoric, poetics, economics, and other subjects made him the most outstanding thinker of his age, if not of all time. His ideas about power, especially about political power, have influenced thinkers up to the present day.

In ontology, Aristotelian power is synonymous with potency, which has three aspects: as a source of change, as a capacity for performance, or as a condition making a thing unchangeable. His thinking on this matter was standard fare until the Enlightenment, when Thomas Hobbes rejected the latter two criteria and redefined the first, to see power only as the source of motion.

In psychology, Aristotle thought of power in terms of capacity for performance, defining, for example, talent in rhetoric as the power (dynamis) to discern what will be persuasive in each domain. Psychological powers can be active or passive, operative or receptive, and immediate or remote. Hobbes altered this definition, so that psychological power or faculty was a capacity to make or receive change.

Like his teacher, Plato, Aristotle took politics to be the most important subject in human life. The art of statecraft is the highest art because it affects the entire social environment, including every art practiced within it. As a subject matter, politics is the study of humans in groups, whereas ethics is the study of the individual in isolation. Only “a beast or a god” can actually live in isolation, and thus humans are social animals. They are also rational animals, and their rationality chooses ends from among possible ends and in doing so attempts to realize a share of human nature by choosing the best or the better from among any set of proposals. Political studies are the most important studies partly because they can improve the art of statecraft, and partly because they enable us to realize our natures as choosers of the better in the highest and weightiest affairs.

The only kind of state Aristotle discusses at length was the city-state or polis. Nation-states, that is, states having more than one population center, were too large for their members to be addressed by a single herald in a single assembly and, hence, were too large to be effectively governed. In addition, the population centers were bound to differ in their religious observances, leading to strife.

The polis is a natural result of human association. The basic unit of association is the family. Families associate together to form villages, and the polis results from the association of villages. Each association aims at achieving some end thought of as good, and thus, the polis is an [Page 31]association aiming at a good. This definition has always left open the question of whether Aristotle is more conventionalist or contractarian. It has also allowed his thinking to influence both schools. The fact that the chief goods for which the polis aims are self-sufficiency and stability—two cognates of power—allows his thinking to influence other theorists, such as Niccolò Machiavelli, who see the accumulation of power as the aim of the state.

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