The Ancients

The Ancients

Western political philosophy is a conversation about the best way to live a good life. The conversation began with the ancient political philosophers Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. In 1989, with the fall of the Soviet Union, it appeared that the conversation might be over, that the question of the good life had been answered—the good life was the life of liberal democratic capitalism enjoyed by the United States and the other developed nations (Fukuyama, 1992). Most people around the world seem to accept the justice of a democratic government and the goodness of a capitalist lifestyle. Still, one must wonder whether other people at other times also thought that their style of government was just and that the life they were living was the good life.

In the movie Conan the Barbarian, Conan is asked, “What is best in life?” He responds, “To crush your enemies, see them driven before you … and to hear the lamentation of their women.” How can we be sure that we are right and Conan is wrong? We judge Conan to be wrong because we can look at his society from the outside, from the perspective of our society. To judge most things, it is helpful to get some distance from them—if you zoom out on Google Maps, you can often find your way much easier than you can if you view something at very close range. This is the single most important reason to study ancient political philosophy; it gives us some distance and perspective on our own society. It asks the same kinds of questions, but often has radically different answers.

This distance is, unfortunately, also a small obstacle facing the student of ancient philosophy. The ancients did not write in English; they wrote in ancient Greek or Latin. Most students (and frankly, most professors) do not read ancient Greek and Latin, so we have to rely on translations by other people, but how can we be sure that they are translating the work correctly? If you ever played the game in which you sit in a circle and whisper a sentence from one person to another, you know that meaning is often lost in translation. We will return to this problem below because it relates to a major area of contention within the field.

A second minor difficulty in understanding the ancients is that the words they use are both familiar and strange. When you read Shakespeare in high school, you discovered that even though he wrote in English, it is often not clear what he means. Often words that we use today were used in a different sense, or in a number of different senses, in the past. The same thing is true in Plato (trans. 1991) and Aristotle (trans. 1984): Many of the words they used are familiar to us because they often form the root of words we use today, but they do not mean the same thing. For example, the word polis, which is the root of the modern word politics, refers to the city-state. Greek society was generally organized around a small metropolitan area, or city-state, that encompassed about 100,000 to 150,000 people and the farmland necessary for their support (Barker, 1960). One of the key [Page 554]elements of the city-state is that it was self-sufficient—it had everything that a person needed in order to live a good life. When Aristotle argues that man is the political animal, he means that we can become fully human only within a polis.

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