American Political Science Review

Vol. 106, No. 2

May 2012

doi:10.1017/S0003055412000184

Between Polis and Empire: Aristotles Politics

MARY G. DIETZ
Northwestern University
ristotle lived during a period of unprecedented imperial expansionism initiated by the kings of Macedon, but most contemporary political theorists conne his political theorizing to the classical Greek city-state. For many, Aristotles thought exhibits a parochial Hellenocentric binary logic that privileges Greeks over non-Greeks and betrays a xenophobic suspicion of aliens and foreigners. In response to these standard polis-centric views, I conjure a different perceptual eldbetween polis and empirewithin which to interpret Aristotles Politics. Both theorist and text appear deeply attentive to making present immediate things coming to be and passing away in the Hellenic world. Moreover, between polis and empire, we can see the Politics actually disturbing various hegemonic Greek binary oppositions (Greek/barbarian; citizen/alien; center/periphery), not reinforcing them. Understanding the Politics within the context of the transience of the polis invites a new way of reading Aristotle while at the same time providing new possibilities for theorizing problems of postnational citizenship, transnational politics, and empire.

It is a mark of items susceptible of destruction that their removal from the perceptual eld renders them obscure to those that have cognition of them. Aristotle, Metaphysics VII.15, 1040a1

mpire is an idea whose time has come in political theory. Whatever our hopes for its concrete signicance for particular theorizations, empire appears in a multitude of guises in the eld: standing as a grand pronunciamento for purposes of advancing insurrection (Eisenstein 2004; Hardt and Negri 2000), soberly positioned as part of an ensemble of threats to cosmopolitan norms and international law (Benhabib 2009; Cohen 2004), coupled with questions of the West and its other in the age of identity (Brown 2006, 177), and lurking behind naturalized theories of global community and world order (Moreeld 2005). With equivalent impact the contemporary turn to empire has also materialized in historical studies of early and late modern European thought, exposing blind

Mary G. Dietz is John Evans Professor of Political Theory, Department of Political Science and Gender and Sexuality Studies Program, Northwestern University, 303 Scott Hall/601 University Place, Evanston, IL 60208 (m-dietz@northwestern.edu). I am grateful to the co-editors, especially Kirstie McClure and Ron Rogowski, and also the APSRs anonymous reviewers for their seriously engaged and challenging commentaries on earlier versions of this article. Various drafts have beneted enormously from my conversations with faculty and graduate students in workshops and colloquia in Political Theory at Ohio State University, the University of Michigan, Northwestern University, Indiana University, the University of Chicago, and Duke University. I acknowledge particularly the always timely, sharp, and friendly critiques of the graduate students in political theory at the University of Minnesota. Demetra Kasimis deserves much credit for research assistance. To my colleagues Danielle Allen, Clifford Ando, Terence Ball, Norman Dahl, Peter Euben, Jill Frank, Penny Gill, Don Herzog, Bonnie Honig, Sara Monoson, Arlene Saxonhouse, Joan Tronto, and Linda Zerilli, I owe a special debt of thanks. Last but not least, I extend gratitude to James Farr for his close and enduring attention to my work. 1 Translations from Aristotles Politics rely heavily on Lord (1984), occasionally on Barker ([1962] 1978), and also on Jowett (1988) and Reeve (1998). I use Lawson-Tancred (1998) for the Metaphysics, Joachim (2001) for On Generation and Corruption, and Hope (1961) for the Physics.

spots or incisive moments (Pitts 2005, 5; see also Muthu 2003), subterranean strategies of exclusion (Mehta 1997, 59), and hegemonic visions of global order (Bell 2007, 1) that have hitherto gone unnoticed in the writings of Machiavelli, Locke, Burke, Smith, Constant, Bentham, the two Mills, and Tocqueville. Political theorists have devoted considerably less energy, however, to exploring transitions to empire (Wallace and Harris 1996) in Greek political theory, at least beyond Thucydides masterful account of Athenian imperial ascendancy and destruction through the course of the Peloponnesian War. From that Thucydidean point of departure, political theory tends to skip over both Plato and Aristotle, shifting its sights from its starting point in classical fth-century Greece and jumping right over to republican imperial Rome. The general dearth of political theoretical attention to empire and related themes in the dialogues of Plato (429347 BCE) is striking.2 Yet even more striking is the absence of engagement with Aristotle (384322 BCE), who lived during a period of unprecedented imperial expansionism in and beyond the Hellenic world, beginning with Philip II of Macedons defeat of the Greek city-states at Chaeronea (388), extending through Alexander IIIs s victory over Persia at Gaugamela (331), and ending with the kings sudden death nine years later in Babylon (322). Although the conuence between the later years of Aristotles life (338322) and Alexanders spear-won world empire (334323) does not go unnoticed by political theorists of a biographical and historical bent, Aristotles Politics remains a dead zone for scholars exploring canonical texts relevant to questions of empire. The assumption that the Politics is irrelevant to both historical and political theorizations of empire, no matter how broadly conceived, is well entrenched in the eld, nding support in claims that launch charges of parochialism against Aristotle himself. Thus, as Taylor (1955, 9) observes, For all that Aristotle tells us, Alexander might never have existed and the small city-state might
2 For some important exceptions see Allen (2010) and Nichols (2007).

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have been the last word of Hellenic political development. Contemporary Aristotle scholars nearly unanimously subscribe to this less than charitable verdict (see Barker 1959; Barnes 1995; Bradley 1991; Everson 1988; Finley 1977; Gomme 1937; Kraut 2002; Lloyd 1968; Morrall 1977; Popper 1962; Wolin [1960] 2004). From comments regarding Aristotles political shortsightedness, it is a short step to thinking that the Politics just at out fails to comprehend the transformation of vast geopolitical terrains (Hansen 1996, 206); emergent military monarchy and federal government (Bradley 1991, 13); shifting alliances and struggles between different cities (Kraut 2002, 89); increases in structural differentiation (Holmes 1979, 127); or any of the appurtenances of imperialism, globalization, and interstate relations (Euben 2001; Wolin [1960] 2004).3 Whatever their differences in interests and emphasis, these assessments conspire toward a political theoretical conclusion that exacts a toll on the interpretive possibilities open to view: Under the diminutive shadow of the Greek city-state, Aristotelian political theory cannot grasp the realities of Macedonian imperialism, much less understand the transience of the polis partly because, as Alasdair MacIntyre (1981, 149) puts it, [Aristotle] had little or no understanding of historicity in general. The polis-centric perspective that comprises this dominant view holds generally to the notion that Aristotelian political theory is exclusively and parochially concerned with the city-state as political community. Accordingly, the political criteria that interest Aristotle are read as those pertaining to the polis as either an abstract imaginative ideal or a practicable best standard for human political association. Having settled Aristotle into these self-contained environs, the polis-centric account produces two different but sometimes related evaluations. The rst forwards the still operative (if considerably attenuated) Hegelian position that Aristotelian theory manifests the nal form of the Greek city-state where man as a political an imal (zoon politikon) is actualized as a goal of perfection (Barker 1959, 208; Schmitt-Pantel 1999, 208; also Bradley 1991; Hansen 1996; Lloyd 1968; Ryder 2003; Stalley 1995). In this evaluative vein, Aristotle as theorist represents the expressive unity of the Greek polis as a kind of effortless and undivided Sittlichkeit (Taylor 1977, 378) embodying the good life realized as citizenship and offering a welcome source for those who seek an ancestry for exhortations to civic virtue (Saxonhouse 2004, 40).4 The second evaluation exacts a
3 Jaeger (1934), Kelsen (1977), Lord (1982), Ober (1998), Polansky (1991), Strauss (1991), and Yack (1993) nd Aristotle attentive to Macedonian imperialism, but do not view the Politics in its entirety as bearing immediately on events in the late fourth century. Others concede that Aristotle was intimately connected to Macedonian power and aware of the imminent collapse of the Greek poleis, yet oblivious to the imperial context as a political theorist (Holmes 1979; Kraut 2002, 7; also Arendt 2005; Barker 1959; Barnes 1982; Bradley 1991; Euben 2001; Lloyd 1968; Schmitt-Pantel 1990). Strauss (1964, 45, 30, 49) identies the polis or regime (not the Greek citystate) as Aristotles primary focus while maintaining that his highest theme is philosophical contemplation. 4 Saxonhouse (1983; 2004) herself is interested in investigating Aristotle as a source for understanding the political dynamics of corrup-

harsher verdict on Aristotles politics, nding them and him (despite other contributions of great signicance) conventionally Greek chauvinist in their acceptance of cultural prejudices allegedly promulgated in the service of an exclusionary, racist, sexist, elitist, slave-owning political status quo (Arendt 1958; Green 1991; Hall 1989; Lloyd 1968; MacIntyre 1981; Mill [1869] 1989; Mulgan 1977; 2000; Nussbaum 1998; 2000; Okin 1979; Popper 1962; Schoeld 1999; Williams 1993). Unlike Aeschylus, Herodotus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Plato, whose writings have encouraged new endeavors among contemporary scholars attuned to the alterity of the other, Aristotle is persistently marked as exhibiting an unashamed Hellenocentric blindness that writes off non-Greeks, barbarians, and slaves, thereby manifesting an imperial binary logic that can even be coded as anticipating the hegemonic discourse of the West (MacIntyre 1981, 149; Spanos 2000, 75). As indispensable to Aristotle studies as the often dazzling polis-centric accounts are, my aim in this article is to counter the dreamscape scenario that tethers Aristotle exclusively to what Foucault (1988, 82) calls the great nostalgic gure of the classical Greek city-state. To thwart the polis-centric temptation that pulls us toward archeological reverie, I want to create a different sort of perceptual eldbetween polis and empirefor purposes of interpreting Aristotle. This eld perceptually shifts the city-state off center stage while at the same time recuperating it within an interpretive frame attentive to the politics of Aristotles present rather than transxed by a symbolic remnant of the imagined past. Granted, the phrase between polis and empire is no less an abstraction than the polis, yet interpretively it departs from the polis-centric approach in three important respects. First, between polis and empire captures a historical outlook on the Hellenistic world loosely alert to the geopolitical events that transpire during Aristotles life (384322 BCE), a passage of time that underscores his remoteness from the Periclean Age of Athens (461429 BCE) while reinforcing his nearness to the shattering of Athenian democracy and the period of Macedonian rule.5 Second, this perceptual eld carries with it an ontological outlook that draws on Aristotles philosophy of movement (kin esis) by emphasizing change (metabol e), potentiality (dunamis), and possibility (endechomenon), elements that are generally missing from the poliscentric perspective on Aristotelian political thought. Finally, instead of starting from a place that has Aristotle stuck in the rearguard of an advancing march from polis to empire, between polis and empire locates his thinking in medias res, immersed in a kinesthetic eld

tion, instability, and power, not as an avatar of Hellenocentrism or an exemplar of the expressive unity of the Greek city-state. 5 duBois (2010, 76), remarking on Aristotles distance from the great age of Greek tragedy, notes that a gap of 50, 70, or even 100 years in the ancient world may not seem signicant from the purchase of the present, given the principle that the more remote things are from us, the closer they seem to each other. Yet for any textual interpretive account even vaguely attuned to historical context these intervals make all the difference.

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of geopolitics and sovereign power. Accordingly, from a perspective that reads Aristotles political thought in the midst of things, polis and empire are not categories of analysis, but rather generative political formationsless akin to dueling conceptual formalisms than to two ropes intertwined in knots of alternately tensing and relaxing struggles and associations, subject to Aristotles formidable powers of observation. As an interpretive schema, then, between polis and empire stays true to the conviction that authorial biographical and historical context can help illuminate the meaning of a text. At the same time, however, my interpretation of the Politics is not driven primarily by a concern for ascertaining authorial intention, however important in certain instances that may be. In deploying between polis and empire as an interpretive frame, I also want to hold to the notion that the quest for meaning and signicance in a text does not have to (nor should it) become solely a quest for the meaning intended by the author.6 This is not to claim that the ascertaining of authorial intention is always beyond our reach, but rather to recognize that complex texts always contain a surplus of meaning or residue that exceeds both the literal interpretation and the intention of the author (Ricoeur 1976, 55). In keeping with this insight about the plurivocity of texts and their proclivities toward profusion, my aim in interpreting Aristotles Politics is not only to stay alert to the authors intention but also to conjure unfamiliar things from the text and create gures of the newly thinkable (Castoriadis 2007). Perhaps the latter may also allow us to shed some light on the limits of the poliscentric textual reality within which Aristotles Politics is currently inscribed. The article sets off by challenging the polis-centric picture of Aristotle as chauvinistically Greek, positioning him ambiguously dualizing between the territorial and political identications that mark Greece/Macedon, Greek/barbarian, and citizen/slave. Conjuring an equivocal gure, a man in the middle, begins the task of destabilizing interpretations of Aristotle that rely on oppositional (either/or) constructions. The second part of the article continues in this vein, starting with the notion that Aristotles thinking is deeply informed by a kinetic disposition attuned to the coming to be and passing away of worldly things. Approaching the Politics as ontologically attuned to ephemerality and change introduces a perspective on imperial politics in the Hellenistic world that breaks the ties binding Aristotle to the polis as a symbolic ideal and stationary formation. The third part puts further pressure on the polis-centric view by making the remote come near to dismantle a series of binary structures that support interpretations of Aristotles Politics as hegemonically and parochially Greek. My aim is to draw from the text contrarian elements of heuristic value and interpretive potential that point
6 See Herzog (1989, 2527), McClure (1996, 1922), and Skinner (2008, 64950) for instructive reections on interpreting texts beyond the authors intention approach while at the same time remaining attentive to historical and intellectual context.

us toward postpolis-centric Aristotle studies as well as contemporary problems of interest in theorizing global politics. The nal section moves provisionally in the contemporary direction by bringing my reading of Aristotle between polis and empire to bear on three intersecting topics in global democratic theory: postnational citizenship, transnational governance, and empire.

MAN IN THE MIDDLE

A [neutral] arbiter always gives the best ground for condence; and the man in the middle is such an arbitrator. Aristotle, Politics IV. 12, 1296b

To begin moving Aristotles politics between polis and empire, I draw on two concepts of his own innovation (one now familiar, one still a bit strange) and apply them to his own situation in the late-fourth-century Hellenic world. The concepts place (topos) and dualizers (epamphoterizein) touch on two of Aristotles primary intellectual concerns, respectively: what it is for something to be somewhere (where-questions) and how it is that certain things appear as mixed or intermediate cases between substantial and opposing kinds (what-questions). Without suggesting that Aristotle intended to apply these concepts and concerns reexively to himself, I nevertheless want to appropriate them to challenge the polis-centric picture of a gure conventionally (even hegemonically) Greek in his territorial and political identications. The concepts of place and dualizers allow me to problematize the questions Where is Aristotle? and What is Aristotle? in such a way as to see the inadequacy of the answers Greece and Greek. This schema also enables us to see how determining Aristotles location is suited to an interpretive maneuver that he himself deploys when faced with troublesome topics: When in doubt, appeal to ambiguity. Where is Aristotle? If the answer to where-questions predicates where something is, then the things specied in these answers might reasonably be considered places (Morison 2002, 4). In the Categories, Aristotle offers geographical examples of expressions that signify place, implying that for places to exist is for them to be occupied by other things (Cat. 4, 2a12, cited in Morison 2002, 45 [note15]). As Benjamin Morison suggests in drawing on Aristotles two examples of receptive containment (2002, 57), [t]he Lyceum and the agora are rather like Francethey are spaces or intervals between given frontiers. Building on this insight, perhaps we can inquire after the spaces or intervals between given frontiers that constitute Aristotles own geographic place(s) of receptive containment to see how closely they map ontoor are suitably contained bythe predication Greece. To start with Aristotles birthplace, a colonial outpost called Stagira, is already to nd him quite literally in a space between given frontiers, located on the Macedonian peninsula in northern Greece, at least 100 kilometers

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from Pella, the capital of Macedon, and 200 kilometers from Athens. The political nature of Stagiras place is equally ambiguous. Mogens H. Hansen (1995, 75) describes it as the borderland between city-state and municipality, an entity that transgresses conventional (oppositional) principles of territorial identication, bearing characteristics of both an independent entity e) associ(polis) in Hellas and a dependent entity (kom ated with barbarian habitations in Macedon. Although in the Physics Aristotle remarks that places of receptive containment need to be treated as though immobile to satisfy the requirement that something moving from place to place must change place (cited in Morison 2002, 16263), this does not mean that these receptive containers cannot be destroyed by occurrences of, say, nature or human events. Stagira is an example of the latter: Suspected of insurrectionary activities in league with the Chalcidic enclaves of the north, the town is obliterated by Philips Macedonian army in the year 348, its inhabitants sent into exile or sold into slavery. Yet receptive containers can be reconstructed by human actors too. Stagira is a case in point again: Rebuilt by Alexander, its repopulation is the fulllment of a promise that Philip made to Aristotle, on condition that the philosopher leave Athens and return to Macedon to tutor the kings son.7 Stagiras second life nds it a less ambiguously constituted entity: It returns as a e where the inhabitants do not enjoy citizenship, kom but rather live as subjects of the Macedonian king. Now, following Aristotle, one might well say that places like Stagira are one thing, but that the political animals who occupy them are quite another; the latter may exhibit no peculiar ambiguities of their own, notwithstanding the equivocity of the spaces they inhabit. On this score, too, however, matters with Aristotle are equivocal. His parents, Nicomachus and Phaestis, are Ionian (Greek) in origin and speak a dialect that marks them as such. Yet by nationality where place becomes signicant againthe familys material fortunes are secured through Nicomachuss personal service as Asclepiad (physician) in the court of the Argead King Amyntas III in Macedon. There is no real evidence to suggest that Aristotles father (who died when Aristotle was young) has any closer territorial or political relationship of identication to Greece than to Stagira, the borderland town where he maintains a house, or to the royal court in Macedon.8 To answer the question where is Aristotle? with regard to territorial and familial identications is to seek clarity in a formulation that must, on pain of misrepresentation, locate him in a place that is intermediate to given frontiers: between Greece and Macedon and
7 The story of Stagiras rebuilding may be apocryphal, although the one about Aristotle tutoring Alexander (343?) is generally accepted as true (see Barker [1962] 1978; Barnes 1995; Green 1991; Jaeger 1934; Lloyd 1968; Plutarch 1973, 260); but not by Chroust (1973). 8 It is uncertain whether Aristotle ever lived at court in Pella (Jaeger 1934, 121; Kennedy 1991; Taylor 1955) or went directly from Stagira to Athens (Barker 1959; Everson 1988; Reeve 1998). After his fathers death he may have been educated by tutors in Macedon (Lawson-Tancred 1998, xxii) or by an uncle, Proxenus, in Stagira (Reeve 1998, xvii).

between subject and citizen as a resident of Stagira. The middling construction becomes no less indeterminate when we consider Athens, where Aristotle arrives for the rst time in 367 to study in Platos Academy and to which he returns in 335/4 (after a hiatus east to Assos in 348/5 where he is befriended by the tyrant Hermias) to found the Peripatetic School in a municipal gymnasium known as the Lyceum. Reecting on his travels between his two places of location, Aristotle tries a joke: I went from Athens to Stagira because of the Great King and from Stagira to Athens because of the great cold (letter to Antipater, cited in Jaeger 1934, 311). Places are not one of the four causes for Aristotle, but they do have some sort of power (dunamis) insofar as they make a difference to the world, entering into an account of why the world is as it is (Morison 2002, 50). Places feature robustly in the Physics in the denition of the elements (e.g., explaining why re goes up in the air). Places also appear in the Categories where they are, as we have noted, instances of geographical predication and also things that are occupied, as Aristotle conrms with two instructive if not close-tohome examples: the Lyceum and the agora of Athens (Cat. 4, 2a12, cited in Morison 2002, 4 [note 15]). Locating Aristotle himself in the Lyceum in Athens where he founded the Peripatetic School (335/4 BCE), we nd him occupying an ambiguous place inside the city but outside its walls. The Politics itself is a product of lectures given in an institution supported by public government funding, but primarily populated by noncitizens and foreigners.9 Adapting a remark that Aristotle applies to those who have put forward views about constitutional matters for certain foreigners, the occupiers of the Lyceum, unlike the members of the Academy, [do] not participate in political actions of any sort, but [lead] entirely private lives (Pol. II.12, 1273b). If we shift the predication of where Aristotle is from his position in the Lyceum to the Athenian agora (or marketplace), then ambiguities surrounding what he is begin to appear. In Athens among Athenians, he is viewed as Macedonian and hence classied as a foreigner (xenos), if not (because of his lineage) a barbarian (barbaros). A friendship with the Macedonian general Antipater, Alexanders viceroy in supreme command over Macedon and Greece, places him under constant suspicion. Not by chance, then, is he driven from Athens twice, on both occasions during events linked to anti-Macedonian uprisings.10 The
9 According to Jaeger (1934) Aristotle composes (lectures) most of Politics Books IVIII at the Peripatetic School (334323) during a time of anti-Macedonian ferment in Athens while Alexanders viceroy Antipater is overseeing the city. References in the text to Pausanias assassination of Philip II in 336 (Pol. V. 10, 1311a39 1311b22) and two other remarks pertaining to Macedonian occupation (Pol. II. 9, 1270b713) and Spartan foreign affairs in 333 (Pol. II. 10,1272b1922; Ober 1998, 291) corroborate Jaegers dating of the text; but see Lord (1981) for some disagreements. 10 Chroust (1967, 40, 42) describes Athens in the late fourth century as harboring a paranoiac distrust of everyone, especially persons who had recently come to Athens from Macedonia. Allen (2010) offers a thoughtful analysis of the culture war among antiMacedonian Athenians politicians during this period.

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second time, after news of Alexanders death, gives rise to his famously stated intention to save the Athenians from sinning twice against philosophy (Edel 1982, 84), which he writes in a letter to Antipater (perhaps a tongue-in-cheek remark from one Macedonian to another?). To place Aristotle in Athens is not just to see him as a foreigner passing through, however, but also to notice another dening feature of his intermittent habitation in the city as a resident alien (metoikos). Designated as such a gure, Aristotle occupies an unstable category between two mutually exclusive substantial political kinds: Unlike the slave he is granted access to the agora, yet unlike the citizen he is denied political capacity in the assembly.11 Between citizen and slave, marked as metic and a foreigner allied to Macedon, with all the vulnerabilities this what-ness implies, Aristotle remarks on the obvious to Antipater (no jokes this time), At Athens, things which are proper for a citizen are not proper for an alien . . . it is dangerous for [an alien] to live in Athens (letter, quoted in Chroust 1967, 40 n.2).12 What is Aristotle? Aristotle thinks that answers to what-questions predicate things that might reasonably be specied in terms of substantial and clearly distinguishable kinds. In the History of Animals (HA), the Parts of Animals (PA), and other zoological studies, he relies on classicatory expressions of just this sort to differentiate not only between plants and animals but also between different if not completely unambiguous animal kinds (HA VIII.2, cited in Granger 1985, 194). Yet as he also allows (on pain of denying the tribute that theory must pay to observation), the urge to x borders between dichotomized kinds like terrestrial and aquatic is confounded on a fairly regular basis by creatures throughout the animal (and plant) kingdom that overlap between groups, constituting mixed or intermediate cases that blur bound11 Metics in Athens were banned from taking an active part in the religious, civic, and political affairs of the city; barred from owning property or building a house (they could lease land with special dispensation); and potentially subject to enslavement for particular offenses, including false claims to citizenship. Unlike slaves, they were liable to taxation and military service, but also had access to courts and to the agora as merchants, educators, and purveyors of crafts (see Miller 1995; Nussbaum 1986; Whitehead 1975). 12 Aristotles friendship with Antipater seems undisputed although, as Lord (1982, 195) observes, it is hazardous to conclude anything denitive about his political sympathies with the Macedonians from biographical sources; thus there are disparate views. For arguments concerning Aristotles detachment from imperial foreign affairs see Gomme (1937) and Taylor (1995); for his active engagement see Ober (1998). Everson (1988), Jaeger (1934), Kelson (1977), Randall (1960), and Ober (1998) nd the Politics sympathetic to the Macedonian kings or at least not in opposition to expansionism. On the Peripatetic Schools hostility to Macedon, see Barnes (1982), Von Wilamowitz-Mollendorf (cited in Barker 1959), Brunt (1993), and Miller (1995); whereas Barker ([1962] 1978) and Merlan (1954 55) note common interests between the school and Antipater in the early years. For a view of Aristotle as pro-Macedonian in his partisan afliations, see Popper (1971) and Strauss (1991), whereas Lord (1982) suggests sympathy to Philip but not Alexanders policy. Barker ([1962] 1978, xixxxiii) argues that the execution of Aristotles nephew Callisthenes, Alexanders court historian and propagandist, provokes revulsion in the Lyceum leading to a tradition that ascribes the kings accomplishments to chance.

aries. Whether by dint of the vagaries of nature or the imperatives of the process of classication itself, these dualizers refuse to comply with the binary logic of categorization dear to the Academicians whose penchant for crude schematizing, Aristotle insists, fails to mark out the differentiae that cut across and therefore trouble otherwise opposing divisions (see PA 643b1ff, cited in Lloyd 1996, 72). Take the cetaceansmammals like dolphins, porpoises, and whales that are suited to aquatic life. They dualize in a sense (but not an unqualied sense), perhaps through an ambiguity in the classicatory terms aquatic and terrestrial themselves (Granger 1985, 199). Seals are a puzzle: They belong to both and neither (but in different respects) of the kinds they dualize between, in one sense terrestrial and not aquatic and in another aquatic and not terrestrial. In any sense (at least in Aristotles learned view), they are deformed quadrupeds (PA 657a22f, cited in Lloyd 1996, 81). The ostrich dualizes between the quadruped and the bird; the water-newt has gills, yet is footed (Granger 1985, 190). Human beings dualize as well, in ways that bear upon their lives, dispositions, and characters; they are both solitary and gregarious for example (HA 488a, cited in Granger 1985, 190). These examples support a position that Aristotle emphatically embraces: Logical classications are possible and one can in fact x borders between substantial kinds. Yet when certain things appear to partake of incompatible divisions, they can be said to do so through an ambiguity that in effect dualizes, equivocates, admits a double sense, or plays a double game.13 Undeniably, the appeal to ambiguity is an inherent feature of Aristotelian thought, at least when explaining things like seals or ostriches, both of which apparently cross over substantial kinds. Yet ambiguity seems to be at issue when it comes to locating Aristotle himself.. We have already seen him partaking (territorially) of Greece and Macedon and overlapping (politically) elements of citizen and slave refusing settlement along just one side and dualizing across substantial kinds. Leaving aside the question of Aristotles disposition and character (the middle in the man?), we might nonetheless complicate the question of Aristotles life by dualizing him both as a where and a what. To do this is to construct a subject whose location admits of a dual sense: equivocating between Greece and Macedon, playing a double game in Athens, arbitrating the boundaries between Greek and barbarian, negotiating the uncertainties of an identity positioned between citizen and slave. On all of these counts we arrive at a gure newly thinkable and strange, a man in the middle who disrupts by calling into question the strategies of foreclosure toward Greece and Greek that capture and constrain the polis-centric view.
13 Dualize and dualizers are A. L. Pecks translations of Aristotles word for the ambiguous case that straddles two normally distinct groups. As Granger (1985, 188, 199) points out in his invaluable discussion, the verb form of dualize is capacious enough to accommodate several related meanings, including to play a double game; stand neutral; to halt between two opinions; to equivocate; to admit a double sense.

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COMING TO BE AND PASSING AWAY

When we have no sense of change or are inattentive to any change, we have no sense of the passing of time. We are in this respect like the people in the legend who, on awakening out of their long sleep in the presence of the heroes in Sardinia, link the earlier with the later time into a unied present, in disregard of the interval to which they have been insensible. Aristotle, Physics IV.11, 218b

To move from Aristotles politics to Aristotles Politics is to confront directly one of the more obdurate aspects of the polis-centric view. This is the claim that Aristotelian political theory is (unambiguously) sealed to the classical city-state, somewhat like (to borrow Nietzsches phrase; [1878] 1995, 209) an insect in amber. The difculty that meets us here is not the emphasis that the standard view places on the city-state (I do not underestimate its importance as a matter of inquiry for Aristotle), but rather how the polis is placed for him as an entity worthy of regard. The timeless xity of that entity is the planted assumption behind the frequent assertion that Aristotle writes as though Greek civilization is not something transitory (Bradley 1991, 13), with no cognition of a transitional phase between the decline of the polis and the appearance of Macedonian world monarchy (Wolin [1960] 2004, 67; see also MacIntyre 1981). To challenge the claim that Aristotle has no sense of the transitional, the transitory, or the emergent, there is no better recourse than to Aristotelian theory itself, particularly those writings that bring teleology and temporality together under the notion of coming to be and passing away. This formulation encompasses a fundamental aspect of Aristotelian ontology frequently articulated in the Physics and Metaphysics: the condition of things in motion (kin esis).14 Built into the kinetic proclivities of (almost) everything in the universe,15 Aristotle contends, is the very idea of change (metabol e) or the actualizing of potential being as such (Phys. 201ab) as the dynamic teleological unfolding of the potentialities or readinesses in a situation (Edel 1982, 83). An ontological orientation toward the actualizing of potentiality, with its roots in the general idea of power and the logical notion of the possible, beckons us toward the shape of things to come, all set and ready to go in the constitution of
14 Aristotle (Phys. III.1, 200b201a; Meta. XI.12) distinguishes four main kinds of change in (1) the coming to be and passing away of substances; (2) quality (e.g., when something changes color); (3) place (via motion); and (4) quantity or size (in growth and diminution). According to Sorabji (1979, 168; also Barnes 1982), whom I follow, all four kinds of change involve a gradual process of transition. 15 On the Heavens and the Metaphysics allow for the presence of Unmoved Movers, including xed stars in the heavens that are orderly, eternal, and unchanging; however, Lloyd (1996, 183) suggests that Aristotle is a star-struck lover often out of his depth on matters of astronomy. There is no ontological indeterminacy in Aristotles concept of forms, but this does not preclude nding modes of ontological indeterminacy of an uncontroversial kind in his thought with regard to matter (hul e) (68).

the present (83). Coming to be and passing away does not point toward actuality as the nal form of something; it indicates the process of change and the activity (energeia) through which the potentiality of something (or the being able to be)16 is becoming an actuality. What should we make of this something that, as Jonathan Lear (1988, 60) says, exists before the change which has the potentiality to become what emerges in the change? The ontological import of this insight for my purposes here has less to do with the fact that something is coming to be than with the fact that something is coming to be (Jaeger 1934, 384): Something normative is making its way into existence (or not) and is subject to processes of change. Aristotle adds to this focus on something (or the being able to be) in this much discussed observation in the Metaphysics:
[S]omething with a potentiality for being admits both of being and of not being, so that the same thing has a potentiality both for being and for not being. And conversely what has a potentiality for not being admits of not being. But whatever admits of not being is perishable either simpliciter or under the aspect relative to which it is said to admit of not being, whether in terms of place, of quantity or of quality. (IX.8, 1050b)

Whether or not this passage embodies the cardinal point on which Aristotles entire theory of dunamis turns, as Giorgio Agamben (1998, 45) argues, we might nonetheless conrm through it Aristotles emphasis on the role that indeterminacy plays in a moment of pure potentiality (dunamis). A certain something may (or may not be) actualized, may be (or do) or not be (or do), may be afrmed or negated, may come to fulllment or perish. To paraphrase Stephen Clark (1975, 128), a something or entity is, for Aristotle, a dynamic concept which yet admits the possibility that the entity will fail to become what it is, either without ambiguity or relative to some aspect of change. To translate this idea into Agambens (1998, 45) idiom is to recognize that if potentiality is to have its own consistency and not disappear immediately into actuality, it is necessary that potentiality be able not to pass over into actuality, that potentiality constitutively be the potentiality not to (do or be). Or, to go with Clarks (1975, 128) pithier formulation, Accidents happen, failure to realize being happens: we may not achieve the completion which is truly available to us. What happens once we bring this ensemble of ontological insights to the activity of interpreting Aristotles Politics between polis and empire and against the polis-centric grain? To go this route is to begin by resisting the temptation to conceptualize the polis as a complete (rather than partial) actualization and move instead toward an outlook that embraces becoming (hence potentiality) in terms that envision it as a something immersed in a relation to worldly processes of coming to be and
16 I thank Danielle Allen for clarifying the translation of something for me.

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passing away. This outlook, as we have seen, privileges the thought of a dynamic eld of things unfolding where, as Aristotle puts it, generation is contrary to destruction, as the loss of something is contrary to its acquisition (Phys. V.5, 229b). Accordingly, by virtue of this worldly in a relation to, the polis can be apprehended from a position that has it subject to uctuations, susceptible to stress, and vulnerable to destruction. The notion of the transitory is embedded in these very Aristotelian formulations. Moreover, because all things that come into being and pass away do so in time (Phys. IV.13, 222b), we can theorize the polis temporally, at the point of transition or common boundary that Aristotle describes as marking the beginning of the future and the end of the past (Phys. IV.12, 222a). In the course of introducing these ontological elements to Aristotles Politics, I clearly do not want to lose sight of the equally Aristotelian notion of the polis as a human creation that belongs to nomos and not to physis. The activity of constituting the polis denes the norm of development to which humans aspire as citizens, and it is only because humans have the capacity to form such associations that the polis is formed. Yet insofar as the polis is also a sublunary something, it therefore by nature admits of the possibility that it will fail to actualize its potentiality or become what it is. Change can make a city worse and nally no city at all (Pol. V.9, 1309b). Subject to the kinetic proclivities of the universe, as are all sublunary things, the polis belongs to physis and not to nomos. Or perhaps in the manner to which we have become accustomed, it is better to think of the polis (unlike, say, stars, or planets, or galaxies) as between physis and nomos.17 In sum, with its emphasis on a process of transition that can be queried in time by marking the signicance of change, Aristotles ontology can help us get out from under the notion that he is incapable of theorizing the polis in terms that locate it in the present, see it in transition, and render it vulnerable to change. To deliver more emphatically on that claim, I now want to move the polis from the realm of abstraction to the palpably explosive political terrain out of which Aristotles Politics emerges in the Hellenistic world of the late fourth century BCE. As we have seen, the poliscentric view tends to nd both the author and the text oblivious to the full impact of a politically decaying society (Arendt 2005, 6) that surrounds them. What I propose against this view is an interpretation that reads the Politics in the midst of things, wholly present in time, alert to discord, the politics of conquest, and the struggles for power among Macedonian kings and Greek city-states. From this vantage point, situated at that common boundary that marks the beginning of the future and the end of the past, it seems appropriate to engage the Politics itself in medias res, at a decisively important moment of transition in Book III, where Aristotle turns toward the investigation of kingship. The investigation hinges on the question of whether it
17

is advantageous for the city or the territory that is to be well administered to be under a kingship or not (Pol. III.14, 1284b). With this question Aristotle brings to light two emergent properties that deserve closer scrutiny, because they bear directly on the decline of the polis and the appearance of imperial Macedonian monarchy in the Hellenistic world. The rst political phenomenon or emergent property appears as an afterthought, following Aristotles discussion of the four types of kingship. Having summarized these four types, Aristotle appears to head for a conclusion (Pol. III.14,1285b) but then (seemingly from out of the blue) there arrives a caveat attached to a fth type of kingship (Pol. III.14, 1285b). This fth type is described as an absolute type of sovereignty concerned with a king who does everything at his own discretion, and it is given a name: pambasileia (Pol. III.16 1287a).18 Pambasileia points to a form of rule like no other, which Aristotle tentatively categorizes as an overarching and hitherto unprecedented absolute type of kingship where a single person is sovereign on every issue and governs at his own discretion over the whole population (Pol. III.14, 1285b; III.16, 1287a). It corresponds to paternal rule over a household and thus may be regarded as household government exercised over a city, or a tribe, or a collection of tribes (Pol. III.14, 1285b). From the perspective of the polis-centric view, the absolute type of kingship poses, as Susan Collins (2006, 145) says, something of a mystery.19 With a shift of perspective between polis and empire, however, the mystery seems to dissolve before the recognition that this absolute kingship bears more than passing resemblance to the mode of sovereignty coalescing around Alexander, the carrier of Macedonian conquest and rule. [W]e are therefore bound to study it philosophically, Aristotle writes of this form of kingship, and to examine briey the difculties which it involves (Pol. III.15,1286a). The examination is indeed rather brief, but the difculties are potentially severe and long lasting. In turning to pambasileia Aristotle rst singles out both the fourth (Spartan) and fth (absolute) types of kingship, nding most of the others between these two; the rst three types have more authority over fewer matters than the absolute type, but more authority than the Spartan type, where the kings do not have sway over matters of life and death except, as we see in Homers example of Agamemnon, outside their territory in military expeditions where there is rule by the law of might (Pol. III.15, 1285a). The
18 As Collins (2006, 141 n.23, 145) notes, the subject of absolute kingship is well traversed in Aristotle studies, usually in relation to the priority of the law and the choiceworthy life, yet rarely with reference to Alexander or imperial politics. Nichols (1991, 74; also Bates, 1997) suggests that Aristotle apparently coins the word pambasileia, noting that it is a combination of the noun for kingship with the adjective for all. 19 Even the most perspicacious polis-centric views have trouble accommodating Aristotles discussion of absolute kingship. Thus Yack (1993, 8586) relegates the topic to an appendix, noting we cannot make room for monarchy in Aristotles thought without undermining [the] coherence and consistency of his conception of political community.

Thanks to Kirstie McClure for this suggestion.

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text focuses on two questions about rule: whether it is advantageous for cities to have a permanent general and for one person to have authority over all matters (Pol. III.15, 1286b). Registering these questions between polis and empire again brings Alexanders persona and power into view. Perhaps this is why Aristotle chooses rst to address the Spartan type, because it shadows that aspect of Alexanders rule linked to permanent generalship and his proclivity in the military eld for seizing not only leadership in matters related to war but also matters related to the gods (Pol. III.14, 1285a).20 Still, the discussion of the Spartan type is eeting, dismissed from further engagement because this sort of kingship has the look of [an investigation of] laws rather than regime (or constitution). With this rhetorical maneuver, Aristotle both registers and removes the familiar gure of Spartan kingship and Homers Agamemnon from the picture, along with the law, thereby preparing the way for a regime type that has neither analogies from the epics of the Greeks nor historical precedents to be drawn from the Greek cities of the ancient times. The only type of rule left standing is thus the one that is unprecedented in its absoluteness, where the king acts in all things according to his own will with authority over all persons (Pol. III.16, 1287a), constituting something like a permanent state of exception embodied in a God-like man (Lindsay 1991,488). The second political phenomenon appears as an emergent property in Politics III.15 and involves constitutional developments that bear on changes in cities (poleis): Since cities have become still larger, Aristotle writes, we may perhaps say that it is now difcult for any form of constitution apart from democracy to exist (Pol. III.15, 1286b; see also II.6, 1265b). This passing comment, which interrupts a broader discussion of kingship and corruption, clears the way toward thinking more about the consequences that democratization and the expansion of populations have in a world of cities enveloped in constitutional change. As Arlene Saxonhouse (2004, 40, 43) observes, Aristotle keeps our attention directly on the city along with issues pertaining to the corruption and decay of the political regime. In fact, the text is preoccupied by the implications that changes in substance, quality, quantity, and size hold for cities as real, material, constitutive site(s) of citizenship as being ruled as well as ruling (Pol. III.16, 1287a). Babylon, so large that its capture was not noticed for three days (Pol. III.3, 1276a; II, 6, 1265a), is an epithet, a symbol of elephantiasis
20

(Finley 1983 4). Anticipating the future, Aristotle persistently questions the viability of the Greek cities of our day (Pol. VII.14, 1333b), assessing their value, identity, constancy, conduct, boundaries, and sustainability under circumstances of corruption and change (see Pol. III.1, 1274b; III.3, 1276a; II.1, 1206b; III.9, 1208b; III.18, 1288a). The problems of urban population and excessive size are of particular concern in Politics VII, a book that is usually read as Aristotles paean to the harmonious, cooperative, choice-guiding model of the ideal city of prayer (kat euch en).21 From a perspective not quite so transxed by the symbol of the polis, however, we are better positioned to see the text struggling to comprehend changes that bear heavily on the politics of cities in the late-fourth-century world. Questions of urban growth and the expansion of populations are especially pressing because in cities, where the population is over-large and the masses so strengthened, the distribution of ofces and honors devolves into guesswork. In such huge places full of boundless encounters and collisions, foreigners and resident aliens are able to melt undetected into the crowd (Pol.VII.5, 1326b). Under these generative conditions, a city in creases in population (poluanthropos polis),eventually reaching a point where it cannot actualize as a constitution and therefore ceases to be a city at all (Pol. VII.4, 1326ab).22 Who will be general of an overly excessive number, or who will be herald, Aristotle asks, unless he has the voice of Stentor? (Pol. VII.4, 1326b). This query may not be anticipating Alexander as the heir to Heras loud-voiced hailer of the Greeks during the Trojan War, but it does point toward a global political problem that we can see the Politics making present, at least once the text is released from the poliscentric view. The problem involves the altered dynamics of a world of encounters between pambasileia (the One) and democratic cities (the Many), in and beyond Greece. Imagining kingship as domination of a kind where a man so greatly superior to others stands to them in the relation of a whole to its parts (Pol. III.17, 1288a) is not out of the realm of possibility in this scenario. Yet neither is it impossible to imagine the potentiality that the multitude possesses for judging many matters better than any single person (Pol. III.17, 1288a). Thus the question of whether kingship is advantageous for cities or not, and if so, which and in what fashion (Pol. III.17, 1288a) and the dilemma of how to strike a proper balance of rule between sovereign and multitude seize hold of Aristotles Politics.23 These
21 For a view decisively against this grain, see Skultety (2009) on the centrality of agonism and competition in the idealized city, as well as Salkevers (2007, 32) argument that Aristotle incorporates a series of plausible horizons or opinions into his discussions of politics and the best human life. 22 See Monoson (2011, 138) for an intriguing discussion of the anxieties that attend Aristotles examination of the issue of population, size, and cities that is also alert to how the Politics registers a heightened sense of the imperiled state of the polis in the face of Macedonian political ambitions. 23 The attentive reader will note that my discussion has morphed from Politics Book III to VII and back to Book III; however, this is

Regarding matters related to the gods, in the late spring of 327 BCE and ush with victories in Asia, Alexander, in Babylon, reinforces his autocratic power with claims to divinity by implementing obeisances in the form of the Persian ritual of proskynesis, prostration before the king as an act of subservience to a god (Walbank 1981, 4142).. Aristotle could hardly have been unaware of this act; his adopted son, Nicanor, an ofcer on Alexanders staff, announces the claim of divine honors at Olympia (Jaeger 1934, 320). Aristotles nephew Callisthenes (Alexanders court historian and propagandist) objects publicly and is later executed (Bosworth 1988, 28486). The Rhetoric [1361a36] refers to obeisances as a ritual of honor peculiar to foreigners.

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questions are not just matters for normative philosophical reection. They also pertain between polis and empire to transient and changing conditions, signaling something in the real political world that is troubling and resistant to philosophical adjudication.

MAKE THE REMOTE COME NEAR

All who are concerned for the constitution should therefore create anxieties, which will put people on their guard, and will make them keep watch without relaxing, like sentinels on night-duty. They must, in a word, make the remote come near. Aristotle, Politics, V.8, 1308a

The emergent gure of an absolute king that Aristotle links to the reality of democratizing cities and populations increasing in size constitutes the parameters through which we can see the Politics struggling with a range of problems that are hardly parochial but rather pertain to global political transformations in the Hellenistic world. Yet however persuasive this picture may be, the reading that I have offered cannot constitute a fully successful challenge to the polis-centric view. Insofar as a signicant element of the standard account hinges on the notion that Aristotelian political theory demonstrates what Malcolm Schoeld (1999, 116) calls the bias we might expect in a slave owning culture which looks outside its own borders . . . for its supply of slaves, we need to consider whether the claim of Hellenocentrism in fact still holds against Aristotles Politics, even if the charges of polis parochialism are undermined. Allowing for the possibility of reading into the text awareness of the transience of the polis amid larger forces of geopolitical transformation and change does not, after all, inoculate it against the harsher charges of Greek chauvinism. Hence Joshua Ober (1998, 343 44, 347) can offer an insightful (and unconventional) reading of Politics VII.7, nding there an agent of international order in the form of the hellenized king of Macedon, while at the same time holding Aristotle to an ethnocentric perspective that harbors racist presumptions. In Obers account, Aristotles imagined Hellenized king would rule as master only over slavish barbarians, leaving the Greeks free from interference. Obers non-polis-centric interpretation of the Greek chauvinist bias in Aristotles politics also brings to mind related polis-centric claims of the sort succinctly registered in Karl Poppers (1971, 278, n.48) charge that Aristotle endorses two fully analogous distinctions between Greek/master on the one hand and barbarian/slave on the other; it also recalls Bernard Williams (1993, 115) observation that the Politics betrays a familiar set of Greek prejudices about the slavish nature of barbarians [which are] the ancestors of the physiognomic and other ideological myths that have

been notorious in modern times. As we have seen, this hard and fast hegemonically Greek structure is a predominant interpretive frame in Aristotle studies, at least for scholars who pay attention to politics, culture, and ideology. The supremacist structure is reinforced by three supporting pillars or hierarchical binary congurations that interpreters construct from various passages in the Politics and then reactively impose onto the text: (1) the Hellenic privileging of the Greek over the barbarian, (2) the Athenocentric privileging of the citizen over the alien, and (3) the global political privileging of Greece (and Greeks) as center over the peripheries (and peoples) of the North and East. What I aim to show next is how reading the Politics between polis and empire destabilizes these three supporting pillars in ways that profoundly weaken the Greek supremacist structural frame. In keeping with the exible hermeneutic sensibility I expressed earlier, the three interventions that follow attend with different emphases and degrees of intensity both to the signicance of authorial intention and to the surplus of meaning that reading between polis and empire elicits from the text.

(1) Conne the term to barbarians

Well known is the story that has Aristotle, in a letter, advising Alexander the King to exercise his imperial rule differentially, acting like a leader [h egemonikos] to the Greeks and a master [despot es] to the barbarians, to care for the former as friends and kinsmen, and treat the latter as beasts or plants (Edel 1982, 25; also Barker [1962] 1978, 388; Green 1991, 58). From this (dubious) legend of the letter, initiated by (the often unreliable) Plutarch, arises the contrastive comparison between Aristotle the Greek chauvinist and Alexander, praised for his broader orientation as the proponent of a fusion of civilizations in the name of a unity of mankind (Edel 1982, 25; see also Popper 1962; Tarn 1933).24 We do not have to rely only on the letter, however, to suspect that Aristotle champions the cultural supremacy of Greeks and thinks, as Kraut (2002, 292, emphasis added) writes, that they rightly count themselves as superior to other peoples and are entirely justied to regard certain foreigners as natural slaves. Almost straightaway, Politics I.2 invokes the poets (specically Euripides) in a way that does indeed seem to support these ethnocentric views: Meet it is that barbarous peoples should be governed by the Greeks . . . the assumption being that barbarian and slave are by nature one and the same (Pol. I.2, 1252b2). Fueled by this apparently decisive proclamation, the polis-centric account has Aristotelian political theory holding stolidly to a naturalized, hierarchical valuation of the Greek over the barbarian.25
24 Badian (1965, 170, n.3) notes that there is probably no truth to the story of Aristotles epistolary advice to Alexander, because the letter itself is unlikely to have been genuine. Plutarchs account is also deemed untrustworthy and likely of his own design (Bosworth 2003a, 210). 25 For an insightful reading that challenges this view by arguing that Aristotles concept of (human) nature is changeable and shaped by

in keeping with certain commentaries that position Books VII and VIII between Books III and IV, while noting that Book III ends with a sentence that is almost verbatim to the one that starts Book VII (see Lord 1981).

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But not so fast. It is indeed the case that early on in Politics I we nd Aristotle introducing the distinction between the naturally ruling element (by virtue of intelligence) and the element naturally ruled (by virtue of bodily power), the latter being naturally in a state of slavery. Hard on the heels of that distinction comes the claim that the female and the slave are naturally distinguished from one another, given their different purposes and tasks (Pol. I.2, 1252b). Only then are we introduced to the barbarians among whom, Aristotle says, the female and the slave occupy the same position, the reason being that no naturally ruling element is forthcoming among barbarous peoples.26 To have the Hellenocentric conceit hold, however, we would need to resort to other places in the Politics where Aristotle appears to naturalize the order of rule that grants supremacy to the Greeks, as a great many poliscentric readings do.27 Still, it seems important to pay attention to the fact that what comes next in Politics I.2 neither disputes the Greek supremacist train of thought nor advocates for it, but instead asks a political question about how the city achieves actualization and the relation this process bears to the rule of kings. Rather than privileging the Greeks here, as naturally free and preternaturally civilized, Aristotle includes them within the ancient condition of men generally, as rustic, barbaric, living in scattered groups, governed by kings, and as much in need of actualizing potentiality as any other people. He later underscores this thought by noting, In ancient times customs were exceedingly simple and barbaric: Greeks went about armed, and bought their brides from each other (Pol. I.3, 1268b). Aristotles proclivity for problematizing the simple equation of Greek = ruling/barbarian = ruled takes on increasing intensity in Politics I when he turns to the question of slavery to explore a rhetorical maneuver embedded in the expression of conventional reputable opinions (endoxa) to which he is always attentive. He observes that some Greeks argue that slavery in war is just (Pol. I.6, 1255a), even though they allow that the original cause of a war may not have been just, particularly if it leads to the enslavement of someone who does not deserve to be in a condition of slavery, namely a Greek. To think otherwise leaves open the horric possibility that, if defeated in war, Greeks even of the highest rank could justly be enslaved. That is why those who hold that slavery in war is just do not like to call such people slaves, but prefer to conne the term to barbarians. These interlocutors, whom Aris-

totle dryly describes as clinging, as they think, to a sort of justice (Pol. I.6, 1255a), are driven to necessarily assert that there are some persons who are everywhere slaves, and others who are so nowhere (Pol. I.6, 1255a): ergo, the naturalized binary construction Greeks (free)/barbarian (slave). The naming function performed by rending the barbarian slavish allows the Greeks to maintain the ction that by denition they are nowhere (and never, never, never shall be) slaves, whereas the barbarians are so everywhere. At this juncture, contrary to Poppers view (1971, 278, n.48), Aristotle seems to be exposing rather than endorsing a Greek master narrative that is busily constructing the legitimating terms of its own supremacist presumptions.28 His persistent references to they, themselves, and their rather than us, ourselves, and ours invite us to consider the possibility that the author does not reexively identify as Greek, at least not in a sense that is unqualied. Thus on the matter of good birth (eugeneia), we nd Aristotle observing that the Greeks consider themselves well born (eugeneis) not only among their own but everywhere, whereas they consider barbarians well born only at home the assumption being that there is something well born and free simply, and something not simply [but relatively] (Pol. I.6, 1255a). The assumption harbors an absolutist justicatory birth logic that universalizes the value of the Greeks even as it diminishes as relative the value of those others who are born (or bound) to be barbarian. Staying true to the endoxic method,29 Aristotle deconstructs this rhetorical maneuver: When they speak in this way, it is by nothing other than virtue or vice that they dene what is slave and what is free, who well born and who ill born (Pol. I.6, 1255a). At this point the question of whether the two fully analogous distinctions that link Greek to freedom/well born/virtue and slave to ill born/vice constitute Aristotles own conviction seems to give way to the question of what he thinks is at issue when the Greeks hold to a notion that claims, in effect, that from the good should come someone good, just as a human being comes from a human being and a beast from beasts. It is a thought as comforting as it is convenient until that balloon is punctured with the deating remark, But while nature wishes to do this, it is often unable to (Pol. I.6, 1255b).30 So much the worse
28 Simpson (1998, 42) notes that nowhere does Aristotle equate his own view with the Greeks line of thought about the barbarian and the slave. In decoupling the barbarian = slave equation, it is also important to note that, worthy of demolition though it surely is, Aristotles notion of the natural slave is neither a geographic nor an ethnic construct marking a particular race or peoples; rather it is a condition of soul in relation to reason (rule) and a peculiar capability of becoming the property of another (Pol. I.5, 1254b) that go to issues of worthiness, character, and failure under certain categories of value (Clark 1975, 107; Frank 2005, 31). 29 Salkever (1994, 206) offers a useful insight into the endoxic method in saying that [t]he practical work of Aristotles theory is . . . the exposure and criticism of presuppositions that shape political institutions and practices in light of a certain teleological understanding of the human good. 30 This is not the only place where Aristotle matter of factly allows for exceptions or disruptions in the natural unfolding of things.

politics, especially in relation to citizens, slaves, and foreigners, see Frank (2004; 2005). A persuasive challenge to distorting interpretive categories that read Aristotle as uncritically endorsing prevailing Greek prejudices is offered by Salkever (1994). 26 Also, as Aristotle must have known, the barbarian practice of buying wives practically reduced women to the level of slaves (Newman 2000, 108). 27 Moving from Pol. I.2 to other passages of the text (especially Pol. III.14; VII.7) is a fairly common (and problematic) interpretive strategy when it comes to solidifying Aristotles view of the barbarian (e.g., Kraut 2002; Schoeld 1999), even for scholars who take a more ameliorative position regarding his alleged Greek chauvinism (e.g., Frank 2004; Hall 2002).

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for nature. Recall Clarks (1975, 128) caveat about actualizing potentiality: [F]ailure to realize being happens; we may not achieve the completion which is truly available to us. In puncturing all of these conventional Greek assumptions with a fair amount of rhetorical legerdemain, Aristotle is arguing not for these views but from them, heading toward an immediate political problem that is obscured amid the distracting byplay of cultural claims and opinions that mark the troubled doubled-thinking of the Greeks. What is the political problem? Schoeld (1999, 132) is right to remind us that except in the context of his preoccupation with different forms of rule Aristotle betrays only a passing interest in slavery in the Politics. Even his attention to the Greeks rhetorical proclivities for othering the barbarian is a passing interest in relation to the danger that truly preoccupies him in Book I. This is the political problem of the relation between the One and the Many that we have already identied as an emergent phenomenon elsewhere in the text, brought on by a crisis of encounter between (absolutist) kingship in the form of a Macedonian monarch and (democratizing) cities in the Hellenistic world. The incipient danger that accompanies these formations is the possibility that soon people will be unable to distinguish between a large household and a small city or differentiate monarchical rule from political rule over free and equal persons (Pol. I.1, 1252a; I.7 1255b). As it happens, the erasure of the distinction between the monarchical household and the city of freemen is no small matter, because the view that all kinds of rule are the same as one another (Pol. I.7, 1255b) is already a worrying development that Aristotle observes in the Hellenistic world.31 Global developments threaten to convert cities into mere alliances useful only as households (Pol. II.2, 1261a) for purposes of military conquest and war. Perhaps the tendency to mistake monarchism of the One for the freedom of the Many is to be expected, however, within a milieu where household management appears in the guise of an absolute king who embraces the freedom of the Greeks while at the same time effectively reducing the whole population to one and the same sort of administrative imperial rule (Pol. III.16 1287a).32

Why Aristotle does not address the dangers that accompany this householding of the world by linking them explicitly to Alexanders imperial regime should be self-evident. Not only is it dangerous for an alien to live in Athens; even Antipaters friend cannot presume to be secure under the whims of the Great Kings imperial rule. In addition, as we have seen, dualizers have a tendency by denition to play a double game. This does not mean, however, that in the Politics Aristotle fails to register the threat between the lines. Reading between polis and empire, we might note, for example, the warnings about Platos Republic that arrive in Book II, including the comment on Socrates selection of the rulers as hazardous, for the philosopher makes the same person always rule (Pol. II.5 1264b). Socrates creates a unity that renders the city more like a household, so that even if one were able to do this, one ought not to do it, as it would destroy the city (Pol. II.2, 1261b). Viewed from this perceptual eld, Aristotles critique of Platos householding of the city is not just the students retort to the teachers failure to get things right. There is also a hidden gesture here that anticipates the destruction of plurality in terms that resonate with Alexanders quest for unity and the monarcho-monomaniacal impulse to subdue the many in order to make the city as far as possible entirely one (Pol. II.2, 1261a).33

(2) These too must be admitted to be citizens

In commentaries on the Politics, the relation between the Athenian citizen and the resident alien has generally played a minor and almost insignicant role. Indeed, unlike the two most famous hierarchical examples of ruler/ruled in Aristotles textthe master/slave and the male/femalethe citizen/resident alien opposition is rarely given notice, much less rendered a problem. Nussbaum (2000, 113) sees Aristotle gliding glibly (and oddly given his own situation) over the topic of the aliens exclusion; Ober (1998, 303) remarks that the metic was not particularly troublesome for Aristotles theory, insofar as this class of person did not ordinarily expect to be made a citizen in his new home and presumably maintained citizenship in their own poleis. Missing from this calculation is the reality of war, military conquest, and the violent vanquishing of populations by victorious Macedonian armies, including the wholesale obliteration of certain cities (Thebes, Olynthus, and Stagira); the occupation of hundreds of others; and the general disruptions, dislocations, deportations, exiles, and
33 After the defeat at Chaeronea, Greece is made a Macedonian protectorate, with the city-states associating under the League of Corinth and a Macedonian executive who has free rein to prevent any suspected internal subversions (Barker [1962] 1978, xx; Bosworth 1988, 197). The householding of the world is evident in Alexanders reputed aims to create an empire enamored of Persian court protocol, organized under an ideal of monarchy, and propelled by a unifying vision subsuming all Asian peoples from Troy itself to the kingdom of Porus under the King of Asia as the King of Kings (Hammond 2003, 139; see also Bosworth 2003, 212).

See also his comment about the male as by nature more expert at leading the female unless constituted in some respect contrary to nature (Pol. I.12, 1259a). 31 This is perhaps similar to the threat that Arendt (1958, 38), mindful of Aristotle in her idiosyncratic way, registers in the modern world by equating the rise of the social from the shadowy interior of the household into the light of the public realm, with the loss of politics. Under these circumstances, political communities come to be viewed in the image of a family whose everyday affairs have to be taken care of by a gigantic, nation-wide administration of housekeeping (28). 32 From 335 BCE on, Alexander persistently frames his imperial campaigns rhetorically, in terms that valorize the Greek freedom and polis. Thus he justies the invasion of Persia and his ultimate ascension to the throne as the Great King (Shah-an-Shah) in the name of freeing the Ionian cities and ensuring their independence, a guarantee subsequently extended, but hardly delivered, to the cities of the Greek peninsula itself (Parker 2005, 49). For an instructive discussion of the administration of the empire, see Badian (1965).

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returns of peoples that attend imperialism on the march, whose aftereffects bring on the end of many poleis as viable constitutional entities. 34 In Politics III.1, where the subject is citizenship, Aristotle begins by situating the metic somewhere between the deciencies of the slave at one end of the measure, and the full political capacity of the citizen (polit es) in the strict sense (III.1, 1275a) at the other. Later on, in discussing why entitlement to sue and be sued in the courts is not sufcient to the title of citizen, he notes that the entitlement to bring suit extends also to resident aliens who share it by virtue of a treaty. Yet even this entitlement is not offered to its full extent because in many places the resident alien also requires the services of a legal protector to take part in this form of association (Pol. III.1, 1274b1275a). To return to an ontological idiom, the resident alien is not devoid of potentiality altogether (Aristotle rejects such a view), but rather represents a lack of capacity, thus potentiality not to (do or be; Meta. IX.9, 1050b). Those of Aristotles own kind occupy a limited position that Aristotle captures when he writes, [T]here is a sense in which these may be called citizens, but it is not altogether an unqualied sense (Pol. III.1, 1274b 1275a). The status of resident aliens as citizens in this not altogether unqualied sense requires further attention. In Politics III.1 Aristotle develops the identication by introducing two other gures to the discussion of resident aliens as citizens. The passage starts out well enough, but in the course of disturbing the strict opposition between the citizen and the alien, it winds up in signicant trouble of its own. Of resident aliens, Aristotle notes,
They are like children who are still too young to be entered on the roll of citizens, or men who are old enough to have been excused from civic duties. There is a sense in which these may be called citizens, but it is not altogether an unqualied sense: we must add that the young are undeveloped, and the old superannuated citizens, or we must use some other qualication; the exact term we apply does not matter, for the meaning is clear. (Pol. III.1, 1274b)

The problem is not merely one of denition, although we can see along with Aristotle how the gure of the alien resists the likenesses that are offered almost as quickly as they are asserted. At both ends of this spectrum that envisions the not yet of the blossoming child and the no more of the fading elder, citizenship either anticipates or looks back on the fulllment of
34 Refugees and exiles are no small matter in Alexanders empire. Faced with the problem of rootlessness in Asia (thousands of unemployed mercenaries, political exiles, and former colonists on their way back to Greece), Alexander publishes an edict in 324 (the Exiles Decree) authorizing the return of these peoples and instructing Antipater to exercise compulsion against any Greek cities unwilling to take back their exiles. The decree, delivered by Aristotles adopted son Nicanor at Olympia, breaches one of the fundamental tenets of the Corinthean League, creating chaos among the poleis. There is upheaval but no general refusal for none of the cities, as Bosworth notes, wished to face the reprisals from the world conqueror (Bosworth 1988, 224; Walbank 1981, 4041).

a potentiality or capacity (dunamis) that involves an active, participatory, and unqualied way of living in political association. That way of living, as we know from Aristotle, is constitutive of the polis itself, and at both ends of the spectrum, this potentiality can be (the child) or has been (the elder) actualized through activity (energeia). Yet here is the rub: The very potentiality to be actualized as citizen is suspended in the gure of the resident alien. On the threshold of coming to be (but not yet fully present) and passing away (but not yet perished), Aristotle interpolates a liminal entity, a citizen-in-a-sense-but-notan-unqualied-sense. Poised as it is in relation to an absent in-betweenyet in a sense called citizenthe gure called alien represents both the exception (Pol. III.1, 1275a) to the qualications that safeguard the citizen and the defect (Pol. III.1, 1275a) that contaminates the purity of the rule. Two consequences follow from this Aristotelian maneuver: First, it interrupts and profoundly disturbs the continuity between man and citizen upon which the system of the polis (Vernant 1962, 49) depends. Second, the maneuver confounds the difference between citizen/alien, throwing the political value of homoioi (men who are alike as equals) according to which the city circumscribes its political space into crisis. Things become even more troubled when the Politics takes the measure of those citizens who fail to participate in or are excluded from a share in the ofces and honors of the city. These persons, Aristotle contends, are just like resident aliens and without honor (Pol. III.5, 1278a). The difference between the nonparticipating citizen and the excluded resident alien can be grasped in terms of political capacity (dunamis), specically as a matter of the potentiality to be or to do (or not to be or to do). The alien possesses a potentiality to exercise (actualize) political capacity, but cannot (because disallowed), whereas the citizen possesses a potentiality to exercise (actualize) political capacity, but does not (because disaffected). Whatever else is going on in this intriguing interplay between those lacking in honor by virtue of being aliens and those lacking in honor by virtue of failing to participate as citizens, the differential logic that props up the order of the city appears to be starting to crumble. The blurring of the opposition between citizen and alien has serious consequences for the logic that supports the citys hierarchical order of inclusion. For in the failure to enact the political capacity for citizenship, the citizen becomes in effect an alien in a sense but not altogether an unqualied sense, fully complicit in undermining the coherence of the distinction that grounds the citys order of rule. Contrary to Aristotles assumption, it now seems that the identity of those who are called citizens in a sense is not clear and the exact term does matter. This is precisely because the formulation resident alien threatens to break the spell of a spiritual universe of likeness (Vernant 1962, 61) that the Greek polis so assiduously attempts to preserve. For proof that the resident alien represents a disquieting element (Agamben 1998, 131) in the order of the polis, we need

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look no further than to that place where Aristotle insists that the question at stake is not, Who is actually a citizen? but rather whether [they are so] justly or unjustly (Pol. III.2, 1275b1276a). The question raises a difculty concerning the criteria that determine who deserves a share in the civic body. This disruption begins with (the democrat) Cleisthenes at Athens who, after the expulsion of the tyrants, enrolled many foreigners and alien slaves in the tribes, enfranchising them (Pol. III.2, 1275b1276a); it continues right on through with Antipaters diktat, following uprisings in the city after Alexanders death, to levy property taxes of a kind that reduced the eligible citizen body in Athens by half (Edel [1982, 329). Changes of this sort give rise to new constitutions and create uncertainties about the meaning of just title to ofce on which the identity of the city rests. Contrary to Stalley (1995, 349), then, who suggests that Aristotle takes it for granted that resident aliens will lack the privileges of citizenship, in Politics III.2 Aristotle appears to take nothing for granted. Instead he raises a serious difculty not only about the fact of the alien being granted the privileges of citizenship but also about forms of democratization that force a reckoning in Athens ` calls (1999, 35) concerning over what Jacques Ranciere the very existence of something in common between those who have a part and those who have none. Whether Aristotle himself is sympathetic to acts of constitutional change and claim-making whereby those called aliens render citizenship ambiguous is not clear nor does it matter; for the Politics is evidently aware that persons previously deemed remote are now actually near and potentially a part of the city in an unqualied sense. That these too must be admitted to be citizens (Pol. III.2, 1276a) is something Aristotle allows, even as we can see the text struggling mightily to classify, control, and contain these gures politically. Yet the disturbance between polis and empire has already begun. Having unsettled the distinction between citizen/alien, the Politics perturbs the political criteria on which the constitution of citizenship has relied, setting in motion deeper investigations into the conditions and contingencies of political rule.

tion of privileged discursive address, between the peripheral peoples (ethn e) of Northern Europe (full of spirit, but lacking in thought and art) on one side, and the non-Greek peoples of Asia (full of thought and art but lacking in spirit) on the other (Pol. VII.7, 1327b). Within the imagined community that appears under the sign of the Greek nations, dominance is acquired in a politically virtuous intermediate space of apparently natural endowment. That is where the happy or well-blended mixture of the peoples of the cold countries, who cannot govern others, and of the peoples of Asia, who cannot govern themselves, comes about.36 To this effect, Aristotle declares that the stock of the Greeks shares in bothjust as it holds the middle in terms of location. From out of a place of historical ux, this observation seems to betray a determinate teleological desire in its wish for a Greek stock of the highest political development capable of governing every other peopleshould it obtain a single regime (Pol. VII.7, 1327b; emphasis added). In the face of such a hypothesis the should it anticipates a possible reality or plausible world (Hawthorne 1991) where the genos of the Greeks is politically unied and freedom is assured through the governance of a regime capable of ruling all (Pol. VII.7, 1327b). The strategic positioning of an apparently xed Greek hegemonic core against a peripherally marginalized set of northern and eastern populations seems to map readily onto an interpretation that produces the familiar charge about the ethnocentric antibarbarian disposition of a text written by an author who is clearly a citizen of a Greek city-state (Lloyd 1968, 266), if not a rank imperialist (Clark 1975, 106).37 But wait. We might wish to pause before concluding that the meteorological passages simply represent a condensed version of Aristotles Hellenocentric Greek supremacist desires. After all, we do have credible arguments that challenge this view by emphasizing Aristotles concept of the potentialities (capacities) that all humans, whatever their environments or locations, possess for action and deliberation, simply by virtue of

(3) [I]t holds the middle in terms of location

To conclude this challenge to the Greek supremacist structure afxed to Aristotles Politics, I turn to one nal source of evidentiary material that commentators frequently cite as indelible proof of Aristotelian political theorys Hellenocentrism. This is the famous passage on moral climate, or the so-called meteorological speculations,35 in Politics Book VII. In this passage, the Greeks are centered in a middle posi35 The passages are dubbed meteorological because they deal with weather, climate, and peoples hence the relation between celestial and sublunary things, all topics of scientic study in Aristotles Meteorology, a work that also promises to engage comets, meteors, earthquakes, the falling of thunderbolts, whirlwinds, and rewinds and the affections produced by their concretion (Meteor. 338 a20 339 a 9).

36 On national identity Walbank (1951, 56) notes that the Greeks possessed enough of the components of a nation to conceive of something like a national idea in times of external threat. However, the political selshness of each city (Jouguet 1928, 7071) or what Beloch later called partikularismus (Green 1996, 6) persistently thwarted the development of an actual Greek nation or a nationality that represented a unied collective identity. 37 As Mara (1995) points out, the term barbarian does not appear in the meteorological passages (Pol. VII.7) nor later in Book VII where Aristotle justies training for war in terms of being master over those who merit being slaves (Pol. VII.14, 1334a). Yet compare Pol III.14, 1285a, where the topic is a form of monarchy evident among some of the barbarians whose characters, in turn, are deemed more slavish than the Greeks, with those in Asia being more so than those in Europe. This pecking order of slavishness contrasts sharply with the absence of references to slavish barbarians (as opposed to blending peoples) in the meteorological passages, leaving it uncertain whether, as Monoson (2011, 143) contends, the discussion of climate in Book VII is trying to account for the observable variety among slavish natures noted in Book III.

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being human (Frank 2004; Yack 1993).38 Insofar as I have already suggested that we have good reason to complicate the one-sided notion of Aristotle as an exemplar of a chauvinistic citizen of a Greek city-state, there might be further reason to suspend, if only for a moment, the urge to read the meteorological passages as nothing more than a dismaying demonstration of Hellenic hauteur (Davis 1981, 32). Yet to go this route is to stay rather closely attuned to Aristotles intentions in writing what he writes in these passages, thereby deecting from view other aspects of the text the resonances, connotations, and allusions that produce a surplus of meaning that exceeds authorial control. Rather than returning to the authors intentions, then, I want to approach the meteorological passages between polis and empire to expose a pervasive mood or sense of ambiguity that thoroughly undermines the texts effort to valorize the Greeks (even if Aristotle wishes it so). The ambiguities are twofold and call into question the coherence of both the ethno and the centric claims that underwrite the texts attempt to secure the supremacy of the location and the character of the Greeks. The rst aspect of the twofold ambiguity in the meteorological passages goes to the texts characterization of ethnos of the Greeks in terms that blend or overlap two mutually exclusive categories, namely, the nations (ethn e) of Europe and Asia. What we seem to have here is an ethnocentric variation on the familiar Aristotelian doctrine that the mixture is a mean (to meson). Rather than going in that direction, however (which leads down the path of virtues and ethics and therefore poses problems of its own), let us examine the Greeks by returning to those dualizers who inhabit Aristotles logic of classication.39 From this angle what becomes immediately apparent is that the text is conjuring the Greeks as a category that cuts across otherwise incompatible substantial kinds, namely, the cold (North) and the hot (East). The Greeks are therefore both and neither (but in different respects) of the kinds they blendin one sense North and not East, in another East and not North. They run hot, not cold in one sense; in another cold, not hot. By virtue of this dualizing, the Greeks may not reduce to the abject state of the deformed quadruped that marks the unfortunate seal, but they are made to constitute (even if Aristotle does not wish it so) an entity that really is useless as an independent classicatory expression. One can hardly fail to notice, in other words, that in the course of their alleged efforts to valorize the homeland, the meteorological passages assign to it a character so ambiguously well blended that it resists identication in terms of essential attributes that make it a kind of its own.
38 By contrast Davis (1996), Kraut (1997, 9394), Miller (1995), and Mulgan (1977) think Aristotle holds to a meteorological determinism whereby environments exercise a causal inuence on character and disposition, undermining the ability of non-Greeks to deliberate about political matters. 39 For the difculties involved in applying Aristotles general doctrine of the mean to his characterization of the Greeks, see Davis (1981) and Saxonhouse (1983).

Then next we learn that the nations of the Greeks themselves internally display the same difference as peoples of the North and Eastthat is, in relation to one another (Pol. VII.7, 1327b)and all coherence seems to disappear. It seems that some Greeks are as one-sided in nature as the spirited Europeans, whereas others are akin to the intelligent Asians. Still others are well blended in relation to both of these capacities, which can only mean that we now have to speak of the middle inside the middle and try to imagine a dualizer that doubles inside its own dualization. The second aspect of the twofold ambiguity in the meteorological passages comes into view if we shift our focus from the alleged center (or middling middle) geographic location of Greece to the peripheries: the European North and the Asian East. By doing some categorical arithmetic and from the perspective of the peripheral terms, we can see that the marginalized entities (Europe and Asia) actually add up to the collective core (Greece) that, as we know, presupposes them as the (foreign or barbarian) other. In the paradoxically abstruse meteorological scenario, however, it is the outsiders who interiorize, from the North and East, the insiders who constitute the between-the-two exteriorized locations. With this feat of global repositioning, the text appears, in effect, to have blurred, by blending, the boundaries that differentiate the once sovereign center from the peripheral margins, absorbing the Greeks (whomever and wherever they are now) into the ow of the peoples of Europe and Asia. Instead of a middle that holds its location (even if Aristotle wishes it otherwise), we have a seemingly boundless geographic space not only lacking a center but also absent any intelligible identity formation. To return to an Aristotelian ontological idiom, we might see how under the meteorological passages the stock of the Greeks is an entity that has failed to become what it is, in the course of the texts losing command of that peoples allegedly middle location. The twofold ambiguities that constitute the surplus of meaning that I have drawn from meteorological passages show how the (Greek) center does not hold. Yet the investigation of the Greeks failure to actualize potentiality cannot end without our raising a question about something conspicuously excluded from the text: Who or what is the carrier of the so-called blending and mixing operations that encompass, overlap, conate, confuse, and blur territories and peoples European, Asian, and Greek? To ask that question is to conjure once more, against the grand Hellenocentric imaginary, the specter of power and incorporative violence in the form of the countervailing reality of Alexander, the hegemonically Hellenized king of Macedon acting on the historical stage. Of course we are not speaking of blending and mixing here, but rather of conquests, subjugations, assimilations, exclusions, exiles, and erasures of actually existing peoples, not to mention the annihilation of armies, as imperialisms operations demand. So if the narrative mode of Aristotles meteorological passages seems to invoke a rhetoric that shuttles peculiarly between nationalist identication with the Greeks on the one hand and global embrace of nations

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North and East on the other, then perhaps it does so because it seems to be ventriloquizing Alexander (even if Aristotle wishes it were not so). The rhetorical structure of these passages maps the outlook of the Monarch of Macedon/Hegemon of Greece/King of Asia, the carrier of empire who both valorizes the Greeks and seeks to bring all peoples of the Hellenic world into fusion under his imperial rule.40

BETWEEN POLIS AND EMPIRE

By removing the classical polis-centric carapace from Aristotelian political theory, I have attempted to pose new possibilities for reading Aristotles Politics between polis and empire. In this sense I hope the displacement of the Greek polis is generative for post polis-centric studies of the thinker whom Marx ([1841] 1975, 34) famously gures as Greek philosophys Alexander of Macedon. But this is not all. History does not repeat itself, yet in some telling heuristic respects the situation of the late-fourth-century Greek cities in the face of Macedonian imperialism carries analogies with contemporary (post)national peoples and states that are called on, as Paul Ricoeur writes (2000, 93), to behave at the same time as the whole and the part, as the container and the contained, as an inclusive agency and an included region. I want to conclude the article by provisionally considering how we might introduce some Aristotelian elements between polis and empire into our current political theoretical endoxa, particularly in response to three problems that Seyla Benhabib (2009, 90) identies under the terms postnational citizenship, transnational governance, and empire. The rst problempostnational citizenshiphas to do with the imperative to question the relationship between the construction of the alien, the foreigner, and the stranger or what Etienne Balibar (2006, 3) calls the reproduction of strangeness as it bears on the status of the citizen. Aristotles own difculties in coming to terms with the citizen in a sense but not an unqualied sense underscore the fact that citizenship is neither a xed nor stable notion, much less an immutable essence, but a permanently open puzzlement (aporia) and an anxiety for the city. Faced with the stranger whose presence, no longer remote, exerts pressure on existing congurations of the public realm and its spaces of appearance, the city (or state) cannot stand as a hermetically sealed construction within which citizenship is untouched by kinesis. Rather, the
40 Alexanders policy of fusion passed down through the mainstream of German historiography seems to coalesce around the notion that the king planned to achieve greater concord and community between races, if not a complete reproductive commingling of peoples (Bosworth 2003a, 208). The mass marriage ceremony at Susa (324 BCE) where Alexander and 91 of his Macedonian companions wed Persian women, was not, however, complemented by ceremonies of Persian generals taking Greek or Macedonian brides. The unions apparently did not last. For more pragmatic views of Alexanders foreign policy and a debunking of the notion of an imagined brotherhood of mankind, see Badian (1965) and Bosworth (1998; 2003, 226).

city (or state) must be theorized as something subjected historically to stasis, including mutations, collapses, and the reconstitution of its borders. In persistently identifying the variable and inconstant aspects of the citystates, Aristotle reminds us of the extent to which the ethnos (or common identication that marks the same) of a city, or a people, or even an imaginary like the Greek stock is subject to the dissolving action (Balibar 2006, 4) of internal movements that mirror aspects of imperialism and globalization. As many contemporary theorists of European unication have pointed out, these transformations reect global inequalities, bringing with them not only unprecedented changes in congurations of the categories of citizen but also resurgences of traditional patterns of exclusion.41 The latter rest uneasily beside the formal equality associated with the professed principles of constitutional democracies, reminders of the persistently equivocal nature of those aliens who would, as Aristotle puts it, readily assume a share in the constitution while going undetected among the crowd (Pol. VII. 4, 326b721). An Aristotelian question arises here for those concerned with the new congurations of political association and extensions of citizenship. To adapt Balibars (2006, 12) formulations, How might we think about the politics of transition from aliens as enemies toward aliens as citizens while not losing sight of the persistently unsettled status of the nonstrangers who see themselves as sovereign in the city (or the state)? The second problemtransnational governance follows from reading Aristotle from within a perceptual eld that reveals the symptoms of impending anachronism (Anderson 1974, 44) among the Greek citystates while at the same time maintaining what might be called a decidedly democratic transpoleis rather than a postpoleis perspective. The former does not imply that cities as political identities are bound to disappear under the aegis of empire, much less that under such formations citizenship is better gured as a global demos in the Alexandrian mode of a brotherhood of mankind, as piqued the cosmopolitan fantasies of certain nineteenth-century German historiographers. An Aristotelian perspective would be instead ontologically attuned to thinking of the world in terms of kinesthetic elds of potentialities, which means posing questions that are alert to cities as both distinctive and overlapping bodies politic, ever changing in their constitutions. Particularized, multifaceted, and receptive to democratizing processes, a transpoleis perspective rejects the notion of a citizen of the world, but might also allow, as Balibar (2002, 53) puts it, that in a few years there may no longer be a British or an Italian nation-state. Between global demos and nation-state, a transpoleis perspective remains attentive to citizenship as governance by returning to cities as embodiments of the multitude (pl ethos) possessing potentiality as power (dunamis). An Aristotelian question arises
41 See Balibar (2003); Baubock (1994); Cowls, Caparaso, and Risse (2001); and Giddens, Liddle, and Diamond (2006), among many others.

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here for those concerned with theorizing cities as places of receptive containment where the multitude (or the Many) reconstitutes a demos for democracy. How might we, the people, actualize and occupy these spaces politically, for purposes of challenging demagoguery, repression, and the violent homogenizing forces of hegemonic rule? The third problemempirelinks to the transformations of sovereignty amid a changing security situation that Benhabib (2009, 81) identies in the immediate aftermath of September 11, 2001. The volatile and obscure moment of ambivalent potential to which Benhabib refers marks the emergence of an unprecedented form of sovereign power that might well call to mind Aristotles efforts to comprehend an equivalent formation, pambasileia, in the late fourth century BCEan empire that transforms the sovereign into living law and then exceeds that law by ruling in all matters according to its own will (Pol. III.16, 1287a), in effect producing a state of exception. The Aristotelian question that arises here is, How might we gauge or assess this sovereign supreme something (the being able to be or not to be) that is empire so as to judge its relation to cities (states) and the multitude (pl ethos)? Read between polis and empire, Aristotles Politics offers two pertinent responses to this question, both of which serve as cautionary gures in a moment where metaphors for empire (of varying degrees of perspicuity) are not in short supply. Each gure is marked by ambivalent potential. The rst response gures the absolute sovereign as unambiguously human yet manifesting such superior virtue that contrary to nature, he (or they) deserves to be preeminent over (2001, the whole (Pol. III.17, 1228a). As Claude Mosse 93) observes, the exception that warrants this grant of supremacy is not the consequence of any de facto domination stemming from [the hegemons] military conquests, but rather the exceptionalism of the leader as a character of intrinsic excellence (ar ete). The exemplarity accorded to the sovereign thus rests on observation and evaluation of his (or their) worthiness and rectitude. In this sense, the reasons to justify the supreme power (kurios) emerge from the multitudes exercising power (dunamis) through the activity of deciding not to execute or exile or ostracize a gure of this sort, but rather to give him (or them) authority over them simply and not by turns (Pol. III.17, 1228a). The ambivalent potential resides in the fact that, no matter how attenuated, citizens are a part of the decisionmaking process that deems this leader so exceptional that all will obey such a person gladly, allowing him (or them) to be permanent kings in their cities (Pol. III.13, 1284b). With the second gure we move from the exceptional individual who is like a god but still among human beings (Pol. III. 13, 1284a) to something decisively different that is, in effect, a negation of all things human. This presence haunts the Politics as a kind of specter, arriving early on in the form of the stranger who possesses privileges and powers in all matters against the whole world, one who is incapable of participating or

who is in need of nothing. By virtue of these characteristics, this thing is not human at all and therefore either a beast or a god (Pol. I.2, 1253a). To borrow ` (1995, 97), Aristotle conjures here a from Ranciere monster committed to total war or a divinity beyond the reach of all reciprocity. Or perhaps it is both, something that partakes in two otherwise oppositional kinds. The beast/god that I am dualizing under the sign of empire undoubtedly lends itself to modernizations: the charismatically revengeful God-fearing politician, the Fearless Leader as demiurge and genocidal ma niac, the omniscient and omnipotent Fuhrer, the globalized militarism of a divinely blessed superpower. Yet none of these rhetorical personications strikes me as quite right, if only for being too literal.42 Instead, and following Aristotles own thinking about matters pertaining to the imagination,43 the Politics offers this monster/divinity more as a phantasm (phantasma), something that functions in the shadows, a picture that may persist at the edges of our sensibilities, like a nightmarish dream, long after it is initiated. In Aristotelian terms, what the beast/god carries along with its spectral principles of violence, torture, death dealing, and disaster is a something we must understand as a threat that involves a change affecting what constitutes the humanity of human beings. Enveloped in darkness, the phantasm marks the disavowal of everything that human potentiality brings to light, including the power of political association, the possibility of sharing together as a multitude in the life of the city, and the actualization of citizenship. To keep the phantasm in view as threat and danger to human associationand here is its ambivalent potentialis to be able to speak truth to projects of imperial power, as Aristotle does in the Politics with reference to the Spartans. Having lost their empire, he says, it clearly follows that they are not happy, and that their legislator was not a good one.. . . Nor do they have a correct conception concerning the sort of rule that the legislator should be seen to honor. To the prevailing endoxa he says that although it is true that [m]ost people are believers in the cause of empire, on the ground that empire leads to a large accession of material prosperity, they are nonetheless in error in thinking so. To legislate everything with a view to domination and war, as an imperialist, is ignoble, a debasement. Yet there persists a tendency among those who organize political things to incline in crude fashion toward those [things] which are held to be useful and of a more aggrandizing sort (Pol. VII.14, 1333b).

42 The personication works literally for Alexander, who is cast as beast and god by the Athenian democrat Demosthenes (384322 BCE), who names the king both Macedonian arch wolf (monolycus) and (later by decree) an invincible divinity (theos anik etos). Ever the enemy of autocratic domination, Demosthenes dies in exile by his own hand, anticipating assassination on the orders of the Athenian politician Demades acting on behalf of Antipater. 43 For clarifying discussions of the imagination, sensation, perception, and cognitive role of phantasia in Aristotles thought see Frede (1992), Polansky (2007), and Schoeld (1992).

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On that discordant note, I conclude by suggesting that we might well pause before enlisting Aristotle in efforts to support contemporary appeals to empire and imperialism that allow how something injurious can also be productive, a lesser evil in the service of enduring freedom. Neither anguished acceptance of the burden that the case for empire necessitates (Ignatieff 2003) nor the self-condent assurance that a new imperial terrain provides greater possibilities for creation and liberation (Hardt and Negri 2000, 218) captures the sensibilities of Aristotles Politics. When it comes to making the case for the imperial conquest of neighboring cities, Aristotles verdict is in fact unambiguous and denitive: We may justly conclude that none of these arguments and none of these systems of law is statesmanlike, or useful, or right (Pol. VII.14, 1333b). There is no doctrine there, no theory, merely an assertion that boldly counters the nearly universal ancient belief in the naturalness of conquest, hegemony, and domination.44 That seems like a better note on which to begin.

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