Aristotle’s Politics III 6-8
Aristotle takes up the nature of sovereignty as it is exercised in the different types of constitutions he has sketched out previously.
Author: Thomas Fleming
Properties of Blood, Chapter Five: Sweet Revenge, Part B
This Simian World Revenge and marriage, as institutionalized means of expressing love and hate, have much in common: Both are found in a variety of forms, but the forms and tendencies that converge in societies around the globe encourage us to think of them as generically human phenomena. That is because they are, both of them, based on natural necessities and passions that have probably been instilled into the human species throughout the long course of evolution. A mouse will fight against an attacker, whether the enemy is a rival mouse or a cat, and I have been charged by...
Aristotle, Politics III.3-5
Aristotle is no egalitarian, and he does not think that poor men who work with their hands (banausoi) and thus cannot participate in political life are fully citizens.
Poems of the Week: Friends
Here are two quite different English poems written by two great classically trained poets, Ben Jonson and A.E. Housman.
Properties of Blood, Chapter 5: Sweet Revenge
NOTE: I had decided to omit the following two chapters on individual violence– as well as a later chapter on blood feuds etc.–from this volume and to put them in a separate book. As I worked on the later chapters, it became apparent to me that my initial outline was better. Sweet Revenge With base deceit you worked upon our feelings. Revenge is sweet, and flavors all our dealings.” Revenge is sweet, whether anyone likes to admit it. But even a hundred years ago, when people were more candid about the reality of aggression, audiences at productions of Gilbert and Sullivan’s...
Brexit Wrecks It
As the days drew new for the vote on Brexit, the United Kingdom’s exit from the European Union seemed unlikely. It seemed too good to be true, even to Nigel Farage. As the polls were closing, the UKIP leader was gloomily predicting a thin victory for the Remains. Later that evening, it was all over but for the whining of good old Dave Cameron in tears. He just had to have this referendum to show that Britons were as suicidal as everyone else in the West. “What”—as that noted political observer B. Bunny, Esq. would say, “a maroon.” The term Britons,...
No One Ever Expects the Spanish Inquisition
When I looked at Red Philipps’ recent piece on the NeverTrump movement, I realized how ignorant I am of the conservative zanies who populate the blogosphere. He referred several times to one Eric Erickson. If I had ever heard of this character, the name—so reminiscent of Swedish comic Ole Olson—had been rejected by my conscious mind as one more piece of lint it did not need. I can already tell you who played Chester and Doc on the Gunsmoke radio program and once read a bad book on Gandhi by another fraud of the same name. Enough, as they...
Poem(s) of the Week
While we were at Camp Saint Christopher, I found myself gassing on, as I so often do, on a favorite theme, namely, how various disabling mental conditions, e.g., intoxication or insanity, may confer benefits in making the sufferer more open to spiritual truths a more controlled rationality will attempt to exclude. My prime example was Saint Catherine of Siena. When someone raised the question of old age–whether someone as decrepit as myself gained anything in spiritual wisdom to compensate for the decline in physical well-being and mental powers. I thought of one of my favorite poems, Edmund Waller’s lines on...
Aristotle, Politics III, 1-2
The third book of the Politics is of fundamental importance for understanding the nature of all forms of political association, particularly citizenship, which is to say, legitimate membership in a commonwealth.
Properties of Blood I.8: Spouses and Heirs, Part E
From Kith to Kin to Commonwealth If there is one commonplace that is shared by political theorists who view human societies not as a set of abstractions but as an organism or ecosystem it is that the commonwealth is an outgrowth of the household or family. Wherever we turn—to Aristotle or Cicero, St. Thomas or Althusius, Sir Robert Filmer or French counter-revolutionaries—we find the family at the foundation of the evolving social order. The steps of this theoretical social evolution usually echo Aristotle’s account that traces the coalescence of households into a village and villages into a city or commonwealth. ...
