"Suppose Aristotle was right, and the political association really is the highest social good, and we really do stand in relation to the polis as parts to a whole. If so, then we should expect to see that our own excellence is only found in political communities. That might be so. But to observe as much and offer it as evidence for the claim that we are in fact mere parts of a greater whole is a mistake that Aristotle should never have made. After all, among his many other contributions to philosophy, he was the first to have described the fallacy of affirming the consequent."
Aristotle's vision of the collective pursuit of the good through politics has been an inspiration for centuries of communitarians. But it should never be forgotten that attaining this good required, for him, a large population of individuals who were wholly or substantially unfree.
Aristotle took it for granted that the good could only be pursued by a small, elite minority of the population of a city. All others were to labor in their service, and yet they would take no share of the communal benefit that came from politics.
Modern communitarians are very properly shocked and dismayed by this aspect of Aristotle. Yet even our modern and aspirationally egalitarian democracies struggle with a similar problem: There is, in truth, only so much rulership to go around, and if the good consists of civic participation in the polis to the extent that Athenian citizens participated, almost none of us are good. Almost none of us can be.
Civic participation is an utopian target in my country, Turkey, and even in the western countries that defend democracy verbally! Do we really choose our representatives in the parliments? Or are they assigned according to some benefit holders' choices. Nobody really cares what we need or think or want... All they want is to cummulate power and use against us, I mean it for all the politicians around the world.
Thanks for the article, it's illuminative
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Who, what do you quote? It was not Aristotle but Plato who conceptualized people as parts of a whole.
As an empiricist Aristotle observed the reality that there simply is nothing good in the world without also something being bad; which explains why suffering is the stuff of art, slavery, of civilization.
I agree with your point about civic participation in today's mass welfare-democracies as compared with elitist democratic Athens. The conclusion you draw should be mended slightly: although virtue can most fully be cultivated in the political life, whilst less so in philosophy and even less in mere economic sovereignty, all this is civic participation, and in this forum civic virtue is performed to varying extents (and qualities) by all participants.
Now for the dependent, mean and indigent even, goodness is not out of the question in Aristotle's mind, goodness of soul, that is, of personal interrelations. But in terms of civic life - he is speaking of goodness of character, virtue, in other words - such people cannot be good, and so your final statement describes them.
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