Yet another GRE essay …
Writing in the fourth century BC, the Greek philosopher Aristotle made two crucial observations in his treatise Politics about the human condition in relation to our nature as political animals: first, that scarcity was the human lot and man could never break free of the competition for scarce resources, and second, that hierarchy in production and organisation could never be erased. It was only those who had the leisure to rule and then be ruled in turn that qualified as citizens for Aristotle’s ideal polis: political equality entailed some degree of material sufficiency and isolation from economic forces. Contemplation, Aristotle noted, could only happen in the absence of material wants, and thus Aristotle designed an entire schema of politics where the household, the oikos, aimed to be a self-sufficient unit that enabled its head to live a political or a contemplative life. That was the hallmark of a good polis, of the ideal city-state. But those subject to the will of the oikos-master, the head of the household, were slaves in Aristotle’s treatise: either slaves by virtue of their position in the household or slaves by virtue of being subject to economic forces and thus having no place, no oikos, where they could retire to at the end of the day. Thus, for Aristotle, the good life was mutually exclusive from the life of toil and penury: but it was only readily available to a few. The welfare of all, the summum bonum, as the medieval schoolmen following his stead called it, lied in everyone recognising their place in society and fulfilling their duty, and for some it meant labour, and for others it meant leisure for intellectual pursuits. I will seek to illustrate that the general welfare of the people is not mutually exclusive from the advancements of those who govern it or exercise intellectual labour in such contexts.
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