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One of the most known and influential Greek philosophers, Aristotle is famously considered to be the “father” of many current disciplines. Among his most notable contributions are his works on philosophy and politics. In fact, the very word “politics”, or “affairs of the city” in Greek, is said to have been first used in Aristotle’s works (Elechi, 2018). A prolific thinker, Aristotle has established many political topics studied today. During the age of democracy, one of the most pressing questions that concern society is what it means to be a good citizen. In his works, Aristotle enunciates that the meaning of being a good citizen is relative to the institution that one is a citizen of.
To investigate what a good citizen would be in the eyes of Aristotle, it is necessary to overview some of Aristotle’s works that have been preserved for centuries. The works that provide the most information on this subject are his Nicomachean Ethics and Politics. As in Aristotle’s view, ethics and politics are intrinsically linked (Elechi, 2018), Nicomachean Ethics and Politics both explore Aristotle’s insights on political science and will serve as the foundation for this overview.
It is worth establishing that Nicomachean Ethics as a body of work consists of ten books, out of which the first five are of most importance for the subject at hand. Book II, III, IV and V serve to provide Aristotle’s opinion on the eleven virtues of man (Pangle, 2018). Aristotle describes the virtues in great detail, delineating their importance. According to Nicomachean Ethics, among the virtues are such qualities as courage, moderation, liberality, greatness of soul, prudence, and justice (Collins, 2022). Out of these virtues, justice is considered to be the most important, encapsulating all others; therefore, it is listed last. Aristotle’s accounts of the virtues also include examples of these virtues as he perceived them, pictured over the course of the life of a good citizen. By listing and describing the virtues in Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle offers his opinion on what it means to be a virtuous man.
Moving forward, the next work to be referred to is Politics. Aristotle intended for this work “to provide generalized teaching for politicians and legislators” (Pezzoli, 2022, p. 313). As Nicomachean Ethics precedes Politics, it provides further ground for it by “elaborating the content of the human good that it is the work of political science to promote” (Pangle, 2018, p. 570). In other words, in Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle defines the way men are virtuous, while in Politics, he centers human virtue and good as the end goal of politics. According to Elechi (2018, p. 193), Aristotle states that “politics applies moral principles to the state while ethics applies those principles to the individual”. Having explored this connection, it becomes apparent that Aristotle’s vision of an ideal citizen would undoubtedly be rooted in ethics and include such qualities as courage, moderation, liberality, justice, and others.
Furthermore, Aristotle’s works contain other considerations regarding what it means to be a good citizen. Aristotle notes three types of governance: monarchy, aristocracy, and politeia (Pezzoli, 2022). These types of states are considered to be morally good; their difference is that monarchy implies one ruler, aristocracy implies several rulers, and politeia implies many rulers. Conversely, Aristotle asserts that institutions can degrade, and names the corresponding corrupted versions of each type of state: tyranny for monarchy, oligarchy for aristocracy, and democracy for politeia (Pezzoli, 2022). From this, we can conclude that, accordingly to Aristotle, a good citizen of an oligarchic state would be different from a good citizen of an aristocratic one, yet he still would be considered a good citizen nonetheless. For that reason, it becomes clear that in Aristotle’s vision, what makes a good citizen is not absolute and shifts depending on one’s type of state.
Most intriguingly, Aristotle admits that a good citizen of a corrupted state does not need to be a virtuous man either. To further understand this, it is worth noting that Aristotle assigns special meaning to the virtue of prudence. In his opinion, prudence is said to be the quality of a good ruler, but not necessarily a good citizen (Mulieri, 2020). Therefore, one can infer that a virtuous man does not have to possess prudence in order to be a good citizen.
To finalize the overview, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Politics have been illuminating in terms of Aristotle’s outlook regarding the ideal citizen. It is established that Aristotle considered courage, moderation, liberality, greatness of soul, and justice to be the moral virtues of man. Therefore, a moral citizen would possess these qualities, as due to the fact that politics and ethics have the common good as their goal, a good citizen must be a moral man. Nonetheless, according to Aristotle’s theory, just institutions of monarchy, aristocracy, and politeia can degenerate and become tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy. Consequently, a citizen of corrupted institutions does not need to possess moral virtues to be considered good. Therefore, Aristotle’s understanding of the ideal citizen is relative to the type of institution.
Reference List
Collins, S. D. (2022) ‘Aristotle on citizenship, the common good, and human happiness’, in McNamara, C. and Shelley, T. (eds.) Citizenship and civic leadership in America. Rowman & Littlefield, pp. 3–16.
Elechi, M. (2018) ‘Critical analysis of Aristotle’s conception of politics’, South-South Journal of Humanities and International Studies, 1, pp. 187–213.
Mulieri, A. (2020) ‘Machiavelli, Aristotle and the Scholastics. The origins of human society and the status of prudence’, Intellectual History Review, 31(4), pp. 495–517. Web.
Pangle, L. S. (2018) ‘The anatomy of courage in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics’, The Review of Politics, 80(4), pp. 569–590.
Pezzoli, F. (2022) ‘Aristotle and the politeia of the Carthaginians’, Araucaria, 49, pp. 311–328.
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