In book VII of the Politics, Aristotle follows his teacher Plato in investigating the best regime (1323a14), discussing both its immaterial and its material conditions. In the course of his inquiry, he addresses the question of what city will house the best regime. When it comes to size and number, he formulates an important requirement: the best city must be eusunoptos (Politics 1326b25, 1327a2–3). Literally this means “well seen together,” but it is generally translated as “easily taken in at a glance” or “well taken in at one view.”Footnote ¹ This requirement is intriguing, as it links two crucial human and political concerns: the concern for wholeness and unity with the concern for visibility. Without either, no effective collective action, no law, and no politics are possible. Only just before, Aristotle pointed out that “with a view to deciding questions of justice and in order to distribute the offices according to merit, it is necessary for the citizens to know one another, what kind they are” (Politics 1326b17).Footnote ²

For a long time, Aristotle's “synoptic” best city was closely connected to the view of the ancient polis as a small, compact, and surveyable “face-to-face” society, with Athens as its most shining example.Footnote ³ Though highly influential throughout the history of political thought, this view received mixed reactions in our times. Contemporary conservative and communitarian thinkers have hailed it as a normative and critical standard against modern liberal individualism.Footnote ⁴ In response, their liberal and progressive counterparts have denounced it as leading to the suppression of the diversity, complexity, and liberty that are characteristic of modern society.Footnote ⁵ On both sides of the political spectrum, however, it survives implicitly in the contemporary critique of representative democracy and its concomitant appeal to direct or participatory democracy: according to this critique, even if political representation is acknowledged as unavoidable due to the complexities of contemporary society, it remains second best to having all members of the community assembled and present in order to participate in genuine collective decision making.Footnote ⁶ In the background, Aristotle's requirement that the city be “easily taken in at a glance” continues to radiate the appeal of a putative original directness that gets lost time and again in the practice of politics.

But is this interpretation sound? In this article, I will argue, not only that the connection between Aristotle's best city and the actual ancient polis is both historically inaccurate and conceptually flawed, but also and more importantly that Aristotle's requirement that the best city be eusunoptos is in fact more ambiguous and merits closer attention than contemporary scholarship has allowed. Rather than being a solution, I submit, it serves to bring to the surface a problem ingredient to the claim to unity of every political community. As a result, it resists both the communitarian adoption and the liberal rejection. To bear this out, I will first briefly address the historical question. Secondly, I will examine the few other instances where Aristotle uses eusunoptos, in order to bring out his understanding of the term. Subsequently, I will focus on the way it is used in the Politics, drawing conclusions and finally returning to the contemporary debate.

Seeing the City

It is very doubtful, to say the least, that Aristotle was thinking at all of actual poleis, to say nothing of Athens itself, in setting his requirements concerning the best regime and the best city. Half a century before the Politics was written, the rhetorician Isocrates had already observed about Athens: “because of its magnitude and the multitude of its inhabitants it is neither easy to survey (eusunoptos) nor sharply defined, but like a swollen river haphazardly picking up and carrying along each thing, both human beings and things.”Footnote ⁷ In our times, along similar lines, J. L. Myres noted that the entire territory of Attica fails to meet the requirements set by Aristotle: “But Attica is a promontory, an aktē, plunged in the sea at the far end of the main watershed of peninsular Greece; and filled also with abrupt and lofty mountains, which prevent it from being ‘easy to oversee’ (eusunoptos) in the sense prescribed by Aristotle for his ideal city state.”Footnote ⁸ Likewise, Stephen Holmes points out that “the one-thousand square miles of Attica were not ‘easily surveyable,’ and its population of sometimes up to 40,000 adult male citizens far exceeded the limit placed on philosophically ‘ideal’ states.”Footnote ⁹ More generally, Bernard Yack argues: “it is a mistake to conceive of actual ancient poleis as small-town societies in which everyone knew everyone else.”Footnote ¹⁰

For some commentators, this discrepancy actually casts a shadow over the whole of Aristotle's discussion of the best regime. Thus, Andreas Osiander notes: “the point is sometimes made that the polis could only function as a small community. Aristotle argues that if the citizens did not know each other personally, it would be too easy for foreigners and metics to pass themselves off as citizens, and therefore the polis should be ‘easy to take in at a glance’ (eusýnoptos). In fact, as is often the case with his discussion of ‘polis matters,’ Aristotle rationalizes rather than explains an existing situation.”Footnote ¹¹ While Osiander's criticism is apposite to some extent, it misses the mark, if only because it fails to take into account the context: Aristotle's intention is not to explain an existing situation in the first place, but to examine the conditions for the best regime. In this latter respect, some rationalization is perhaps not amiss, provided it is properly understood. Nevertheless, the question remains: if the actual Greek polis did not even begin to meet the requirement set by Aristotle, what did he have in mind in formulating it? In fact, the term eusunoptos is as rare in Aristotle's work as it is in ancient Greek in general. In order to get a firmer grip on its meaning for Aristotle, let us take a look at its occurrences in his other works.

Period and Plot

Apart from the Politics, Aristotle uses eusunoptos only in two other works: the Rhetoric and the Poetics, both of which deal with literary construction and poetic production.Footnote ¹² In the Rhetoric, it occurs twice in book III, which is devoted to style. In the first occurrence, criticizing the dithyrambic mode of the ancient poets as too long-winded, he praises the periodic style with its short speeches or periods: “by period I mean a speech/talk (lexis) that has a proper beginning and end in itself and a magnitude that is well seen together (eusunoptos)” (Rhetoric 1409a). As Aristotle goes on to argue, being limited, periods are easier to learn and to memorize, because “the hearer always supposes that he grasps something and that some conclusion has been reached” (Rhetoric 1409b). In this context, it is important to note that being eusunoptos is connected with seeming: it helps in producing an appearance of wholeness, which at the same time conceals the fact that it is artificial.

The second occurrence is in a section devoted to a discussion of styles of civic rhetoric, in this case the deliberative (or political) and the forensic (or judicial): compared to the former which is inexact like a rough sketch (skiagraphia, lit. “shadow-painting”), “the forensic style is more precise, and more so before a single judge, because there is the least rhetoric in it; for what is proper and what is foreign to the subject is easier to take in at a glance (eusunoptos)” (Rhetoric 1414a). Here, the function of rhetorical wholeness runs parallel to that of political wholeness: it allows one to include what belongs and to exclude what does not. However, in the context Aristotle makes it clear that the precision of forensic rhetoric, like the approximate imprecision of deliberative and epideictic rhetoric, is deceptive insofar as it too is based on a skillful manipulation of appearances. His remark on Homer's use of asyndeta proves to apply in general to rhetorical style: “the hearer seems (dokei) to oversee (hupereidein) many things” (Rhetoric 1414a). As in the case of periods, there is an intimate connection between limitation, order, and beauty, but this connection is based on the artificial—technical—construction of wholeness.Footnote ¹³

This impression is reinforced when we turn to the Poetics, where eusunoptos occurs twice. The first time is in the section where Aristotle discusses “well-put-together stories/plots (muthoi)” in tragedy, which he has just defined as “an imitation of an action that is of stature and complete, with magnitude” (Poetics 1450b24–25). Hence, it comes as no surprise to learn that, just as beautiful bodies and animals “must be easy to take in at a glance (eusunoptos), so also in the case of plots they must have a length, and this must easily be remembered (eumnēmoneutos)” (Poetics 1451a4–6).Footnote ¹⁴ For this reason, he later praises Homer's decision not “to make the [Trojan] war a whole” in the Iliad as most felicitous, “for the story would otherwise have tended to be much too great and not easily seen at one time (eusunoptos)” (Poetics 1459a32–33).Footnote ¹⁵ Like rhetoric, poetry divides up an unsurveyable whole into parts and turns those parts into surveyable wholes. Thus, it is no accident that Aristotle sets the requirement right after he has discussed the role of sight or spectacle (opsis) in tragedy. Opsis is at once the most inconspicuous and the most important aspect of poetic mimēsis, insofar as it is the implicit perspective from which the actions and the plot are selected. Though itself invisible, it is that which makes visibility and appearances possible. In this sense, “opsis has all” of tragedy (Poetics 1450a13–14). In the present context, it underscores the fact that being eusunoptos is the result of poetic invention and intervention.

Thus, it is perhaps no accident that both occurrences of eusunoptos in the Poetics are either immediately preceded or immediately followed by praise of the greatest poet. Just after the first occurrence, Aristotle sets Homer apart from the other poets in that “it is likely he beautifully saw” (Poetics 1451a24–25), by which is meant that he was capable of making a whole in which every part is necessary.Footnote ¹⁶ And when, just before the second occurrence, Aristotle praises Homer's choice in the latter's own idiom, saying he “appears to speak in a divine way” like an oracle, this is apposite in more than one way: it also suggests that the poet's capacity for “seeing beautifully” is intimately related to his ability to adopt a divine, bird's-eye perspective with regard to his material (Poetics 1459a31–32). As the final mention of Homer in the Poetics suggests, this ability is creative and constructive: “Homer has been especially effective in teaching everyone else how they must speak falsehoods” (Poetics 1460a19–20). Just before, Aristotle had given one of the reasons: “alone of the poets he is not ignorant of what he himself ought to do. For the poet himself ought to speak least” (Poetics 1460a6–8). In other words, Homer knows to disappear behind the opsis of his work.

Prayer and Politics

However, Aristotle also points out that, while this level of poetic endowment is extremely rare, the failure of most tragic poets to produce beautiful plots is not only due to their own flaws. Another factor, he explains, is “the weakness of the spectators. For the poets follow the spectators, making their poetry according to prayer (kat' euchēn)” (Poetics 1453a35–36). In other words, the poets tend too much to cater to what the audience wishes to see: the triumph of justice in a happy ending. This remark brings to light an intriguing connection between the Poetics and the Politics.Footnote ¹⁷ For, as an attentive reading of the book in question shows, the expression kat' euchēn provides a key to Aristotle's guiding intention in the Politics. Thus, book II opens as follows: “Since we have undertaken to investigate the things concerning the political community, what is the strongest of all for those who are capable of living the life that is the best according to prayer (kat' euchēn)” (Politics 1260b27–29). Similarly, at the beginning of book IV Aristotle anticipates book VII when he asserts that the first task of the science of politics is to investigate the best regime, “what it is and how it would be if it were to come into being according to prayer if there are no impediments from outside” (Politics 1288b23–24). And when, further on, he raises the question as to what is the best regime and the best life for most cities and most human beings, he clearly indicates that the criteria to be used are neither virtue nor education nor the endowments of nature, nor the equipment of fate, nor “the regime that comes into being according to prayer” (Politics 1295a26–30).

When we turn to book VII, it becomes apparent that the expression is nothing less than a leitmotif. Indeed, as a number of contemporary commentators have noted, there is a marked difference between the first six books of the Politics and the final two, in that Aristotle seems to turn abruptly from the more practical and “realistic” approach of the former to an apparently theoretical and “idealistic” treatment in the latter.Footnote ¹⁸ Although interpretations vary, they agree that the shift is indicated by Aristotle's systematic use of kat' euchēn.Footnote ¹⁹ As I will go on to argue, it is no less germane to the discussion of the eusunoptos requirement regarding multitude and territory.

People and Place

To start our investigation, let us focus on the immediate context. In fact, Aristotle uses eusunoptos three times in book VII. The first time it occurs at the beginning, when he argues that the question regarding the best regime cannot be answered without raising the preliminary question of what is the most choiceworthy life of the individual. Viewed “in the light of the deeds” (Politics 1323a40), this life must by characterized by the correct balance between external goods, the goods of the body, and the goods of the soul. However, Aristotle adds, only when we look at the matter “in accordance with reason (kata ton logon)” does it become clear, or to be more exact, is it “easy to survey” (eusunoptos) (Politics 1323b7). For then we learn that, whereas external goods and goods of the body have limits, the goods of the soul do not, since the former goods are always only goods for the sake of the soul (tēs psuchēs heneken) (Politics 1323b19). Seeing things clearly together, which involves recognizing and drawing limits, requires an operation of logos, and hence of the soul, which consists in capturing, managing, and organizing appearances.

Accordingly, Aristotle establishes a fundamental parallel between the best collective life and the best individual life on the basis of virtue, the good order of the soul: “the best life, both for each separately and in common for the cities, is the life with virtue equipped to this extent that it allows taking part in actions with regard to virtue” (Politics 1323b40–1324a2). The happiest life of the community, he argues, is of necessity the same as that of the individual: the life of doing and faring well (eupraxia), which as the highest action is performed for its own sake (autoteleis). As a result, we are led to expect, the best regime, “if it is not to come into being against reason (paralogon),” will be autarchic, self-oriented, and self-contained to the highest degree (Politics 1323a19). By establishing this parallel, Aristotle reconnects the Politics with the Nicomachean Ethics, at the very beginning of which he defines the end of political science as “the human good” and considers that “if it is the same for the individual and for the city, that of the city appears to be greater and more perfect” (Ethics 1094b7).

Even though Aristotle abandons the conditional mode in the Politics, this does not render the parallel unproblematic. For he appends a nuance that qualifies the ostensible superiority of the practical life over the theoretical life: “the active life is not necessarily in relation to others, as some suppose, nor are only those acts of thinking active which are undertaken for the sake of those things that result from acting, but much more the contemplations and thoughts that are their own end (autoteleis) and for their own sake. For the end is faring well, which is a kind of action” (Politics 1325b17–21). If contemplation and thinking are the model of autotelic action and faring well, it remains to be seen how and to what extent this model can be transposed to the best city.Footnote ²⁰

This brings us to the context of the second instance. Aristotle subsequently moves from the best regime to discussing the characteristics of the city that underlies it as its necessary and proper material equipment. As to this equipment, he distinguishes two basic parts: a multitude of citizens and a territory or place. In both cases he then goes on to set the famous requirement that they be eusunoptos:

In both sections, Aristotle seems to suggest that size matters: if either the multitude or the territory becomes too large, self-sufficiency will be impossible. At the same time, it becomes clear that self-sufficiency is strongly predicated on keeping at bay and excluding outsiders who may endanger it. With regard to the territory, being eusunoptos primarily serves the end of defending the city against its enemies: the territory “must be hard to enter for the enemies, but easy to exit for [the people] themselves” (Politics 1326b41–42). The same holds for the requirement with regard to the multitude: if the multitude is too big, “it will not be easy for the regime to come into being; who will be commander of a very excessive multitude? Who will be herald who has not the voice of a Stentor?” (Politics 1326b6–7). Moreover, excessive size renders it impossible for the citizens “to know one another, what kind they are,” and thus to settle properly questions of adjudication and distribution of offices (Politics 1326b17). Finally, it also complicates detecting and repelling the enemy within: “for strangers and metics it is easy to have a share in the regime: for it is not difficult to be unseen through excessiveness of the multitude” (Politics 1326b21–22). In each case, eusunoptos and the limits it entails serve to avert any threats to the best city's self-sufficiency and self-rule.

Distance, Proximity, and Power

Comparing the first instance of eusunoptos with the second and third in book VII, it would seem that Aristotle shifts from the conceptual to the material, from the theoretical to the practical. But is this really the case? Is it really only a matter of size and defense? If we look more closely at the second and third instances, some questions are in order.

To begin with, in requiring that the territory be easy to survey, Aristotle omits that this facilitates offense no less than defense. If the territory is eusunoptos, it is no less so for an enemy venturing to conquer it. This is borne out when one takes a look at how eusunoptos is used by other authors. Although, as noted, the word is quite rare in Greek, it is used most frequently by ancient historiographers with regard to situations of armed conflict, where either one sees or is seen by an enemy, either deliberately or involuntarily. Thus, it is typically used when one easily spots an enemy army from the ramparts of one's city, or when one's army is easily perceived by an enemy looking out from the ramparts of his city.Footnote ²¹ In both cases, for something to be eusunoptos requires distance: an object can only be “easily taken in at a glance” from a certain remove, a bird's-eye view, as it were, whence the differences between the parts retreat in favor of the unity of the whole. Thus, simply to observe or to ascertain that a multitude or a territory is eusunoptos cannot be done from within either of them, but only from outside and at a certain remove. What in fact consists of separate or separable parts (individuals) can only be seen as one whole (a group) from the perspective of an Other in an other place.Footnote ²²

At the same time, while it is true that the object will not be seen as a meaningful whole if the viewpoint is too close, the object will not be seen as a meaningful whole if the viewpoint is too far away. In the latter case, the heterogeneity of the parts can no longer be recognized, so that the whole cannot be defined as this or that particular whole, in this case, friends or enemies. Thus, it would seem that eusunoptos involves a process of negotiating the proximity of a practical perspective and the distance of a theoretical perspective. In this respect, calling something eusunoptos requires an operation of concretization as well as of abstraction, which involves both the eyes and the mind or the soul, while the heterogeneity of the parts is not lost from view.

With regard to the context in which Aristotle sets the requirement, this raises the further question: easy to survey by and for whom? In other words, whose perspective is involved in being eusunoptos? On first appraisal, two options suggest themselves. The first is the perspective of the citizen. According to Richard Kraut, who rehearses the received view, Aristotle's requirement “implies that the number of citizens should be small enough for them to recognize each other. Aristotle's ideal community, unlike Classical Athens, is a ‘face-to-face society.’”Footnote ²³ However, this reading in the key of mutual recognition already moves away from the plain meaning of eusunoptos as it is used in the two passages. Strictly interpreted, it requires that every citizen be able to easily take in the multitude of all his fellow citizens within the regime's territory, as a whole within a whole, so to speak. Thus, Pierre Manent, who otherwise shares Kraut's “face-to-face” reading, takes it to mean that the community as a whole must be immediately present to each of its members.Footnote ²⁴

However, on both counts this interpretation disregards a number of practical difficulties. Earlier on in the Politics, Aristotle argues that the size of the population may be too small: when at one point the number of Sparta's citizens fell below a thousand, defense became impossible (Politics 1270a29–34). But if this is indicative of the minimal size of the citizen body, it becomes hard to imagine how even in the best city each citizen would be able to know, command, or address all the others, let alone to survey the whole citizen body at a glance.Footnote ²⁵ For a citizen residing among his fellow citizens within the territory of the city, it is strictly speaking impossible to adopt a synoptic perspective. In order to see the multitude and the territory as a whole that is immediately present, he would need to leave both in order to find an external vantage point.Footnote ²⁶ As we will see, one may wonder whether an external viewpoint is not implied even in face-to-face relationships between as few as two citizens. Citizenship would then require negotiating two viewpoints—one from within, based on proximity and participation, and one from without, based on distance and observation—that are mutually dependent.

A second option that would appear to tackle this difficulty is to assimilate the perspective of eusunoptos with a position of power and authority. Thus, James P. Dougherty notes: “if Aristotle required in his Politics … that a city be eusunoptos—easily taken in by a single view—only the city king has that view.”Footnote ²⁷ In a more critical vein, Lawrence Manley acknowledges “Aristotle's dictum that the shape of a city should be eusynoptos, easily taken in at a glance so that the citizens feel they are comprised in one body,” but he also invites us to take into account “the more sinister implications of the eusynopsis … in which the all-encompassing view can be taken in only from one central point, the seat of power.”Footnote ²⁸ Plausible though this suggestion may be, it fails to address the problem mentioned above. If surveying the body of citizens at a glance is the exclusive reserve of the seat of power, that seat must necessarily be located at sufficient remove from, if not altogether outside of, both the multitude and the territory that constitute its dominion. It is not clear from the context that Aristotle indeed has this in mind in formulating his requirement. However, even if we suppose that he does, the difficulty remains ingredient even to the best regime. Regardless of the appropriate size of its multitude and territory, to assert or even to require that they be eusunoptos presupposes a vantage point outside and beyond.

Hence, I would suggest that the problem lies elsewhere, to wit, in the alleged shift from the conceptual to the material use of eusunoptos. More exactly, the question is whether Aristotle actually does—and intends to—shift. Perhaps we must wonder whether he does not understand the second and third instance of eusunoptos in book VII in the light of the first. More importantly, we must wonder whether in doing so Aristotle does not wish to suggest that the material is somehow always blended with the conceptual, or the practical with the theoretical, even—and perhaps particularly so—in the realm of politics.Footnote ²⁹ If this is the case, it is doubtful whether any political community, even the best regime of the city according to prayer, can ever be literally eusunoptos.

The Problem of Statecraft

In order to clarify this issue, it is worth turning to the opening of the section in which Aristotle sets the requirement with regard to the multitude and the territory:

The section as a whole is based on an analogy between legislators and statesmen on the one hand, and craftsmen on the other, or between law, politics, and statesmanship on the one hand and the arts on the other. Craftsmen must have material that has been suitably prepared, like properly carded wool or properly sawn wood, in order to make a beautiful product. Similarly, the statesman and lawgiver require equipment that has been suitably prepared, like a multitude of citizens and a territory.

In spite of, or perhaps because of, its intuitive appeal—notice Aristotle's almost casual reference to “the other craftsmen”—the analogy papers over a number of important differences, precisely with regard to the “things” that must of necessity “be presupposed in advance according to what is prayed for.”Footnote ³¹ As Richard Kraut observes, while the artisan has little to no control over his raw materials or his instruments and is dependent on chance or fate (tuchē), the statesman and the legislator are less constrained: “in some cases the legislator's training—his study of ethics, political systems, and so on—puts him in a good position to change the kind and amount of equipment with which he works.”Footnote ³² As distinguished from the artisan, Kraut adds, the statesman-lawgiver not only has knowledge but also political power, which allows him to shape his material. One might add that this power applies to the territory no less than to the multitude: to some extent, the statesman-legislator may alter the location of the community. However this may be, it may explain why Aristotle distinguishes between the material (hulē) of the artisans and the equipment (chorēgia) of the statesman-lawgiver. Chorēgia refers to the activities of the chorēgos, who is responsible for selecting, training, accommodating, and financing a chorus for public dramatic performances, events with a marked political significance, and in which opsis and synopsis play no mean role.Footnote ³³ Compared to the craftsman, both the chorēgos and the statesman-lawgiver are less dependent on chance and more able to shape their materials.

However, this raises further questions. Granted that the statesman-lawgiver has more leeway with regard to his materials, what do we make of Aristotle's demand that the latter “ought to have been begun suitably”? With regard to the territory, one can imagine that it has to do with favorable geographical conditions being in place. What it means for the multitude, however, is far from clear. Compared to the artisan's material, human equipment is at once more flexible and more recalcitrant. Does Aristotle imply that the multitude ought to consist of citizens who already meet the requirements set by the best regime with regard to virtue and happiness? If that is the case, considering the paucity of the virtuous (Politics 1302a1–3), it remains to be seen whether a sufficient number can be brought together to form a political community. Alternately, if they don't meet the requirements, does it mean that they require further education? Aristotle seems to suggest as much when he says that “the lawgiver ought to be concerned with how good men come into being and through what habits, and what is the end of the best life” (Politics 1333a11–16). But this concern appears theoretical and philosophical rather than practical. As Kraut points out, however, this interpretation seems to be excluded by Aristotle's assertion that it is impossible for most to attain the good life and the happiness required by the best regime (see Politics 1288b25–26, 1328a38–42, 1331b39–1332a4).Footnote ³⁴

In both cases, then, it would seem that as far as the citizen body is concerned, the best regime ought already to be in place, either partially or completely, before the statesman-legislator is able to start to work on it. This problem attending the founding of Aristotle's best regime is strangely akin to a paradox signaled much later by Rousseau in The Social Contract:

This is not to deny the great differences between Aristotle and Rousseau: to mention only the most obvious, Rousseau denies the Aristotelian premise that man is a political animal. However, it seems that, beyond these differences, both are aware of a genuine problem inherent in the founding of a polity. For a political community to be founded successfully, its members would already have to be before the founding what they should become as a result of the founding, to wit, virtuous and happy citizens. From the analysis of Aristotle's account, it would seem that this paradox besets even the establishment of the best regime in the city according to prayer. Even here, good citizenship and good common institutions presuppose one another indissolubly.Footnote ³⁶

As is well known, Rousseau tries to solve the paradox by subsequently invoking the figure of the superhuman Legislator, who has the genius and the talent both to establish good institutions and to educate good citizens at the same time, by claiming divine inspiration and divine authority. In Aristotle's account, the anonymous instance—chance, acting as a chorēgos—that ensures multitude and territory are suitably prepared seems to fulfill a function analogous to that of Rousseau's Legislator. As many commentators have argued, however, Rousseau's introduction of the Legislator is a deus ex machina who does not really solve the problem of circularity, but rather begs the question.Footnote ³⁷ Similarly, the analogy between politics and arts that underlies the foundation of the best regime rather brings to light the problem inherent in the very notion of “statecraft.” Like the other artisans, the statesman-legislator aims to bring together what is disparate into a coherent and stable whole, like weaving different strands into a strong mesh or joining wooden planks into a seaworthy ship.Footnote ³⁸ Unlike the artisans, and perhaps more like the chorēgos, the human equipment he deals with must already constitute a whole, a political community of citizens, if he wishes to succeed at all in establishing the best city.

The human equipment, however, is at once more susceptible and more resistant, and to this extent, the community remains dependent on the initiative and the talent of the statesman-legislator in order to be shaped into the best city. This means that the citizen community of the best regime is neither entirely pre-given nor entirely produced: rather, it remains suspended between these two poles, and cannot be reduced to either. As a result, the statecraft involved in establishing the best regime requires a “making” that goes beyond both the other arts and chorēgia, and which is more akin to poetry. This becomes apparent when we broaden the focus to the discussion of multitude and territory in book VII as a whole.

Bleak Beauty: Political Cosmetics

Once we move beyond the complexities of the opening passage, the ramifications of the city according to prayer to be informed by the best regime turn out to be no less surprising. Laying out its essential characteristics, Aristotle introduces a series of remarkable requirements with regard to both the inhabitants and the territory, punctually justifying them as “according to prayer.” Moreover, in these requirements the political becomes indissolubly mixed up with the cosmetic and the artificial. Immediately after having argued that the territory should be eusunoptos, Aristotle turns to the city's location: “as to the position of the city, if it must be made according to prayer (kat' euchēn), it is fitting that it lie beautifully (kalōs) with regard to the sea and the land” (Politics 1327a4–5). This beauty, however, is hard to achieve, since Aristotle goes on to require that the city be both near the sea for reasons of trade and removed from it in order to avoid external influence—after all, the best regime is autotelic and modeled on the best life of the individual.Footnote ³⁹ Similarly, the land is divided in such a way as to serve both private and public ends at the same time.

The connection between what is according to prayer and what is beautiful acquires a darker shade when it comes to the people. Aristotle flatly denies citizenship to that part of the city that is generally most disruptive and refractory to political planning: the dēmos or lower classes, which include farmers, artisans, and merchants. For them, he argues, there is no place in “the most beautifully (kallista) ministered city” (Politics 1328b38). In fact, he even goes so far as to argue that farmers, “if it must be according to prayer,” should best be slaves (Politics 1330a26). Together with the artisans and merchants, the farmers are thus reduced to the status of mere instruments for the maintenance of the city according to prayer. By the same token, the cosmetic subjection of the dēmos renders the beautiful city's claim to justice questionable.Footnote ⁴⁰ For it effectively amounts to instituting slavery by law or convention, which Aristotle rejected as unjust in book I of the Politics. The beautiful city's political justice, it seems, rests uncomfortably on the despotic justice that characterizes the relationship between master and slave.Footnote ⁴¹ As Bernard Yack points out, book VII of the Politics is primarily concerned with articulating “the necessary conditions of happiness rather than the principles of perfect justice.”Footnote ⁴² In this respect, we certainly shouldn't forget that the discussion of happiness in book VII rests on a problematic parallel between individual and political happiness.Footnote ⁴³

The conflation of politics and cosmetics, of the material and the conceptual, and of the practical and the theoretical comes to a head in the urban planning and architecture of the city according to prayer. Thus, “the site of the city itself must be prayed to be successfully placed on a steep slope” (Politics 1330a37–38). In this way, it is destined perfectly to imitate its internal political hierarchy, with the temples and rulers' lodgings uphill and the marketplace below. As Aristotle explains, the construction and placing of the buildings serve cosmetic as well as political (in this case polemic) ends, to the extent that the two meanings of kalon—the noble and the beautiful—seem to be perfectly combined: “for this is the beautiful/noble (kalōs) condition with regard to safety and with regard to order/ornament (kosmos)” (Politics 1330b31–32). Similarly, the walls of the city according to prayer have a function that is as much defensive as decorative: “so that not only must walls be built round a city, but also they must be cared for so that with respect to the city they may hold suitably both in relation to ornament/order (kosmos) and in relation to the needs of war” (Politics 1331a12–14).

Finally, people and place are all but fused into an ordered and ornamental whole, when Aristotle suggests that the multitude of citizens be divided and distributed into common meals (sussitia), each of which should be located at one of the many guard-posts that punctuate the walls: “and these things can be arrayed (diakosmeō) in this manner” (Politics 1331a23–24). In the end, it seems that even those admitted to citizenship can hardly escape being turned into things, albeit objects without any practical purpose, like gemstones set in a necklace. Already in book I, Aristotle had invoked myth to enjoin us to beware of what we wish for: when king Midas's prayer was answered, everything he touched turned to gold and became useless for human life (Politics 1257b16–18). As if touched by Midas, the city according to prayer is beautiful, but its civic life is quite static and inert, with comprehensive and massive regulation of both intellectual and physical human life.Footnote ⁴⁴ As Aristotle stresses, both its business and its military strategy are for the sake of leisure (Politics 1333a40–b1). However, for its condition of leisure to endure unperturbed under actual conditions, it should be either a worldwide despotism (cf. Politics 1334a2–3) or the splendid isolation of, “as the poets say,” the Islands of the Blessed (Politics 1334a31–32).

Surveying the discussion of the equipment of the city according to prayer in book VII, one comes away with an image that is too good to be true. Necessity, utility, and ornament coincide, or rather are made to coincide in a spectacular way, while those elements that might produce tensions and contradictions are suppressed and “prayed away.” According to Michael Davis, “Aristotle excludes the demos as most recalcitrant to this sort of coincidence and then transforms the city into a place where nothing is accidental. It becomes a poem in which the parts seem at first as haphazard as the events of real life but in the end fit together like a book. … Only in a regime that is like a poem can the tension between the good of the part and the good of the whole be resolved.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Moreover, in its splendid isolation, with its external and bodily goods selected and coordinated for the sake of its cosmetic splendor, the best city comes to resemble the contemplating individual, autotelic, self-contained, and at peace. At the same time, this resemblance brings to light the fundamental difference between the “doing well” of an individual human being (as distinguished from a citizen) and that of a political community of citizens. At the beginning of book VII, it will be remembered, Aristotle remained ambiguous as to the meaning of the active life, suggesting that contemplation in solitude is in fact more active than the political life. Although in the remainder of the book this nuance is obscured by repeated assertions of the identity of individual and collective perfection, the characteristics of the best city indicate that this identity is artificial to a high degree. Perhaps this is why Aristotle almost turns the legislator for the best regime into a poet by giving him the task of inculcating this identity into his subjects, who thereby are transformed from humans into citizens: “The same things are best for individuals and for communities, and it is necessary that the lawgiver implant (empoiein) these things in the souls of human beings” (Politics 1333b37–39). In this light, it comes as no surprise that book VIII of the Politics, which is entirely devoted to education, ends with a discussion of poetry.

Political Wholeness

If this interpretation is correct, I submit that one important element of Aristotle's poetico-political strategy is the requirement of eusunoptos. Just like the other characteristics of the city according to prayer, it is a poetic or rhetorical device and as such part and parcel of Aristotle's deliberate conflation of politics and cosmetics, as well as of the identification of the individual and the collective best life that underlies it. It is a preliminary but major step in its chorēgia, aimed at making the city beautiful, turning its territory into a stage and its multitude into a cast, by subjecting it to the view of an external spectator. In this sense, the first occurrence of eusunoptos in book VII, as discussed earlier on, turns out to be programmatic: of the best city, it may be said that “only when looking at it in accordance with reason is it easily surveyable” (Politics 1323b7–8). That is, it only becomes surveyable from a theoretical viewpoint, which in the perspective of praxis can only be approximated in and through poetry. Going even further, we may wonder whether anything, perhaps even an individual, can ever be said to be eusunoptos without such an operation.

The purpose of this device, however, concurs with that of the general design of the city according to prayer, in that it points up an important problem of politics. Rendering a political community eusunoptos is an operation that runs parallel to that in rhetoric and poetry. It makes what is not strictly speaking a whole appear as a whole; it thereby enables us to include what is proper to the whole and to exclude what is not; and, last but not least, it gives us the impression that we oversee many things in a single glance. In this way, it makes effective collective action and political decision making possible.

Like its poetic and rhetorical counterparts, political wholeness depends on an artificial, symbolic operation: in this case, it necessarily presupposes a viewpoint that is not located within the whole it constitutes, and that therefore can never be completely assimilated within the whole. It is part of what Aristotle elsewhere calls “the order/adornment (kosmos) of sight/spectacle (opsis)” (Poetics 1449b34). In other words, citizenship requires human beings to be in at least two places and to play two different roles at the same time: as participants engaged, embedded, and immersed in community life, and as spectators who speculate and anticipate on the overarching meaning of that life. Since the two places and roles never coincide, they are always interdependent: each necessarily refers to the other in order to find its bearings. The ambiguity of citizenship that comes to light in this way seems to be related to an ambiguity that surfaces right at the beginning of book VII. According to Aristotle, the citizens of the best regime are those who “fare best” by “doing the best things” (Politics 1323a14–19). This means that they are at once the means and the end of the regime, just as their virtue unites the noble and the useful.Footnote ⁴⁶ Here already, the best regime brings together under one viewpoint what in other regimes is always more or less at variance. This may also explain why Aristotle uses eusunoptos and not simply sunoptos, which might have sufficed: the eu (“well,” “good”) connects it to the eupraxia, the faring well by doing well that is characteristic of the best regime.

However, the key parallel in the Poetics, between beautiful bodies and animals on the one hand and beautiful plots on the other, which serves to underpin the requirement of eusunoptos in poetry, also reveals an important nuance. In the case of plots, the simultaneity of eusunoptos is impossible, Aristotle points out: otherwise a poetic work, either epic or tragic, would be like a painting instead of a sequence of events. This explains why he asserts that, whereas bodies and animals must be eusunoptos, plots must be eumnēmoneutos, “easily remembered” (Poetics 1451a4–6): their wholeness is defined in terms of time, not space.

In the case of the best regime in the Politics, this brings to light two interesting problems. To begin with, insofar as it is eusunoptos, the city according to prayer is more like a beautiful but static picture, and the movement that is added subsequently does little to alter that: it is mechanical and repetitive, as might seem to be appropriate for an autotelic regime. What is missing in the city according to prayer are time and action: they are suppressed together with the elements that provoke tension and conflict and thereby threaten its unity. Constructed like a poem, the city according to prayer is almost ahistorical: its unity has been immunized against change as far as possible, while anything that points to temporality and historicity has been suppressed. By the same token, however, it has become apolitical: the class conflicts and disagreements about the good and the just that characterize actual political life have disappeared. To this extent, I agree with Bernard Yack's thesis that the best regime cannot be viewed as the capstone of a political teleology.Footnote ⁴⁷ Rather than being the culmination of a natural process, it lays bare the complex and refractory relationship between individual and collective perfection and happiness by modeling the latter on the former, in order to show how this relationship animates actual regimes. Even if, according to Aristotle, no actual political community is truly well ordered, the peculiarities of the best regime reveal that the community that is well ordered to the highest degree is no longer political.

At the same time, the difference between bodies and plots shows that political unity is intimately connected with memory and narrative: for a political community to view itself and act on itself as a whole, easy to take in at a glance, it must be able to see and remember itself as involved in a plot, a common history. However, both are never simply historical facts, but poetic and rhetorical constructs, involving a similar symbolic operation that presents as a whole what is never a whole. In this way, Aristotle suggests that poetry, rather than being a product or accompaniment of political life, is actually constitutive of it. In the Poetics, he suggests that the traditional distinction between action (prattein) and poetic production (poiein), as well as that between action and the dramatic imitation (mimēsis) of action, may well be spurious (Poetics 1448b1–2). Human action always lays claim to a wholeness that does not yet exist but which it must necessarily postulate in order to get going. To this end, it must rely on poetry, which furnishes the means that allow us to view our action as if it were a whole before it is completed or even undertaken. Poetry, in other words, enables us to view our actions and their context as a whole, even though this wholeness always comes too early. In this way, poetry not only completes but constitutes action, as Michael Davis suggests: “Poetry makes it possible to experience our action as whole before it is whole. This wholeness then becomes part of the experience itself. Or rather, since the conjunction does not really occur temporally, poetry constitutes the experience.”Footnote ⁴⁸ In whatever we undertake, we are guided by a fabricated vision of our action as if it were already completed, a vision that suppresses but can never altogether obscure the fact that it is a fabrication.

As the Politics makes clear, this applies no less to the fabric of political action, including the construction of the city according to prayer and the best regime. Even this project cannot succeed without invoking and anticipating spatial and temporal wholeness, which is always as necessary as it is premature. Hence, rather than offering a blueprint—utopian or not—for politics, Aristotle constructs the city according to prayer in order to bring to light certain limits of politics.Footnote ⁴⁹ As much as poetry, politics is beset by the paradox that the “first things” are in fact imitations, things traditionally held to be second.Footnote ⁵⁰ This paradox conditions collective action no less than individual action: whenever a political community acts in its own interests, it necessarily resorts to poetry in order to experience this action as a whole before it is whole. In this process, poetico-political wholeness plays a crucial role: it supplies elements of synoptic unity (common origins, common interest, and territorial integrity) by which collective action is generally justified.Footnote ⁵¹ However, it also implies that these elements are as much produced as they are reproduced in and by that same collective action. The results of this action are therefore always capable of being called into question: different and competing understandings of the synoptic unity may arise in a political debate, leading to revision and change. The latter, however, are just as much dependent on the poetico-political actions of citizens. Here, it would seem, lies Aristotle's response to the problem of circularity brought up by Rousseau's Legislator. As Jill Frank puts it, Aristotle “seeks not to resolve the circularity but to exploit it, staying within the relation between individual and political structures by way of the in-between of activity.”Footnote ⁵² What enables Aristotle to do so, I would argue, is the realization that activity involves a continuum of praxis, mimesis, and poiēsis in which there is neither an absolute beginning nor an absolute end, even though poetic reference to both is indispensable in politics.

Making a Scene

At face value, the present interpretation of book VII of the Politics may seem to be at odds with two of its most fundamental premises, to wit, that human beings are political by nature and that the political community is natural (Politics 1252b30–31, 1253a3). However, such is not necessarily the case. To begin with the latter premise, the present view ties in with recent commentators who argue that Aristotle views the political community not quite as being natural or having a natural end, but rather as a framework in which human beings can pursue their natural perfection.Footnote ⁵³ That framework, I want to argue here, is always partly artificial, in that to a considerable degree it depends on the poetry inherent in political action, which anticipates a wholeness that is never simply given, and which copes with necessity by adorning it, with varying degrees of success. Moreover, we should not forget that Aristotle's key assertion in book I is conditional: “hence every city is by nature, if the first communities (koinōniai) are” (Politics 1252b30–31, emphasis added). As becomes apparent from the surrounding discussion, the naturalness of the first communities—such as the household—is already problematic. There is a dark but undeniable side to it of slavery, cannibalism, and robbery, as becomes apparent from the prime example he uses in this context: the Cyclops (Politics 1252b21–25). Hence, immediately afterwards he indicates that this is a partial, cyclopean view of the city that must be supplemented in order to grasp the complete, stereoscopic picture. Concerning the polis, Aristotle asserts: “The impulse towards this kind of community is by nature in all [human beings]. But the first who brought them together was responsible for the greatest goods” (Politics 152b30–32, emphasis added). In other words, the natural impulse of human beings by itself is not enough: in order to achieve the highest human goods and to avoid lapsing into injustice, violence, license, and intemperance, they have to be “constituted” or brought together into a city by some agent. To say the least, this makes the naturalness of the city far more complicated and equivocal, by taking into account the productive and poetic dimension of human nature.

This, furthermore, points us to the possibility of a different understanding of the first premise. More precisely, I want to argue that the poetic element in political action can and should be seen as a vital part of man's political nature. Of the four Aristotelian definitions of man, the fourth is generally less known but no less important: besides man naturally being political, capable of speech, and desiring to know, Aristotle asserts in the Poetics that “just as to imitate is natural to human beings … so also is it natural for everyone to take pleasure in imitations” (Poetics 1448b5–9). Further on, he explains why: “They are pleased in seeing images because in their contemplating there is a coincidence of learning and figuring out what each thing is, for example ‘That's him!’” (Poetics 1448b15–18). Considering the way in which Aristotle qualifies the distinction between action, production, and imitation, it is plausible to assume that the natural human propensity to imitate and to take delight in imitations is no mean part of the political nature of man. Political action, both by the individual citizen and by the community as a whole, may indeed be said to be an imitation in order to learn and figure out what each thing is, in this case by anticipating what it is to be a citizen or a community: “That's us!” In this imitation and anticipation, we stage and look at ourselves as a whole that is eusunoptos, so that we are able to act as though we actually were what we cast ourselves to be.

By this token, Aristotle's construction of the city according to prayer exhibits a keen awareness of a dimension of politics that seems to have vanished from the agenda of political thought for a long time, only to reappear recently. When the French political philosopher Claude Lefort introduced the distinction, now widely known, between la politique (politics) and le politique (the political), he explicitly invoked the Platonic-Aristotelian concept of politeia: the political denotes “the constitution of the social space, the form of society,” within which the play of politics takes place.Footnote ⁵⁴ According to Lefort, the political mise en forme involves a mise en sens, in the sense that it constitutes a space in which things become intelligible and meaningful as just or unjust, allowed and forbidden, real and imaginary. More importantly and at the same time, it involves a mise en scène—a chorēgia in Aristotelian parlance—that involves an external spectator's perspective: as Lefort explains, a political space cannot exist without “a quasi-representation of itself,” without “a reference from which it [society] renders itself virtually visible to itself, from which its various social articulations become decipherable within a common space.”Footnote ⁵⁵

By dint of this external point of reference, we might add, the political space becomes whole as the common space in which a common good can be pursued, and in which “an experience of coexistence” is possible in the first place. However, Lefort also points out that this external point of reference can never be internalized: it is never present, but it can only be re-presented within the polity. As a result, “it proves to be impossible to fix a boundary between what belongs to the order of action and what belongs to the order of representation.”Footnote ⁵⁶ While action is impossible without some representation of an external point of reference, the latter does not exist independently, but it can only come to light through representative action. Thus, in drawing our attention to the “symbolic dimension” as constitutive of politics, Lefort rehearses the continuum of praxis, mimēsis, and poiēsis that is already brought to light in and by Aristotle's city according to prayer.Footnote ⁵⁷

By the same token, it becomes more difficult to appeal to Aristotle in the contemporary debate between communitarianism and liberalism. Contrary to the communitarian position, book VII of the Politics shows that the unity and integrity of the political community, as well as its conception of the common good, are never simply given, but are always dependent on the anticipatory imitation inherent in political action. This dependency also means that they are subject to diverging, competing, and conflicting claims and views, and thus to political debate. On the other hand, book VII should also make us wary of a blanket dismissal of any notion of political unity and common good, a dismissal that underlies liberal mainstays like individualism, pluralism, and constructivism: it suggests that individual and collective political action can never initiate without reference to a putative unity, a point of view whence the community can be seen as a whole, even if that reference always comes too early and remains disputable. Jill Frank aptly encapsulates the Aristotelian viewpoint as follows: “Rejecting the priority of either individual or community produces a polity that is neither a homogeneous unity nor a simple aggregation of differentiated individuals, but, rather, both and neither, a unity of the different.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Precisely by modeling the good of the community on that of the individual, and by forging both into a static whole that is eusunoptos, Aristotle shows that in fact they can never be seen together so easily, at a glance.

Moreover, book VII also shows that the fondness on both sides of the political spectrum for direct or participatory democracy is in need of reconsideration. Following Aristotle's indications, it must be pointed out that even in the so-called direct democracy of Athens there was no fixed boundary between action and representation, between praxis, mimēsis, and poiēsis: in taking the floor of the assembly, the ekklēsia, no speaker could escape referring to a community that, as a unity, was and remained absent, even though all citizens were present. Even when two fellow citizens came face to face and interacted, insofar as they did so as fellow citizens this was never simply a direct encounter, but already conditioned and mediated throughout by an external viewpoint that is poetically constructed. As Aristotle well knew, a human face (prosōpon) is always a mask (prosōpon), albeit one that points to the complex truth of poetry.Footnote ⁵⁹