“Empire” is an idea whose time has come in political theory. Whatever our hopes for its concrete significance for particular theorizations, empire appears in a multitude of guises in the field: standing as a grand pronunciamento for purposes of advancing insurrection (Eisenstein Reference Eisenstein2004; Hardt and Negri Reference Hardt and Negri2000), soberly positioned as part of an ensemble of threats to cosmopolitan norms and international law (Benhabib Reference Benhabib, Gautney, Dahbour, Dawson and Smith2009; Cohen Reference Cohen2004), coupled with questions of the West and its other in the “age of identity” (Brown Reference Brown2006, 177), and lurking behind naturalized theories of global community and world order (Morefield Reference Morefield2005). With equivalent impact the contemporary turn to empire has also materialized in historical studies of early and late modern European thought, exposing “blind spots or incisive moments” (Pitts Reference Pitts2005, 5; see also Muthu Reference Muthu2003), subterranean “strategies of exclusion” (Mehta Reference Mehta, Cooper and Stoler1997, 59), and hegemonic “visions of global order” (Bell Reference Bell2007, 1) that have hitherto gone unnoticed in the writings of Machiavelli, Locke, Burke, Smith, Constant, Bentham, the two Mills, and Tocqueville. Political theorists have devoted considerably less energy, however, to exploring transitions to empire (Wallace and Harris Reference Wallace and Harris1996) in Greek political theory, at least beyond Thucydides’ masterful account of Athenian imperial ascendancy and destruction through the course of the Peloponnesian War. From that Thucydidean point of departure, political theory tends to skip over both Plato and Aristotle, shifting its sights from its starting point in classical fifth-century Greece and jumping right over to republican imperial Rome.

The general dearth of political theoretical attention to empire and related themes in the dialogues of Plato (429–347 BCE) is striking.Footnote ² Yet even more striking is the absence of engagement with Aristotle (384–322 BCE), who lived during a period of unprecedented imperial expansionism in and beyond the Hellenic world, beginning with Philip II of Macedon's defeat of the Greek city-states at Chaeronea (388), extending through Alexander III's s victory over Persia at Gaugamela (331), and ending with the king's sudden death nine years later in Babylon (322). Although the confluence between the later years of Aristotle's life (338–322) and Alexander's spear-won world empire (334–323) does not go unnoticed by political theorists of a biographical and historical bent, Aristotle's Politics remains a dead zone for scholars exploring canonical texts relevant to questions of empire. The assumption that the Politics is irrelevant to both historical and political theorizations of empire, no matter how broadly conceived, is well entrenched in the field, finding support in claims that launch charges of parochialism against Aristotle himself. Thus, as Taylor (Reference Taylor1955, 9) observes, “For all that Aristotle tells us, Alexander might never have existed and the small city-state might have been the last word of Hellenic political development.” Contemporary Aristotle scholars nearly unanimously subscribe to this less than charitable verdict (see Barker Reference Barker1959; Barnes Reference Barnes and Barnes1995; Bradley Reference Bradley, Keyt and Miller1991; Everson Reference Everson1988; Finley Reference Finley, Barnes, Schofield and Sorabji1977; Gomme Reference Gomme1937; Kraut Reference Kraut2002; Lloyd Reference Lloyd1968; Morrall Reference Morrall1977; Popper 1962; Wolin [1960] Reference Wolin2004). From comments regarding Aristotle's political shortsightedness, it is a short step to thinking that the Politics just flat out fails to comprehend the transformation of vast geopolitical terrains (Hansen Reference Hansen, Wallace and Harris1996, 206); emergent military monarchy and “federal government” (Bradley Reference Bradley, Keyt and Miller1991, 13); “shifting alliances and struggles between different cities” (Kraut Reference Kraut2002, 8–9); increases in structural differentiation (Holmes Reference Holmes1979, 127); or any of the appurtenances of imperialism, globalization, and interstate relations (Euben Reference Euben, Botwinick and Connolly2001; Wolin [1960] Reference Wolin2004).Footnote ³

Whatever their differences in interests and emphasis, these assessments conspire toward a political theoretical conclusion that exacts a toll on the interpretive possibilities open to view: Under the diminutive shadow of the Greek city-state, Aristotelian political theory cannot grasp the realities of Macedonian imperialism, much less understand the “transience of the polis” partly because, as Alasdair MacIntyre (Reference MacIntyre1981, 149) puts it, “[Aristotle] had little or no understanding of historicity in general.” The polis-centric perspective that comprises this dominant view holds generally to the notion that Aristotelian political theory is exclusively and parochially concerned with the city-state as political community. Accordingly, the political criteria that interest Aristotle are read as those pertaining to the polis as either an abstract imaginative ideal or a practicable best standard for human political association. Having settled Aristotle into these self-contained environs, the polis-centric account produces two different but sometimes related evaluations. The first forwards the still operative (if considerably attenuated) Hegelian position that Aristotelian theory manifests the “final form” of the Greek city-state where “man” as a political animal (zōon politikon) is actualized as a “goal of perfection” (Barker Reference Barker1959, 208; Schmitt-Pantel 1999, 208; also Bradley Reference Bradley, Keyt and Miller1991; Hansen Reference Hansen, Wallace and Harris1996; Lloyd Reference Lloyd1968; Ryder Reference Ryder and Worthington2003; Stalley Reference Stalley1995). In this evaluative vein, Aristotle as theorist represents the expressive unity of the Greek polis as a kind of “effortless and undivided Sittlichkeit” (Taylor Reference Taylor1977, 378) embodying the good life realized as citizenship and offering a “welcome source” for those who seek “an ancestry for exhortations to civic virtue” (Saxonhouse Reference Saxonhouse, Heffernan and Kleinig2004, 40).Footnote ⁴ The second evaluation exacts a harsher verdict on Aristotle's politics, finding them and him (despite other contributions of great significance) conventionally Greek chauvinist in their acceptance of cultural prejudices allegedly promulgated in the service of an exclusionary, racist, sexist, elitist, slave-owning political status quo (Arendt Reference Arendt1958; Green Reference Green1991; Hall Reference Hall1989; Lloyd Reference Lloyd1968; MacIntyre Reference MacIntyre1981; Mill [1869] Reference Mill and Collini1989; Mulgan Reference Mulgan1977; Reference Mulgan2000; Nussbaum 1998; Reference Nussbaum2000; Okin Reference Okin1979; Popper 1962; Schofield Reference Schofield1999; Williams Reference Williams1993). Unlike Aeschylus, Herodotus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Plato, whose writings have encouraged new endeavors among contemporary scholars attuned to the alterity of the other, Aristotle is persistently marked as exhibiting an unashamed Hellenocentric “blindness” that writes off “non-Greeks, barbarians, and slaves,” thereby manifesting an “imperial binary logic” that can even be coded as anticipating the “hegemonic discourse of the West” (MacIntyre Reference MacIntyre1981, 149; Spanos Reference Spanos2000, 75).

As indispensable to Aristotle studies as the often dazzling polis-centric accounts are, my aim in this article is to counter the dreamscape scenario that tethers Aristotle exclusively to what Foucault (Reference Foucault1988, 82) calls the “great nostalgic figure” of the classical Greek city-state. To thwart the polis-centric temptation that pulls us toward archeological reverie, I want to create a different sort of perceptual field—“between polis and empire”—for purposes of interpreting Aristotle. This field perceptually shifts the city-state off center stage while at the same time recuperating it within an interpretive frame attentive to the politics of Aristotle's present rather than transfixed by a symbolic remnant of the imagined past. Granted, the phrase “between polis and empire” is no less an abstraction than “the polis,” yet interpretively it departs from the polis-centric approach in three important respects. First, “between polis and empire” captures a historical outlook on the Hellenistic world loosely alert to the geopolitical events that transpire during Aristotle's life (384–322 BCE), a passage of time that underscores his remoteness from the Periclean Age of Athens (461–429 BCE) while reinforcing his nearness to the shattering of Athenian democracy and the period of Macedonian rule. Footnote ⁵ Second, this perceptual field carries with it an ontological outlook that draws on Aristotle's philosophy of movement (kinēsis) by emphasizing change (metabolē), potentiality (dunamis), and possibility (endechomenon), elements that are generally missing from the polis-centric perspective on Aristotelian political thought. Finally, instead of starting from a place that has Aristotle stuck in the rearguard of an advancing march from polis to empire, “between polis and empire” locates his thinking in medias res, immersed in a kinesthetic field of geopolitics and sovereign power. Accordingly, from a perspective that reads Aristotle's political thought in the midst of things, “polis” and “empire” are not categories of analysis, but rather generative political formations—less akin to dueling conceptual formalisms than to two ropes intertwined in knots of alternately tensing and relaxing struggles and associations, subject to Aristotle's formidable powers of observation.

As an interpretive schema, then, “between polis and empire” stays true to the conviction that authorial biographical and historical context can help illuminate the meaning of a text. At the same time, however, my interpretation of the Politics is not driven primarily by a concern for ascertaining authorial intention, however important in certain instances that may be. In deploying “between polis and empire” as an interpretive frame, I also want to hold to the notion that the quest for meaning and significance in a text does not have to (nor should it) become solely a quest for the meaning intended by the author.Footnote ⁶ This is not to claim that the ascertaining of authorial intention is always beyond our reach, but rather to recognize that complex texts always contain a “surplus of meaning” or “residue” that exceeds both the literal interpretation and the intention of the author (Ricoeur Reference Ricoeur1976, 55). In keeping with this insight about the “plurivocity” of texts and their proclivities toward profusion, my aim in interpreting Aristotle's Politics is not only to stay alert to the author's intention but also to conjure unfamiliar things from the text and create “figures of the newly thinkable” (Castoriadis Reference Castoriadis and Arnold2007). Perhaps the latter may also allow us to shed some light on the limits of the polis-centric textual reality within which Aristotle's Politics is currently inscribed.

The article sets off by challenging the polis-centric picture of Aristotle as chauvinistically Greek, positioning him ambiguously dualizing between the territorial and political identifications that mark Greece/Macedon, Greek/barbarian, and citizen/slave. Conjuring an equivocal figure, a “man in the middle,” begins the task of destabilizing interpretations of Aristotle that rely on oppositional (either/or) constructions. The second part of the article continues in this vein, starting with the notion that Aristotle's thinking is deeply informed by a kinetic disposition attuned to the “coming to be and passing away” of worldly things. Approaching the Politics as ontologically attuned to ephemerality and change introduces a perspective on imperial politics in the Hellenistic world that breaks the ties binding Aristotle to the polis as a symbolic ideal and stationary formation. The third part puts further pressure on the polis-centric view by making “the remote come near” to dismantle a series of binary structures that support interpretations of Aristotle's Politics as hegemonically and parochially Greek. My aim is to draw from the text contrarian elements of heuristic value and interpretive potential that point us toward post–polis-centric Aristotle studies as well as contemporary problems of interest in theorizing global politics. The final section moves provisionally in the contemporary direction by bringing my reading of Aristotle “between polis and empire” to bear on three intersecting topics in global democratic theory: postnational citizenship, transnational governance, and empire.

MAN IN THE MIDDLE

To begin moving Aristotle's politics between polis and empire, I draw on two concepts of his own innovation (one now familiar, one still a bit strange) and apply them to his own situation in the late-fourth-century Hellenic world. The concepts “place” (topos) and “dualizers” (epamphoterizein) touch on two of Aristotle's primary intellectual concerns, respectively: what it is for something to be somewhere (“where-questions”) and how it is that certain things appear as “mixed” or “intermediate” cases between substantial and opposing kinds (“what-questions”). Without suggesting that Aristotle intended to apply these concepts and concerns reflexively to himself, I nevertheless want to appropriate them to challenge the polis-centric picture of a figure conventionally (even hegemonically) Greek in his territorial and political identifications. The concepts of “place” and “dualizers” allow me to problematize the questions “Where is Aristotle?” and “What is Aristotle?” in such a way as to see the inadequacy of the answers “Greece” and “Greek.” This schema also enables us to see how determining Aristotle's location is suited to an interpretive maneuver that he himself deploys when faced with troublesome topics: When in doubt, appeal to ambiguity.

Where is Aristotle? If the answer to where-questions predicates “where” something is, then the things specified in these answers might reasonably be considered places (Morison Reference Morison2002, 4). In the Categories, Aristotle offers geographical examples of expressions that signify place, implying that for places to exist is for them to be “occupied” by other things (Cat. 4, 2a1–2, cited in Morison Reference Morison2002, 4–5 [note15]). As Benjamin Morison suggests in drawing on Aristotle's two examples of “receptive containment” (2002, 57), “[t]he Lyceum and the agora are rather like France—they are spaces or intervals between given frontiers.” Building on this insight, perhaps we can inquire after the “spaces or intervals between given frontiers” that constitute Aristotle's own geographic place(s) of receptive containment to see how closely they map onto—or are suitably contained by—the predication “Greece.” To start with Aristotle's birthplace, a colonial outpost called Stagira, is already to find him quite literally in a space between given frontiers, located on the Macedonian peninsula in northern Greece, at least 100 kilometers from Pella, the capital of Macedon, and 200 kilometers from Athens. The political nature of Stagira's “place” is equally ambiguous. Mogens H. Hansen (Reference Hansen, Hansen and Raaflaub1995, 75) describes it as “the borderland” between city-state and municipality, an entity that transgresses conventional (oppositional) principles of territorial identification, bearing characteristics of both an independent entity (polis) in Hellas and a dependent entity (kōmē) associated with barbarian habitations in Macedon. Although in the Physics Aristotle remarks that places of receptive containment need to be treated as though “immobile” to satisfy the requirement that something moving from place to place must “change place” (cited in Morison Reference Morison2002, 162–63), this does not mean that these receptive containers cannot be destroyed by occurrences of, say, nature or human events. Stagira is an example of the latter: Suspected of insurrectionary activities in league with the Chalcidic enclaves of the north, the town is obliterated by Philip's Macedonian army in the year 348, its inhabitants sent into exile or sold into slavery. Yet receptive containers can be reconstructed by human actors too. Stagira is a case in point again: Rebuilt by Alexander, its repopulation is the fulfillment of a promise that Philip made to Aristotle, on condition that the philosopher leave Athens and return to Macedon to tutor the king's son.Footnote ⁷ Stagira's second life finds it a less ambiguously constituted entity: It returns as a kōmē where the inhabitants do not enjoy citizenship, but rather live as subjects of the Macedonian king.

Now, following Aristotle, one might well say that places like Stagira are one thing, but that the political animals who occupy them are quite another; the latter may exhibit no peculiar ambiguities of their own, notwithstanding the equivocity of the spaces they inhabit. On this score, too, however, matters with Aristotle are equivocal. His parents, Nicomachus and Phaestis, are Ionian (Greek) in origin and speak a dialect that marks them as such. Yet by “nationality”—where place becomes significant again—the family's material fortunes are secured through Nicomachus's personal service as Asclepiad (physician) in the court of the Argead King Amyntas III in Macedon. There is no real evidence to suggest that Aristotle's father (who died when Aristotle was young) has any closer territorial or political relationship of identification to Greece than to Stagira, the borderland town where he maintains a house, or to the royal court in Macedon.Footnote ⁸ To answer the question “where is Aristotle?” with regard to territorial and familial identifications is to seek clarity in a formulation that must, on pain of misrepresentation, locate him in a place that is intermediate to given frontiers: “between Greece and Macedon” and “between subject and citizen” as a resident of Stagira. The middling construction becomes no less indeterminate when we consider Athens, where Aristotle arrives for the first time in 367 to study in Plato's Academy and to which he returns in 335/4 (after a hiatus east to Assos in 348/5 where he is befriended by the tyrant Hermias) to found the Peripatetic School in a municipal gymnasium known as the Lyceum. Reflecting on his travels between his two places of location, Aristotle tries a joke: “I went from Athens to Stagira because of the Great King and from Stagira to Athens because of the great cold” (letter to Antipater, cited in Jaeger Reference Jaeger1934, 311).

Places are not one of the four causes for Aristotle, but they do have some sort of power (dunamis) insofar as they “make a difference to the world,” entering into an account of why the world is as it is (Morison Reference Morison2002, 50). Places feature robustly in the Physics in the definition of the elements (e.g., explaining why fire goes up in the air). Places also appear in the Categories where they are, as we have noted, instances of geographical predication and also things that are “occupied,” as Aristotle confirms with two instructive if not close-to-home examples: the Lyceum and the agora of Athens (Cat. 4, 2a1–2, cited in Morison Reference Morison2002, 4 [note 15]). Locating Aristotle himself in the Lyceum in Athens where he founded the Peripatetic School (335/4 BCE), we find him occupying an ambiguous place inside the city but outside its walls. The Politics itself is a product of lectures given in an institution supported by public government funding, but primarily populated by noncitizens and foreigners.Footnote ⁹ Adapting a remark that Aristotle applies to those who have put forward views about constitutional matters “for certain foreigners,” the occupiers of the Lyceum, unlike the members of the Academy, “[do] not participate in political actions of any sort, but [lead] entirely private lives” (Pol. II.12, 1273b). If we shift the predication of where Aristotle is from his position in the Lyceum to the Athenian agora (or marketplace), then ambiguities surrounding what he is begin to appear. In Athens among Athenians, he is viewed as Macedonian and hence classified as a foreigner (xenos), if not (because of his lineage) a barbarian (barbaros). A friendship with the Macedonian general Antipater, Alexander's viceroy in supreme command over Macedon and Greece, places him under constant suspicion. Not by chance, then, is he driven from Athens twice, on both occasions during events linked to anti-Macedonian uprisings.Footnote ¹⁰ The second time, after news of Alexander's death, gives rise to his famously stated intention to “save the Athenians from sinning twice against philosophy” (Edel Reference Edel1982, 84), which he writes in a letter to Antipater (perhaps a tongue-in-cheek remark from one Macedonian to another?). To place Aristotle in Athens is not just to see him as a foreigner passing through, however, but also to notice another defining feature of his intermittent habitation in the city as a resident alien (metoikos). Designated as such a figure, Aristotle occupies an unstable category between two mutually exclusive substantial political kinds: Unlike the slave he is granted access to the agora, yet unlike the citizen he is denied political capacity in the assembly.Footnote ¹¹ Between citizen and slave, marked as metic and a foreigner allied to Macedon, with all the vulnerabilities this what-ness implies, Aristotle remarks on the obvious to Antipater (no jokes this time), “At Athens, things which are proper for a citizen are not proper for an alien . . . it is dangerous for [an alien] to live in Athens” (letter, quoted in Chroust Reference Chroust1967, 40 n.2).Footnote ¹²

What is Aristotle? Aristotle thinks that answers to what-questions predicate things that might reasonably be specified in terms of substantial and clearly distinguishable kinds. In the History of Animals (HA), the Parts of Animals (PA), and other zoological studies, he relies on classificatory expressions of just this sort to differentiate not only between plants and animals but also between different if not completely unambiguous animal kinds (HA VIII.2, cited in Granger Reference Granger1985, 194). Yet as he also allows (on pain of denying the tribute that theory must pay to observation), the urge to fix borders between dichotomized kinds like “terrestrial” and “aquatic” is confounded on a fairly regular basis by creatures throughout the animal (and plant) kingdom that “overlap” between groups, constituting mixed or intermediate cases that blur boundaries. Whether by dint of the vagaries of nature or the imperatives of the process of classification itself, these “dualizers” refuse to comply with the binary logic of categorization dear to the Academicians whose penchant for crude schematizing, Aristotle insists, fails to mark out the differentiae that cut across and therefore trouble otherwise opposing divisions (see PA 643b1ff, cited in Lloyd Reference Lloyd1996, 72). Take the cetaceans—mammals like dolphins, porpoises, and whales that are suited to aquatic life. They dualize “in a sense” (but not an unqualified sense), perhaps through an ambiguity in the classificatory terms “aquatic” and “terrestrial” themselves (Granger Reference Granger1985, 199). Seals are a puzzle: They belong to both and neither (but in different respects) of the kinds they dualize between, in one sense terrestrial and not aquatic and in another aquatic and not terrestrial. In any sense (at least in Aristotle's learned view), they are “deformed quadrupeds” (PA 657a22f, cited in Lloyd Reference Lloyd1996, 81). The ostrich dualizes between the quadruped and the bird; the water-newt has gills, yet is footed (Granger Reference Granger1985, 190). Human beings dualize as well, in ways that bear upon their lives, dispositions, and characters; they are both solitary and gregarious for example (HA 488a, cited in Granger Reference Granger1985, 190). These examples support a position that Aristotle emphatically embraces: Logical classifications are possible and one can in fact fix borders between substantial kinds. Yet when certain things appear to partake of incompatible divisions, they can be said to do so through an ambiguity that in effect “dualizes,” “equivocates,” “admits a double sense,” or “plays a double game.”Footnote ¹³

Undeniably, the appeal to ambiguity is an inherent feature of Aristotelian thought, at least when explaining things like seals or ostriches, both of which apparently cross over substantial kinds. Yet ambiguity seems to be at issue when it comes to locating Aristotle himself. We have already seen him partaking (territorially) of “Greece” and “Macedon” and overlapping (politically) elements of “citizen” and “slave”—refusing settlement along just one side and dualizing across substantial kinds. Leaving aside the question of Aristotle's disposition and character (the “middle in the man”?), we might nonetheless complicate the question of Aristotle's life by dualizing him both as a “where” and a “what.” To do this is to construct a subject whose location admits of a dual sense: equivocating between Greece and Macedon, playing a double game in Athens, arbitrating the boundaries between Greek and barbarian, negotiating the uncertainties of an identity positioned between citizen and slave. On all of these counts we arrive at a figure newly thinkable and strange, a man in the middle who disrupts by calling into question the strategies of foreclosure toward “Greece” and “Greek” that capture and constrain the polis-centric view.

COMING TO BE AND PASSING AWAY

To move from Aristotle's politics to Aristotle's Politics is to confront directly one of the more obdurate aspects of the polis-centric view. This is the claim that Aristotelian political theory is (unambiguously) sealed to the classical city-state, somewhat like (to borrow Nietzsche's phrase; [1878] Reference Nietzsche and Handwerk1995, 209) “an insect in amber.” The difficulty that meets us here is not the emphasis that the standard view places on the city-state (I do not underestimate its importance as a matter of inquiry for Aristotle), but rather how the polis is placed for him as an entity worthy of regard. The timeless fixity of that entity is the planted assumption behind the frequent assertion that Aristotle writes as though “Greek civilization” is not “something transitory” (Bradley Reference Bradley, Keyt and Miller1991, 13), with no cognition of a “transitional phase” between the “decline of the polis and the appearance of Macedonian world monarchy” (Wolin [1960] Reference Wolin2004, 67; see also MacIntyre Reference MacIntyre1981).

To challenge the claim that Aristotle has no sense of the transitional, the transitory, or the emergent, there is no better recourse than to Aristotelian theory itself, particularly those writings that bring teleology and temporality together under the notion of “coming to be and passing away.” This formulation encompasses a fundamental aspect of Aristotelian ontology frequently articulated in the Physics and Metaphysics: the condition of things in motion (kinēsis).Footnote ¹⁴ Built into the kinetic proclivities of (almost) everything in the universe,Footnote ¹⁵ Aristotle contends, is the very idea of change (metabolē) or “the actualizing of potential being as such” (Phys. 201a–b) as the “dynamic teleological unfolding of the potentialities or ‘readinesses’ in a situation” (Edel Reference Edel1982, 83). An ontological orientation toward “the actualizing of potentiality,” with its roots in the general idea of power and the logical notion of the possible, beckons us toward “the shape of things to come, all set and ready to go in the constitution of the present” (83). “Coming to be and passing away” does not point toward “actuality” as the final form of something; it indicates the process of change and the activity (energeia) through which the potentiality of “something” (or “the being able to be”)Footnote ¹⁶ is becoming an actuality.

What should we make of this “something” that, as Jonathan Lear (Reference Lear1988, 60) says, exists before “the change which has the potentiality to become what emerges in the change”? The ontological import of this insight for my purposes here has less to do with the fact “that something is coming to be than with the fact that something is coming to be” (Jaeger Reference Jaeger1934, 384): Something normative is making its way into existence (or not) and is subject to processes of change. Aristotle adds to this focus on “something” (or “the being able to be”) in this much discussed observation in the Metaphysics:

Whether or not this passage embodies the “cardinal point” on which Aristotle's entire theory of dunamis turns, as Giorgio Agamben (Reference Agamben1998, 45) argues, we might nonetheless confirm through it Aristotle's emphasis on the role that indeterminacy plays in a moment of pure potentiality (dunamis). A certain something may (or may not be) actualized, may be (or do) or not be (or do), may be affirmed or negated, may come to fulfillment or perish. To paraphrase Stephen Clark (Reference Clark1975, 128), a something or “entity” is, for Aristotle, “a dynamic concept which yet admits the possibility that the entity will fail to ‘become what it is,’” either without ambiguity or relative to some aspect of change. To translate this idea into Agamben's (Reference Agamben1998, 45) idiom is to recognize that “if potentiality is to have its own consistency and not disappear immediately into actuality, it is necessary that potentiality be able not to pass over into actuality, that potentiality constitutively be the potentiality not to (do or be).” Or, to go with Clark's (Reference Clark1975, 128) pithier formulation, “Accidents happen, failure to realize being happens: we may not achieve the completion which is truly available to us.”

What happens once we bring this ensemble of ontological insights to the activity of interpreting Aristotle's Politics “between polis and empire” and against the polis-centric grain?

To go this route is to begin by resisting the temptation to conceptualize the polis as a complete (rather than partial) actualization and move instead toward an outlook that embraces becoming (hence potentiality) in terms that envision it as a “something” immersed in a relation to worldly processes of coming to be and passing away. This outlook, as we have seen, privileges the thought of a dynamic field of things unfolding where, as Aristotle puts it, “generation is contrary to destruction, as the loss of something is contrary to its acquisition” (Phys. V.5, 229b). Accordingly, by virtue of this worldly “in a relation to,” the polis can be apprehended from a position that has it subject to fluctuations, susceptible to stress, and vulnerable to destruction. The notion of the “transitory” is embedded in these very Aristotelian formulations. Moreover, because “all things that come into being and pass away do so in time” (Phys. IV.13, 222b), we can theorize the polis temporally, at the point of transition or “common boundary” that Aristotle describes as marking the “beginning of the future and the end of the past” (Phys. IV.12, 222a).

In the course of introducing these ontological elements to Aristotle's Politics, I clearly do not want to lose sight of the equally Aristotelian notion of the polis as a human creation that belongs to nomos and not to physis. The activity of constituting the polis defines the norm of development to which humans aspire as citizens, and it is only because humans have the capacity to form such associations that the polis is formed. Yet insofar as the polis is also a sublunary “something,” it therefore by nature admits of the possibility that it will fail to actualize its potentiality or “become what it is.” Change can make a city worse and finally no city at all (Pol. V.9, 1309b). Subject to the kinetic proclivities of the universe, as are all sublunary things, the polis belongs to physis and not to nomos. Or perhaps in the manner to which we have become accustomed, it is better to think of the polis (unlike, say, stars, or planets, or galaxies) as “between” physis and nomos. Footnote ¹⁷ In sum, with its emphasis on a process of transition that can be queried in time by marking the significance of change, Aristotle's ontology can help us get out from under the notion that he is incapable of theorizing the polis in terms that locate it in “the present,” see it in transition, and render it vulnerable to change.

To deliver more emphatically on that claim, I now want to move the polis from the realm of abstraction to the palpably explosive political terrain out of which Aristotle's Politics emerges in the Hellenistic world of the late fourth century BCE. As we have seen, the polis-centric view tends to find both the author and the text oblivious to the “full impact of a politically decaying society” (Arendt Reference Arendt2005, 6) that surrounds them. What I propose against this view is an interpretation that reads the Politics in the midst of things, wholly present in time, alert to discord, the politics of conquest, and the struggles for power among Macedonian kings and Greek city-states. From this vantage point, situated at that “common boundary” that marks the beginning of the future and the end of the past, it seems appropriate to engage the Politics itself in medias res, at a decisively important moment of transition in Book III, where Aristotle turns toward the investigation of kingship. The investigation hinges on the question of whether it is “advantageous for the city or the territory that is to be well administered to be under a kingship or not” (Pol. III.14, 1284b). With this question Aristotle brings to light two emergent properties that deserve closer scrutiny, because they bear directly on the decline of the polis and the appearance of imperial Macedonian monarchy in the Hellenistic world.

The first political phenomenon or emergent property appears as an afterthought, following Aristotle's discussion of the four types of kingship. Having summarized these four types, Aristotle appears to head for a conclusion (Pol. III.14,1285b) but then (seemingly from out of the blue) there arrives a caveat attached to “a fifth type of kingship” (Pol. III.14, 1285b). This fifth type is described as an “absolute” type of sovereignty concerned with a king “who does everything at his own discretion,” and it is given a name: pambasileia (Pol. III.16 1287a).Footnote ¹⁸Pambasileia points to a form of rule like no other, which Aristotle tentatively categorizes as an overarching and hitherto unprecedented “absolute type” of kingship “where a single person is sovereign on every issue” and “governs at his own discretion over the whole population” (Pol. III.14, 1285b; III.16, 1287a). It corresponds to “paternal rule over a household” and thus “may be regarded as household government exercised over a city, or a tribe, or a collection of tribes” (Pol. III.14, 1285b). From the perspective of the polis-centric view, the absolute type of kingship poses, as Susan Collins (Reference Collins2006, 145) says, “something of a mystery.”Footnote ¹⁹ With a shift of perspective between polis and empire, however, the mystery seems to dissolve before the recognition that this absolute kingship bears more than passing resemblance to the mode of sovereignty coalescing around Alexander, the carrier of Macedonian conquest and rule. “[W]e are therefore bound to study it philosophically,” Aristotle writes of this form of kingship, “and to examine briefly the difficulties which it involves” (Pol. III.15,1286a). The examination is indeed rather brief, but the difficulties are potentially severe and long lasting.

In turning to pambasileia Aristotle first singles out both the fourth (“Spartan”) and fifth (absolute) types of kingship, finding most of the others “between” these two; the first three types have more authority over fewer matters than the absolute type, but more authority than the Spartan type, where the kings do not have sway over matters of life and death except, as we see in Homer's example of Agamemnon, “outside their territory” in military expeditions where there is rule “by the law of might” (Pol. III.15, 1285a). The text focuses on two questions about rule: whether it is advantageous for cities to have a permanent general and for one person to have authority over all matters (Pol. III.15, 1286b). Registering these questions “between polis and empire” again brings Alexander's persona and power into view. Perhaps this is why Aristotle chooses first to address the Spartan type, because it shadows that aspect of Alexander's rule linked to “permanent generalship” and his proclivity in the military field for seizing not only leadership in matters related to war but also “matters related to the gods” (Pol. III.14, 1285a).Footnote ²⁰ Still, the discussion of the Spartan type is fleeting, dismissed from further engagement because this sort of kingship “has the look of [an investigation of] laws rather than regime” (or constitution). With this rhetorical maneuver, Aristotle both registers and removes the familiar figure of Spartan kingship and Homer's Agamemnon from the picture, along with the law, thereby preparing the way for a regime type that has neither analogies from the epics of the Greeks nor historical precedents to be drawn from the Greek cities of the ancient times. The only type of rule left standing is thus the one that is unprecedented in its absoluteness, where the king “acts in all things according to his own will” with authority over all persons (Pol. III.16, 1287a), constituting something like a permanent state of exception embodied in a “God-like man” (Lindsay Reference Lindsay1991,488).

The second political phenomenon appears as an emergent property in Politics III.15 and involves constitutional developments that bear on changes in cities (poleis): “Since cities have become still larger,” Aristotle writes, “we may perhaps say that it is now difficult for any form of constitution apart from democracy to exist” (Pol. III.15, 1286b; see also II.6, 1265b). This passing comment, which interrupts a broader discussion of kingship and corruption, clears the way toward thinking more about the consequences that democratization and the expansion of populations have in a world of cities enveloped in constitutional change. As Arlene Saxonhouse (Reference Saxonhouse, Heffernan and Kleinig2004, 40, 43) observes, Aristotle “keeps our attention directly on the city” along with issues pertaining to the corruption and “decay of the political regime.” In fact, the text is preoccupied by the implications that changes in substance, quality, quantity, and size hold for cities as real, material, constitutive site(s) of citizenship as “being ruled as well as ruling” (Pol. III.16, 1287a). Babylon, so large that its capture was not noticed for “three days” (Pol. III.3, 1276a; II, 6, 1265a), is an epithet, a “symbol of elephantiasis” (Finley Reference Finley1983 4). Anticipating the future, Aristotle persistently questions the viability of the “Greek cities of our day” (Pol. VII.14, 1333b), assessing their value, identity, constancy, conduct, boundaries, and sustainability under circumstances of corruption and change (see Pol. III.1, 1274b; III.3, 1276a; II.1, 1206b; III.9, 1208b; III.18, 1288a).

The problems of urban population and “excessive size” are of particular concern in Politics VII, a book that is usually read as Aristotle's paean to the harmonious, cooperative, choice-guiding model of the ideal city of prayer (kat’ euchên).Footnote ²¹ From a perspective not quite so transfixed by the symbol of the polis, however, we are better positioned to see the text struggling to comprehend changes that bear heavily on the politics of cities in the late-fourth-century world. Questions of urban growth and the expansion of populations are especially pressing because in cities, where the “population is over-large” and the masses so strengthened, the distribution of offices and honors devolves into “guesswork.” In such huge places full of boundless encounters and collisions, foreigners and resident aliens are able to melt undetected into the crowd (Pol.VII.5, 1326b). Under these generative conditions, a city increases in population (poluanthrôpos polis),eventually reaching a point where it cannot actualize as a constitution and therefore ceases to be a “city” at all (Pol. VII.4, 1326a–b).Footnote ²² “Who will be general of an overly excessive number, or who will be herald,” Aristotle asks, “unless he has the voice of Stentor?” (Pol. VII.4, 1326b). This query may not be anticipating Alexander as the heir to Hera's loud-voiced hailer of the Greeks during the Trojan War, but it does point toward a global political problem that we can see the Politics making present, at least once the text is released from the polis-centric view. The problem involves the altered dynamics of a world of encounters between pambasileia (the One) and democratic cities (the Many), in and beyond Greece. Imagining kingship as domination of a kind where a man “so greatly superior to others stands to them in the relation of a whole to its parts” (Pol. III.17, 1288a) is not out of the realm of possibility in this scenario. Yet neither is it impossible to imagine the potentiality that the multitude possesses for judging many matters “better than any single person” (Pol. III.17, 1288a). Thus the question of whether kingship “is advantageous for cities or not, and if so, which and in what fashion” (Pol. III.17, 1288a) and the dilemma of how to strike a proper balance of rule between sovereign and multitude seize hold of Aristotle's Politics.Footnote ²³ These questions are not just matters for normative philosophical reflection. They also pertain “between polis and empire” to transient and changing conditions, signaling something in the real political world that is troubling and resistant to philosophical adjudication.

MAKE THE REMOTE COME NEAR

The emergent figure of an absolute king that Aristotle links to the reality of democratizing cities and populations increasing in size constitutes the parameters through which we can see the Politics struggling with a range of problems that are hardly parochial but rather pertain to global political transformations in the Hellenistic world. Yet however persuasive this picture may be, the reading that I have offered cannot constitute a fully successful challenge to the polis-centric view. Insofar as a significant element of the standard account hinges on the notion that Aristotelian political theory demonstrates what Malcolm Schofield (Reference Schofield1999, 116) calls “the bias we might expect in a slave owning culture which looks outside its own borders . . . for its supply of slaves,” we need to consider whether the claim of Hellenocentrism in fact still holds against Aristotle's Politics, even if the charges of polis parochialism are undermined. Allowing for the possibility of reading into the text awareness of the transience of the polis amid larger forces of geopolitical transformation and change does not, after all, inoculate it against the harsher charges of Greek chauvinism. Hence Joshua Ober (Reference Ober1998, 343–44, 347) can offer an insightful (and unconventional) reading of Politics VII.7, finding there an agent of “international order” in the form of “the hellenized king of Macedon,” while at the same time holding Aristotle to an ethnocentric perspective that harbors “racist” presumptions. In Ober's account, Aristotle's imagined Hellenized king would rule as master only over slavish barbarians, leaving the Greeks free from interference.

Ober's non-polis-centric interpretation of the Greek chauvinist “bias” in Aristotle's politics also brings to mind related polis-centric claims of the sort succinctly registered in Karl Popper's (Reference Popper1971, 278, n.48) charge that Aristotle endorses two “fully analogous distinctions” between Greek/master on the one hand and barbarian/slave on the other; it also recalls Bernard Williams’ (Reference Williams1993, 115) observation that the Politics betrays a “familiar set of Greek prejudices about the slavish nature of barbarians [which are] the ancestors of the physiognomic and other ideological myths that have been notorious in modern times.” As we have seen, this hard and fast hegemonically Greek structure is a predominant interpretive frame in Aristotle studies, at least for scholars who pay attention to politics, culture, and ideology. The supremacist structure is reinforced by three supporting “pillars” or hierarchical binary configurations that interpreters construct from various passages in the Politics and then reactively impose onto the text: (1) the Hellenic privileging of the Greek over the barbarian, (2) the Athenocentric privileging of the citizen over the alien, and (3) the global political privileging of Greece (and Greeks) as center over the peripheries (and peoples) of the North and East. What I aim to show next is how reading the Politics “between polis and empire” destabilizes these three supporting pillars in ways that profoundly weaken the Greek supremacist structural frame. In keeping with the flexible hermeneutic sensibility I expressed earlier, the three interventions that follow attend with different emphases and degrees of intensity both to the significance of authorial intention and to the surplus of meaning that reading “between polis and empire” elicits from the text.

BETWEEN POLIS AND EMPIRE

By removing the classical polis-centric carapace from Aristotelian political theory, I have attempted to pose new possibilities for reading Aristotle's Politics “between polis and empire.” In this sense I hope the displacement of the Greek polis is generative for post–polis-centric studies of the thinker whom Marx ([1841] Reference Marx1975, 34) famously figures as “Greek philosophy's Alexander of Macedon.” But this is not all. History does not repeat itself, yet in some telling heuristic respects the situation of the late-fourth-century Greek cities in the face of Macedonian imperialism carries analogies with contemporary (post)national peoples and states that are called on, as Paul Ricoeur writes (Reference Ricoeur2000, 93), “to behave at the same time as the whole and the part, as the container and the contained, as an inclusive agency and an included region.” I want to conclude the article by provisionally considering how we might introduce some Aristotelian elements “between polis and empire” into our current political theoretical endoxa, particularly in response to three problems that Seyla Benhabib (Reference Benhabib, Gautney, Dahbour, Dawson and Smith2009, 90) identifies under the terms “postnational citizenship,” “transnational governance,” and “empire.”

The first problem—postnational citizenship—has to do with the imperative to question the relationship between the construction of the alien, the foreigner, and the stranger or what Etienne Balibar (Reference Balibar2006, 3) calls “the reproduction of strangeness” as it bears on the status of the citizen. Aristotle's own difficulties in coming to terms with the “citizen in a sense but not an unqualified sense” underscore the fact that citizenship is neither a fixed nor stable notion, much less an immutable essence, but a permanently open puzzlement (aporia) and an anxiety for the city. Faced with the stranger whose presence, no longer remote, exerts pressure on existing configurations of the public realm and its spaces of appearance, the city (or state) cannot stand as a hermetically sealed construction within which citizenship is untouched by kinesis. Rather, the city (or state) must be theorized as something subjected historically to stasis, including mutations, collapses, and the reconstitution of its borders. In persistently identifying the variable and inconstant aspects of the city-states, Aristotle reminds us of the extent to which the ethnos (or common identification that marks the same) of a city, or a people, or even an imaginary like “the Greek stock” is subject to the “dissolving action” (Balibar Reference Balibar2006, 4) of internal movements that mirror aspects of imperialism and globalization. As many contemporary theorists of European unification have pointed out, these transformations reflect global inequalities, bringing with them not only unprecedented changes in configurations of the categories of “citizen” but also resurgences of traditional patterns of exclusion.Footnote ⁴¹ The latter rest uneasily beside the formal equality associated with the professed principles of constitutional democracies, reminders of the persistently equivocal nature of those “aliens” who would, as Aristotle puts it, “readily assume a share in the constitution” while going “undetected among the crowd” (Pol. VII. 4, 326b7–21). An Aristotelian question arises here for those concerned with the new configurations of political association and extensions of citizenship. To adapt Balibar's (Reference Balibar2006, 12) formulations, How might we think about the politics of transition from aliens as enemies toward aliens as citizens while not losing sight of the persistently unsettled status of the “nonstrangers” who see themselves as sovereign in the city (or the state)?

The second problem—transnational governance—follows from reading Aristotle from within a perceptual field that reveals the symptoms of “impending anachronism” (Anderson Reference Anderson1974, 44) among the Greek city-states while at the same time maintaining what might be called a decidedly democratic “transpoleis” rather than a “postpoleis” perspective. The former does not imply that cities as political identities are bound to disappear under the aegis of empire, much less that under such formations citizenship is better figured as a global demos in the Alexandrian mode of a “brotherhood of mankind,” as piqued the cosmopolitan fantasies of certain nineteenth-century German historiographers. An Aristotelian perspective would be instead ontologically attuned to thinking of the world in terms of kinesthetic fields of potentialities, which means posing questions that are alert to cities as both distinctive and overlapping bodies politic, ever changing in their constitutions. Particularized, multifaceted, and receptive to democratizing processes, a transpoleis perspective rejects the notion of a “citizen of the world,” but might also allow, as Balibar (Reference Balibar2002, 53) puts it, “that in a few years there may no longer be a British or an Italian nation-state.” Between global demos and nation-state, a transpoleis perspective remains attentive to citizenship as governance by returning to cities as embodiments of the multitude (plēthos) possessing potentiality as power (dunamis). An Aristotelian question arises here for those concerned with theorizing cities as places of “receptive containment” where the multitude (or the Many) reconstitutes a demos for democracy. How might we, the people, actualize and occupy these spaces politically, for purposes of challenging demagoguery, repression, and the violent homogenizing forces of hegemonic rule?

The third problem—empire—links to the “transformations of sovereignty” amid a “changing security situation” that Benhabib (Reference Benhabib, Gautney, Dahbour, Dawson and Smith2009, 81) identifies in the immediate aftermath of September 11, 2001. The “volatile and obscure” moment of “ambivalent potential” to which Benhabib refers marks the emergence of an unprecedented form of sovereign power that might well call to mind Aristotle's efforts to comprehend an equivalent formation, pambasileia, in the late fourth century BCE—an empire that transforms the sovereign into living law and then exceeds that law by ruling in all matters according to its own “will” (Pol. III.16, 1287a), in effect producing a state of exception. The Aristotelian question that arises here is, How might we gauge or assess this sovereign supreme “something” (the being able to be or not to be) that is empire so as to judge its relation to cities (states) and the multitude (plēthos)?

Read between polis and empire, Aristotle's Politics offers two pertinent responses to this question, both of which serve as cautionary figures in a moment where metaphors for empire (of varying degrees of perspicuity) are not in short supply. Each figure is marked by ambivalent potential. The first response figures the absolute sovereign as unambiguously human yet manifesting such superior virtue that “contrary to nature,” he (or they) deserves “to be preeminent over the whole” (Pol. III.17, 1228a). As Claude Mossé (Reference Mossé2001, 93) observes, the “exception” that warrants this grant of supremacy is not “the consequence of any de facto domination stemming from [the hegemon's] military conquests,” but rather the exceptionalism of the leader as a character of intrinsic excellence (arête). The exemplarity accorded to the sovereign thus rests on observation and evaluation of his (or their) worthiness and rectitude. In this sense, the reasons to justify the supreme power (kurios) emerge from the multitude's exercising power (dunamis) through the activity of deciding not to “execute or exile or ostracize” a figure of this sort, but rather to give him (or them) authority over them “simply and not by turns” (Pol. III.17, 1228a). The ambivalent potential resides in the fact that, no matter how attenuated, citizens are a part of the decision-making process that deems this leader so exceptional that all will “obey such a person gladly,” allowing him (or them) to be “permanent kings in their cities” (Pol. III.13, 1284b).

With the second figure we move from the exceptional individual who is “like a god” but still “among human beings” (Pol. III. 13, 1284a) to something decisively different that is, in effect, a negation of all things human. This presence haunts the Politics as a kind of specter, arriving early on in the form of the stranger who possesses privileges and powers in all matters against the whole world, one who is “incapable of participating or who is in need of nothing.” By virtue of these characteristics, this thing is not human at all and therefore either a “beast or a god” (Pol. I.2, 1253a). To borrow from Rancière (Reference Rancière and Heron1995, 97), Aristotle conjures here “a monster committed to total war or a divinity beyond the reach of all reciprocity.” Or perhaps it is both, something that partakes in two otherwise oppositional kinds. The beast/god that I am dualizing under the sign of “empire” undoubtedly lends itself to modernizations: the charismatically revengeful God-fearing politician, the Fearless Leader as demiurge and genocidal maniac, the omniscient and omnipotent Führer, the globalized militarism of a divinely blessed superpower. Yet none of these rhetorical personifications strikes me as quite right, if only for being too literal.Footnote ⁴² Instead, and following Aristotle's own thinking about matters pertaining to the imagination,Footnote ⁴³ the Politics offers this monster/divinity more as a phantasm (phantasma), something that functions in the shadows, a picture that may persist at the edges of our sensibilities, like a nightmarish dream, long after it is initiated. In Aristotelian terms, what the beast/god carries along with its spectral principles of violence, torture, death dealing, and disaster is a something we must understand as a threat that involves a change affecting what constitutes the humanity of human beings. Enveloped in darkness, the phantasm marks the disavowal of everything that human potentiality brings to light, including the power of political association, the possibility of sharing together as a multitude in the life of the city, and the actualization of citizenship.

To keep the phantasm in view as threat and danger to human association—and here is its ambivalent potential—is to be able to speak truth to projects of imperial power, as Aristotle does in the Politics with reference to the Spartans. Having lost their empire, he says, it clearly follows that “they are not happy, and that their legislator was not a good one.. . . Nor do they have a correct conception concerning the sort of rule that the legislator should be seen to honor.” To the prevailing endoxa he says that although it is true that “[m]ost people are believers in the cause of empire, on the ground that empire leads to a large accession of material prosperity,” they are nonetheless in error in thinking so. To legislate everything “with a view to domination and war,” as an imperialist, is ignoble, a debasement. Yet there persists a tendency among those who organize political things to incline “in crude fashion toward those [things] which are held to be useful and of a more aggrandizing sort” (Pol. VII.14, 1333b).

On that discordant note, I conclude by suggesting that we might well pause before enlisting Aristotle in efforts to support contemporary appeals to empire and imperialism that allow how something injurious can also be productive, a “lesser evil” in the service of “enduring freedom.” Neither anguished acceptance of “the burden” that the case for empire necessitates (Ignatieff Reference Ignatieff2003) nor the self-confident assurance that a new imperial terrain “provides greater possibilities for creation and liberation” (Hardt and Negri Reference Hardt and Negri2000, 218) captures the sensibilities of Aristotle's Politics. When it comes to making the case for the imperial conquest of “neighboring cities,” Aristotle's verdict is in fact unambiguous and definitive: “We may justly conclude that none of these arguments and none of these systems of law is statesmanlike, or useful, or right” (Pol. VII.14, 1333b). There is no doctrine there, no theory, merely an assertion that boldly counters the nearly universal ancient belief in the naturalness of conquest, hegemony, and domination.Footnote ⁴⁴ That seems like a better note on which to begin.