Publication Type: Proceeding

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: In Bowling Alone, Putnam (2000) relies on economic terminology such as “goods,” “investment,” and “productivity” to define social capital (Smith and Kulynych 2002). This emphasis on capitalism when discussing social networks obfuscates the importance of cultivating community, trust, and reciprocity among the citizenry. In this paper, I utilize Aristotle’s conceptualization of the city and citizenship, as put forth in The Politics and The Nichomachean Ethics, as a theoretical framework to evaluate the implications of Putnam’s definitions of social capital theory. Aristotle’s arguments with regard to the city and citizenship indicate that fundamental changes would have to be made within the institutions and the priorities of the United States in order for a more cohesive, civically-engaged community to be achieved.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: NEGOTIATING THE GOOD LIFE:
ARISTOTLE AND THE CIVIL SOCIETY


ABSTRACT:

How to solve the liberal/communitarian debate? Today, we are beginning to realize that this much discussed tension is fundamentally false. Modern liberals have come to embrace a more holistic concept of freedom, one focused on autonomy but also on community, as citizens choose to exercise of virtue and freely negotiate a notion of the common Good.

This modern concept of “freedom in community” is, in the end, not so new: it was first put forward by Aristotle. It was he who first argued cogently for “flourishing” and for a “completed life” as the proper end of man, and as the essence of happiness. But this flourishing does not and cannot take place in isolation. We are deeply social beings, and our stories demand listeners as well as narrators.

But what kind of polis is relevant for us in the post-Classical, post-Enlightenment and post-existentialist world? Clearly, traditional statist models have failed, and will not do in the diverse and pluralistic environment of the 21st century. I think Aristotle would seek the answer in a liberal community, and specifically in the global civil society. Only a globally interlinked and free set of communities of ideas can provide the nourishment and the proper setting for eudaimonia in the modern sense. I propose to examine three contemporary examples of modern civil society in my search for a neo-Aristotelian polis: Al Qaeda, the Gay Liberation Movement and Amnesty International. All will be found wanting, but the ideal remains compelling.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Hannah Arendt is infamous for her views on “the social question”—particularly the assertion that “cares and worries” that “belong” in the household should stay firmly located there. This view implies that Arendt sees the economic and the political as independent, with neither embedded in the other. Although at other moments she seems well aware that the economic is embedded in the political and is politically significant—for example, in her discussion of modern private property’s contribution to world alienation—Arendt’s quarantining the oikos as a prepolitical site contributes to the appearance of economic practices, institutions, and standards as non-normative and merely biological or natural. This tendency undermines her urgent warning in The Human Condition that a particular danger of the late modern era is a sense of powerlessness, a kind of fatalism whereby we abstain from judging whether that which we can do is actually wise to do, and a sense that things just happen without anyone making them happen. In the current U.S. context, in which citizens and leaders alike largely view the economy as a capricious god to be propitiated, Arendt’s warning is particularly relevent, but its usefulness is limited by her lack of careful consideration of the relationship between the economic and the political.

This article critiques Arendt’s economic blindspots by building on Aristotle’s claims that the economic ought to be normatively and institutionally embedded in the political, and that the danger to politics lies not in economic concerns bleeding out of their putatively prepolitical realm and into the political, but in economic concerns appearing to be independent of politics, ends in themselves beyond normative considerations. Moreover, recent readings of Aristotle undermine the sharp distinction between the private and the public, or between the oikos and the polis, instead viewing the just regime and the virtuous citizen as mutually constitutive, and therefore politics as permeating the everyday through the habituation of citizens. On this view, politics cannot and should not be contained in a particular realm; the oikos does not appear as a prepolitical realm but as one shaped by the normative judgments and choices made through political processes. Once we release politics from its confinement in a particular “realm,” and once we view economics as always shaped by political choices, we can begin to take Arendt’s warnings about powerlessness and fatalism seriously.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper is written in the burgeoning tradition of Aristotelian liberalism. In it I seek to enrich this tradition by developing a liberal theory of autonomy based on a broadly Aristotelian foundation. Part One summarizes and critiques the Kantian theory of autonomy and the major theories of autonomy in analytic philosophy. Part Two explicates the Aristotelian conception of autonomy, drawing on recent work by Fred Miller and Roderick Long. Aristotle is chided for not being liberal enough and so Part Three develops an Aristotelian-liberal theory of autonomy based in part on recent work by Douglas Rasmussen, Douglas Den Uyl, Roderick Long, and Chris Matthew Sciabarra. Autonomy is conceived of as belonging to individuals or groups. Global and local autonomy are distinguished, with global autonomy being the exercise of one's rational faculty (or self-direction) and local autonomy relating to particular desires, preferences, actions, and so forth. Local autonomy is further conceived as having three fundamental dimensions: political, social, and personal. Political autonomy is equivalent to the traditional classical liberal/libertarian concept of liberty, and is normatively protected by the right to liberty. The right to liberty protects the possibility of self-direction, a constitutive part of moral agency and all forms of human flourishing, by prohibiting the threat or use of initiatory force. Political autonomy means, in part, that one not have alien desires, preferences, actions, and so forth imposed on oneself by physical coercion. Social autonomy involves freedom from social influences that threaten the actualization of one's telos. Personal autonomy involves internal freedom from deviant desires, addiction to drugs, and so forth that threaten the actualization of one's telos. Personal and social autonomy cannot be promoted at the expense of political autonomy. Aristotelian liberalism, and an Aristotelian-liberal theory of autonomy, promise to transcend the liberal/communitarian debate. An Aristotelian-liberal theory of autonomy avoids the Enlightenment pitfalls that plague Kantian and analytic theories of autonomy.