THE ARISTOTELIAN AND AN INSTITUTIONAL VIEW
NOTES Back to article
* I am indebted to A. Reckermann for criticism
and discussion of an earlier draft as well as to M. Frede, D. Markis, M.
Mignucci and F. Peonidis for clarifying criticism during the conference on
Aristotele in Thessaloniki, June 1997.
l. Compare e.g. Habermas, 1987.
2. See white, 1987.
3. See, for instance, Balzer et al., 1987, ch. 6.
4. Compare, however, recent developments in AI, like
Brown & Carmo, 1996.
5. Balzer, 1990.
6. References to the two books Politics (Politica,
1957) and Nicomachean Ethics (Ethica Nicomachea, 1957) will be directly
mentioned in the text and will be made in the form (Pol. s,n) or (NE s,n) where
Pol. means Politics, NE means Nicomachean Ethics, s is the section and n the
page number. In order to avoid at least the worst kinds of meanfomning change in
translation, the Greek original expressions of important notions are sometimes
mentioned in modern form and written with roman letters.
7. The notion of citizenship is discussed by
Aristotle at length and at a modern level of sophistication (Pol. 1274-6, 67
ff).
8. The term `politeia' is used in at least three
different meanings in Aristotle. First, it denotes constitutions in general,
like e.g. in (Pol. 1331; 1332). Second, it is used to denote a mixture of
democracy and oligarchy, e.g. (Pol. 1293; 1294). The third use is found in (Pol.
1279) where politeia refers to one of the three systematically distinguished
forms, namely that in which the majority of the people represents the supreme
power and also takes the common good into account. In the present paper,
politeia is used exclusively in the third meaning.
9. The question of whether a virtuous person in
office could have an aim different from the general aim of the state certainly
is important for the understanding of Aristotle's notion and system of virtues,
but cannot be adequately discussed here.
10. Recall Aristotle's above precondition that the
virtuous have to be equipped with the goods necessary to be virtuous.
11. In Germany after the second world war, the
basic alternative in election campaigns always has been `freedom or socialism' (Freiheit oder Sozialismus) where socialism is basically linked to
equality as established by regulations of the state.
12. One of the few exceptions is Eckstein, 1979.
13. In the social sciences presently the game
theoretic view seems to prevail when institutions are discussed. However, what
are called `institutions' in the game theoretic approach are not political
systems, but more local and abstract things like `promise', `convention' and the
like. Up to now game theoretic analysis has not been able to model and to
explain one single political system of the kind we are discussing here.
1993.
14. A short, systematic description is found in
Balzer, 1990, for more details see Baizer,
Ranking Political Systems 145
15. These definitions and the following theorems are
elaborated in the appendix.
16. See Lukes, 1974.
17. See Balzer, 1993, chap. 6.
18. Compare the definition in Balzer, 1993, chap. 12.
19. In a more fine grained analysis one would use
action-types and require that a and a ' be actions of the same type, compare
Balzer, 1994.
20. Solidarity is too complex a notion to be
treated in brief. It centrally relies on the notion of joint attitudes which
have recently been analyzed in detail, see for instance Balzer & Tuomela, 1997.
21. This feature is also found in most other, recent
accounts.
22. See, forn instance, Ballmer & Brennenstruhl, 1981.