In the Politics, Aristotle maintains, contrary to his predecessors, that there is a distinctive mode of authority that husbands should exercise over their wives.Footnote 1 He even coins a word for it: γαμιϰή, ‘the marital art’ or ‘marital rule’ (Pol. 1.3, 1253b8–10; 1.12, 1259a37–9).Footnote 2 Marital rule is supposed to differ from the authority that fathers have over their children and from the kind of rule that citizens exercise over one another. Yet it is not clear whether there is any conceptual space between political and paternal rule for marital rule to occupy. Where fathers rule and children are ruled, citizens take turns ruling and being ruled. Husbands, however, either share their rule with their wives, or they do not. If they do not, then marital rule seems indistinct from paternal rule; if they do, then it seems indistinct from political rule. To add to the confusion, Aristotle says that husbands properly rule their wives politically, but without alternating in positions of ruling and being ruled. On its face, this idea seems flatly contradictory. Political rule just is shared, reciprocal rule, and so if the husband rules permanently and his wife is merely ruled, then his rule cannot be political. So Aristotle's own description of marital rule appears inconsistent, and in any case it is difficult to see how marital rule could have the distinctive character that he insists it does.
In what follows, I argue that there is indeed conceptual space between political and paternal rule, and that we can make sense of the comparison between marital and political rule while preserving their distinctness. Understanding marital rule requires understanding Aristotle's theory of the varieties of ruling and being ruled as a theory about the different ways in which decision-making can be distributed among the participants in a cooperative activity. On the view I develop, marital rule resembles political rule because in both kinds of rule the participants share in joint deliberation about their common activities. Yet because common deliberation is compatible with permanent hierarchy, the two forms of rule are distinct: in marriage, the husband always properly retains a position of superior authority, while in political rule hierarchies are typically temporary and always subject to the approval of the people ruled. Seeing the coherence of Aristotle's account of marital rule therefore not only enables a better understanding of his conception of the household, but also helps to sharpen our appreciation of what is perhaps the central thesis of his political philosophy, that political rule is a distinctive kind of rule that differs in fundamental ways from other forms of authority.
A brief word about my approach. Aristotle's claims about women have prompted many scholars to condemn his position and to seek to unmask it as the product of a reactionary misogynist ideology.Footnote 3 Others have attempted to defend the philosopher on the grounds that he does not in fact hold the views usually attributed to him.Footnote 4 In many cases, an excessive concern with whether we should praise or blame Aristotle has contributed to oversimplification, implausibly strained interpretations, and even blatant misreadings.Footnote 5 I pursue neither strategy here. I instead follow the many philosophers who have aimed to apply the principle of charity within the bounds of plausibility in order to arrive at a careful and nuanced understanding of what Aristotle thought about women and why, but without attempting to defend him against the accusation of uncritically relying on his own and others' prejudices.Footnote 6 My goal is not to convict or acquit Aristotle of any charges against him, but to understand his ideas and arguments and to assess them in terms of their coherence and historical plausibility.
1
The Politics opens with the insistence that political rule differs from household management, and the guiding project of the first book is to substantiate that claim with an analysis of household management and its parts (Pol. 1.1, 1252a16–23). It quickly becomes apparent that Aristotle regards the parts of household management as differing among themselves as well. The household is a community composed of three sub-communities: husband and wife, father and child, and master and slave (Pol. 1.3, 1253b5–7). Each of these relationships involves the exercise of a kind of authority or rule (ἀϱχή) distinct from the other two. The rule of a master over a slave, ‘despotic rule’ (δεσποτεία, δεσποτιϰή), differs most clearly from the others because it differs most fundamentally. Unlike rule over free people, despotic rule does not aim at the good of the ruled. Rather, the master regards his slaves as instruments of his own action, and hence as having no good that is not ultimately a function of their contribution to their master's good (Pol. 1.4, 1253b30–3).Footnote 7 A well-ruled slave will, Aristotle thinks, benefit from being so ruled, provided that he is a ‘slave by nature’ rather than a naturally free person who has been unjustly enslaved (Pol. 1.5, 1254b2–9, 55a1–3; 1.6, 1255b4–15). But the slave's benefit is not the master's guiding aim; it is at best a subordinate goal or an incidental effect. Unlike slaves, who are like parts of their masters, naturally free people exist for their own sake, and hence cannot justly be treated as the mere tools or possessions of others (Pol. 1.4, 1254a1–13; cf. Metaph. 10.2, 982b26–7). Unlike despotic rule, therefore, rule over the free aims at the good of the ruled or at a good common to ruler and ruled (Pol. 1.7, 1255b16–20; 3.6, 1278b30–40).
In drawing this contrast, Aristotle is of course not making a descriptive empirical claim. As the central books of the Politics make clear, he is all too aware that most actual instances of political rule are to some significant extent corrupt. The diverse forms of corruption are various ways in which free people are subjected to rule that does not aim at their good (Pol. 3.7, 1279a22–31). These corrupt forms of political rule nonetheless remain political in part because they retain the characteristic forms of political rule – assemblies, courts, offices (Pol. 4.14, 1297b41–98a3) – and in part because the evaluative standards of political rule continue to apply. To say that rule over the free aims at the good of the ruled is to speak of the proper, uncorrupted form of rule over the free, and to speak in this way is consistent with recognizing that many and perhaps even most particular instances of rule over free people fail to rise to this standard. This point is important for interpreting Aristotle's claims about the forms of rule in the household. These are not claims about what happens, but about what happens when things happen correctly. So when Aristotle tells us about marital rule, he is not telling us how husbands and wives do in fact relate to one another in day-to-day life, but about how they relate to each other when they relate to each other in the appropriate way.
One aspect of the husband's rule over his wife is, then, clear: the husband rules his wife as a free person, which is to say that he exercises authority over her with a view to her good. Yet the same is true of his relationship to his children and of the relationship of citizens to one another, and so this feature distinguishes marital rule only from despotism and not from paternal or political rule. Unfortunately, when Aristotle attempts to clarify the difference between marital and paternal rule, matters become less clear:
A man rules both his wife and his children as free, but not in the same manner of rule. Rather, he rules his wife in a political way and his children in a royal way. For the male is, by nature, more suited for rule than the female, unless of course he is constituted contrary to nature, and the older and mature is more suited for rule than the younger and immature. Now in the majority of cases of political rule, the ruling and the ruled change places; for they tend to be equal in nature and to differ in nothing.Footnote 8 None the less, when one rules and another is ruled, they seek a difference to exist in their clothing and their speech and their honours, just as Amasis said about his footpan. But the male is always like this in relation to the female. (Pol. 1.12, 1259a39–b10)
This is a puzzling passage. It begins by distinguishing marital from paternal rule through a comparison with politics.Footnote 9 As it goes on to indicate, politics is characterized by shared, reciprocal rule, usually achieved through alternation in positions of authority. This is consistent with Aristotle's account of political rule throughout the Politics: political rule involves ruling and being ruled, and since there are usually too many people to rule all at once, alternation in office is typically the best arrangement (Pol. 1.7, 1255b16–20; 2.2, 1261a32–b6; 3.6, 1279a8–21; 7.14, 1332b12–42). So at first blush an analogy between marital and political rule should lead us to expect that husband and wife will share authority and take turns exercising it over each other. Yet as the passage continues it seems to say exactly the opposite. Political rulers adopt conventional means of marking the distinction between ruler and ruled through special forms of dress, formal modes of speech, and expressions of deference and respect. The difference between them is one of outward form and function, not one of nature. The Egyptian Amasis, who had become king despite his low birth, responded to his subjects' disdain for his origins by having his golden footpan melted down and reshaped into a statue of a god, which the Egyptians duly worshipped.Footnote 10 Though the statue and the footpan had the same underlying nature, their outward forms and functions called for very different treatment.Footnote 11 But while citizens mark their temporary differences of authority by conventional means, males, Aristotle thinks, are always marked out as by nature more suited for rule than females.Footnote 12 So the implication seems to be that husband and wife do not alternate in ruling and being ruled.Footnote 13 But if so, then it is hard to see what remains of the comparison between marital and political rule.
The difficulties that this passage raises are reflected in the different interpretations it has received in the two most recent English commentaries. Trevor Saunders denies that Aristotle means to suggest that wives rule in any way; marital rule, on his reading, resembles political rule only in the limited sense that women, like fellow citizens, ‘require consultation, argument, and persuasion’.Footnote 14 Hence for Saunders the husband does not rule his wife in a genuinely political way; his rule is simply more like political rule than anything else. Peter Simpson, on the other hand, regards the husband's rule as straightforwardly political. The husband can rule his wife in a political way by treating her as a ruling citizen would treat a ruled citizen; the difference is simply that the husband and wife will not exchange roles.Footnote 15 Simpson and Saunders perhaps agree about what marital rule will look like on the ground: a husband does not just bark orders at his wife, but seeks her consent through persuasion and argument. But this cannot be the point of the analogy between marital and political rule. Aristotle tells us that masters should even reason with their slaves: ‘those’, he says, ‘who deprive slaves of rational speech and tell us that we should merely give them commands do not speak well; for slaves need to be admonished even more than children’ (Pol. 1.13, 1260b5–7). Presumably masters need to explain their commands and the reasons for them because slaves, unlike children, cannot be expected to work these reasons out for themselves. But Aristotle clearly expects proper household management to operate primarily through reasoned discourse rather than force or coercion. So if the comparison between marital and political rule is to have any point, it will need to be a more substantial one.
Saunders and Simpson therefore both fail to provide an adequate account of the similarity between marital and political rule. Simpson's view, however, also threatens to collapse the distinction between the two altogether. But Aristotle cannot afford to collapse it, because his fundamental thesis is that political rule is distinctive. It differs from other forms of rule not just in the number of people involved, but in the manner in which the rule is exercised. The difference cannot rest on alternation, because alternation alone does not amount to a difference in kind. Aristotle describes the view he rejects as holding that alternation is sufficient to distinguish political rule from royal or ‘kingly’ rule, and he takes this distinction as an application of the more general claim that the varieties of rule differ not in kind or form (εἴδει), but only in quantity (Pol. 1.1, 1252a9–16). Since he nowhere argues that alternation alone yields a difference in kind, it seems clear that he agrees with his opponents that it is only a quantitative difference. That agreement is well founded, since alternation of ruler and ruled does not entail any difference in the kind of authority the ruler exercises at any given time.Footnote 16 Hence if alternation alone distinguished political and marital rule, Aristotle could not consistently maintain that they differ in kind. If the analogy between politics and marriage is to fit coherently into the theory of rule, there must be a difference in kind between marital and political rule as well as a similarity sufficient to warrant the comparison.
The differences between these forms of rule become more apparent in light of Aristotle's account of their rationale. Slaves, children and women each supposedly exhibit specific psychological deficiencies that purportedly justify the free adult male's rule but also constrain the shape that his rule can legitimately take. These deficiencies are deficiencies of the capacity for rational deliberation:
For the free rules the slave and the male rules the female and a man rules a child differently. All the parts of the soul exist in all of them, but in different ways. For the slave altogether lacks the deliberative capacity, and the female has it, but it lacks authority, and the child has it, but it is incomplete. (Pol. 1.12, 1260a9–14)
In rough outline, the connection between these deficiencies and the related modes of authority is straightforward. A person who is, on Aristotle's view, justly subjected to despotic rule is one who lacks the capacity to deliberate for himself and to live his life accordingly. Such a radically incapacitated person needs someone else to do his deliberating for him, and this is the kind of authority that despotic rule involves.Footnote 17 Children are similar to slaves, but with the crucial difference that their deliberative capabilities are under development. Hence paternal rule aims at preparing children to become free adults, and though parents initially do all of their children's deliberation for them, children gradually develop their capacity and expand the scope of their independent deliberation.Footnote 18
Once again, however, when we turn our attention to women, matters become less clear. Here we are told that women have the capacity for deliberation, but that it ‘lacks authority’ (ἄϰυϱον). As in the other two cases, the nature of this deficiency should explain the character of the husband's rule. But Aristotle's description of the deficiency is obscure, and so too is the sort of rule he envisions. To understand it, we need to answer three closely related questions. First, what, according to Aristotle, do women have that children and slaves lack? Second, what do women lack that free adult men have? And finally, what difference does it make for women's role in the household and their relationship to their husbands? I will take up each question in turn.
2
First, when Aristotle says that the wife and the children have, but the slave lacks, the capacity for deliberation, there are two things that he does not mean. On the one hand, he does not mean that slaves lack, but women possess, the faculty of reason. Even allegedly ‘natural’ slaves remain human beings, and hence rational animals.Footnote 19 Recall that Aristotle encourages masters to reason with their slaves rather than simply giving them orders. Even the ability to understand complex commands requires distinctively human conceptual capacities; by advising masters to reason with their slaves, Aristotle shows that he expects slaves to be capable of grasping the reasons behind their masters' orders. Aristotle elsewhere distinguishes two senses in which we might speak of the soul as having reason: either as having it in itself and actively engaging in reasoning, or as being receptive to reason, listening to reason, as he puts it, as to a father (Pol. 1.5, 1254b22–4; Eth. Nic. 1.7, 1098a3–5; 1.13, 1103a1–3; Eth. Eud. 2.1, 1219b26–36). Everyone, on Aristotle's view, has this receptivity to reason. So when he attributes to women the possession of the deliberative capacity as well, he means to attribute to them the more robust capacity for the active employment of their own practical reasoning.Footnote 20
Just how robust this capacity is we can see from the second thing that Aristotle does not mean when he says that women have it but slaves do not. From much of Aristotle's discussion, we might expect that deliberation is just a matter of means-end reasoning (Eth. Nic. 3.3, 1112b11–20, 1112b32–4; 6.9, 1142a31–b33). But Aristotle acknowledges cases in which supposedly natural slaves practise crafts that involve fairly complex means (such as cooking, Pol. 1.7, 1255b22–37), and in any case it seems implausible to suppose that people capable of following instructions and understanding the reasons behind them could be altogether incapable of thinking about how to achieve their goals. Many readers of the Politics have concluded that Aristotle simply contradicts himself here.Footnote 21 Others have found this contradiction too obvious and have preferred an interpretation that sets a higher bar on what counts as deliberation.Footnote 22 There are in fact good independent reasons to think that much of what we might intuitively think of as means-end reasoning falls short of full-blown Aristotelian deliberation.
Though the details of Aristotle's moral psychology are complex and controversial, it is tolerably clear that he follows Plato in distinguishing three irreducibly distinct varieties of motivation or desire (ὄϱεξις) in the human soul: non-rational appetite (ἐπιθυμία), spirited desire or emotion (θυμός) and rational desire, often rendered as ‘wish’ (βούλησις).Footnote 23 Each kind of motivation is able to yield voluntary action on its own without or even in opposition to the others (Eth. Nic. 1.13, 1102b13–31). Genuinely rational action or praxis differs from mere voluntary action by being based on a rational decision (πϱοαίϱεσις), itself reached via deliberation that proceeds from a rational desire (Eth. Nic. 3.2, 1111b26–9; 3.3, 1113a2–5; 6.2, 1139a31–b5). Children and non-rational animals act voluntarily without deliberation, and so are incapable of praxis (Eth. Nic. 3.2, 1111b8–10). Yet it would be false to describe them as failing to seek means to their ends. In fact, Aristotle recognizes that many non-human animals display remarkable cognitive abilities in pursuit of their goals, and he is willing to ascribe to them a kind of intelligence analogous to practical wisdom (Eth. Nic. 6.7, 1141a26–8; Hist. an. 1.1, 488b15–26).Footnote 24 This sophistication in finding means to ends is not deliberative, Aristotle thinks, because it does not involve rational thought, but requires only the integrated exercise of perception, memory and imagination.Footnote 25 Deliberation, by contrast, is an active process of reasoning that involves an abstract grasp of the causal and explanatory relations between means and ends (Eth. Eud. 2.10, 1226b20–30; Eth. Nic. 6.9, 1142a31–b33).Footnote 26 This abstractness helps to account for the broader scope, complexity and critical potential of deliberation compared to the non-rational pursuit of one's goals. At the limit, deliberation yields rational decisions about how to live our lives as a whole. We can not only devise clever ways to fulfil our desires, but can consider what sorts of desires we ought to cultivate in light of the standard set by the ideal of a complete and self-sufficient good that ‘makes life choiceworthy and lacking in nothing’ (Eth. Nic. 1.7, 1097b15). Deliberation so conceived transcends the ability to find ways to gratify an appetite for food or to calm one's fear of danger by finding a route of escape.
Deliberation, on this view, is likewise more demanding than following even a fairly complex set of instructions to produce a particular result, such as baking a cake. Though baking a cake will require finding and taking means to various ends, it need not involve the reflective discovery of those means in the first place; the ability to bake cakes well does not depend on the ability to work out for oneself how to bake cakes. In the craft of baking, a better analogue to deliberation would be discovering through reasoned reflection that flour, eggs, milk, sugar and butter can be mixed up and baked into a delicious treat.Footnote 27 People who lack the capacity for deliberation nonetheless retain capacities of reason-responsiveness, and so can be taught to perform complex technical tasks. No doubt they can also employ the considerable cognitive resources of perception, memory and imagination in performing these tasks. For all that, they do not need to deliberate. Whether or not Aristotle is right to suppose that it is possible to lack the capacity for deliberation altogether without also lacking the capacities of reason-responsiveness, it should be clear that it is this higher-order ability of rational deliberation, and not just the bare ability to find means to one's ends, that he denies to non-rational animals, slaves and immature children but attributes to adult women.Footnote 28
3
If this is what women have, then what are they supposedly missing? Aristotle says that the woman's deliberative capacity is ‘without authority’ (ἄϰυϱον), but there are several competing interpretations of what this term implies. Disagreement centres on two issues: whether the term describes an intrapersonal or an interpersonal feature of the woman's psyche, and whether it is a natural or a conventional one. Perhaps the most common interpretation, and the one that I will defend, is an intrapersonal naturalist one: women can deliberate, but they tend to be controlled not by their deliberations, but by their non-rational motivations.Footnote 29 Against this, interpersonal interpretations maintain that women's deliberations lack authority not over their own desire and action, but over men.Footnote 30 This interpersonal lack of authority is usually taken to be conventional, though several important scholars have taken it as natural in one way or another.Footnote 31 Similarly, the intrapersonal deficiency might be seen as having conventional causes.Footnote 32 Rather than arguing against each of these alternatives in detail, I will instead consider some reasons to prefer the intrapersonal naturalist reading, and will then answer some prominent objections that have been raised against it.
The intrapersonal naturalist interpretation has much in its favour. First, it fits nicely into Aristotle's moral psychology, with its complex view of motivation. Second, it gives some theoretical refinement to a common Greek stereotype of women as dominated by their emotions and appetites, a view that Aristotle elsewhere seems to accept.Footnote 33 Finally, it can play the role in the argument of Politics 1 that it is evidently supposed to play. This last point is the most troublesome for conventionalist and interpersonal readings. As I have noted, Aristotle's theory of the varieties of rule is normative and not merely descriptive; it does not purport to tell us how things are, but how they are when they are correct. Yet on conventionalist interpretations, we are being told about a contingent social fact that does no justificatory work.Footnote 34 Similarly, the strategy of the argument is to appeal to psychological differences to justify varied modes of rule. On an interpersonal interpretation, marital rule would, uniquely, be justified by an appeal to a social relation rather than a psychological capacity.Footnote 35 These problems are, to my mind, decisive against interpersonal and conventionalist readings so long as the standard interpretation is defensible. In the interest of clarifying as well as defending it, I want to consider two important objections that have been raised against it by one of most sophisticated proponents of the conventionalist view, Marguerite Deslauriers.
The first of these objections is lexical, the second philosophical. The lexical objection is that the term ἄκυϱος is applied elsewhere in the Aristotelian corpus only to things that lack authority owing to convention rather than to some natural incapacity; we read, for instance, of invalid contracts or defunct laws as ἄϰυϱος.Footnote 36 But while the term does not appear to pick out a natural incapacity elsewhere in Aristotle's practical writings, it seems to do just that in his biological works. Perhaps the most straightforward example is a discussion of hermaphrodites in the Generation of Animals, where we are told that in every hermaphroditic animal, one set of genitalia is κύϱιος and the other ἄκυϱος (Gen. an. 4.4, 772b27). In this context, these terms seem clearly to mean that one set is operative and the other not. This is a natural incapacity if anything is. Later in the same book, Aristotle supports the claim that the movements of the waters depend on the movements of the celestial bodies by appeal to the ‘reasonable’ principle that the movements of ‘the less authoritative things’ (τῶν ἀϰυϱοτέϱων) follow the movements of the ‘more authoritative’ (τῶν ϰυϱιοτέϱων, Gen. an. 4.10, 778a1–2). Presumably the celestial bodies do not exert this control over the waters merely by convention. In the Movement of Animals, we find the claim that ‘any rest within the animal is ineffectual [ἄϰυϱος] if there is not something outside which is unqualifiedly at rest and unmoved’ (De motu an. 2, 698b8).Footnote 37 Animal motion, no less than the movement of the waters or the celestial bodies, is not fundamentally governed by convention. So from this and other passages, we should conclude that something can be ἄκυϱος by nature as well as by convention. In other words, the lexical objection is simply false.Footnote 38
The philosophical objection is more serious. This objection is that the incapacity that the standard interpretation attributes to women would render them unable to possess genuine virtues, a conclusion that Aristotle explicitly rejects. If women are by nature prone to be driven by non-rational motivations to act contrary to their own deliberation, then they naturally suffer from akrasia. Aristotle distinguishes akrasia from vice, since the akratic person's deliberation and decision may be correct; but since they are ineffective, akrasia falls short of virtue as well. Yet the claim that women's deliberative capacity lacks authority is introduced in the context of an explanation for how women can have virtues. Like children and slaves, women are said to possess virtues of the relevant kinds through their relationship to the adult male head of the household. Slaves can have virtues of character such as courage and temperance only if they are guided by their master's practical wisdom; though they cannot themselves possess virtues of intellect, they can develop dispositions to respond appropriately to correct reasoning (Pol. 1.13, 1260a14–20, b3–5). Analogously, a woman's virtues are enabled by her husband's rule: as Aristotle puts it, the man's virtue is ‘ruling’ virtue, while his wife's is ‘assisting’ virtue (Pol. 1.13, 1260a20–4).Footnote 39 If women were, in Deborah Modrak's phrase, ‘constitutionally akratic’, then they could not have virtues of any kind, whether assisting or ruling.Footnote 40
There is a fairly straightforward response to this objection: Aristotle's claim need not be understood to be that akrasia is inevitable in women, but that marital rule is precisely what enables women to overcome this natural deficiency and to put their deliberation in control.Footnote 41 Yet the objection points to an important aspect of Aristotle's view. Marital rule cannot enable a woman's virtue simply by empowering her to resist her non-rational motivations, for while that achievement would free her from the bonds of akrasia, it would make her only enkratic, and not virtuous. Virtue, as Aristotle understands it, involves a harmony between reason and desire, and for deliberation to have authority is not simply for it to emerge victorious from a struggle with appetite and emotion, but to guide and shape appetite and emotion in accordance with the deliverances of reason. The texts are silent about how a husband's rule is supposed to enable his wife's virtue, and so we can only speculate as to what Aristotle might have thought about this. But he need only have thought that women are somehow affected emotionally by being subject to their husbands' authority, so that their non-rational motives cooperate with rather than oppose their reason.Footnote 42 Most of us will not find this idea especially plausible, to say the least, but it is not uncharitable to attribute it to Aristotle. It is of a piece with conventional Greek views of women as highly capable of deliberative rationality but dangerous when not subordinate to men.Footnote 43 Hence it could easily have seemed to have ample empirical confirmation. More important than the precise mechanism is that marital rule, on this view, enables a woman's virtue not by supplementing any rational defect on her part, but by inhibiting the non-rational obstacles to the effective employment of her deliberative capabilities.Footnote 44
4
Aristotle's account should therefore lead us to expect that wives play an important deliberative role in the household, and this would help to explain why he compares a husband's rule to political rule: like political rule but unlike paternal and despotic rule, marital rule gives the ruled some scope for deliberation. Taking the analogy with politics seriously, however, requires that wives somehow share in rule. Aristotle elsewhere seems to say as much. In a discussion of justice in Nicomachean Ethics 5, he explains:
There is no justice without qualification in relation to one's own things, and a possession and a child, until it reaches a certain age and becomes separate, are, as it were, parts of oneself, and no one deliberately chooses to harm oneself. That is why there is no injustice towards oneself, and so there is not political justice or injustice either. For it [political justice] exists in accordance with law and among those who are naturally suited for law, and these are people who have equality in ruling and being ruled. That is why justice exists more in relation to one's wife than in relation to one's children or possessions. (Eth. Nic. 5.6, 1134b9–16)
We can speak of justice towards slaves and children, Aristotle thinks, because we can recognize some standards governing our treatment of them. But these standards are standards of justice only with qualification, because the interests of slaves and immature children are too closely bound up with the interests of their masters and parents to amount to fully separate interests. Neither of these relationships fits the model of the relationship between citizens, which Aristotle takes to be the paradigmatic relationship of justice (Eth. Nic. 5.6, 1134a24–30). Yet justice between husbands and wives more closely resembles political justice because here too the participants have a kind of equality in ruling and being ruled. What this passage claims, then, is that a husband's rule over his wife, though not a form of political rule, resembles it because the wife shares in ruling as well as being ruled.
It might seem sufficient to say that the wife shares in rule because she has the recognized authority to issue commands to other members of the household, helping to ensure that her husband's decisions are properly implemented and thereby exercising her ‘assisting’ virtues. The ability to issue commands, however, is insufficient for sharing in rule as Aristotle conceives it. This becomes clear when we consider that even slaves can be in a position to give orders. Not only can some slaves be put in charge of others, but slaves can give commands to their masters' young children: slaves might, for example, be entrusted with the task of teaching free children to read and write, and a slave, no less than a father or a mother, could be expected to tell children to stop playing dangerous games with farming tools, particularly if his masters had explicitly instructed him to make sure that the children stayed out of trouble.Footnote 45 So too could an older brother be expected to help ensure his younger brother's compliance with their father's rules. Yet neither slaves nor brothers are described as ruling each other or anyone else in the household.
One likely reason why slaves and siblings do not count as sharing in or exercising rule when they issue commands to other members of the household is that their ability to give orders derives from the adult male householder's authority. If a slave can give orders to a child when he is teaching that child to read and write, the force of those orders none the less depends on the father's previous instructions: he directs the slave to teach the child his letters, and he orders the child to study his letters with the slave. Similarly, when a slave tells a child to stop fooling around with dangerous tools, the child's choice to obey the slave flows from the supposition that his father would at least endorse the command if he has not already explicitly given it himself. If we imagine, by contrast, a slave ordering his master's child to perform some particularly unpleasant bit of manual labour, the child can disobey with impunity and can even disregard the command altogether if he knows that his father would never support it. It is not that slaves can in no way succeed in giving commands that their masters would not support. It is, rather, that any regularly recognized authority that slaves have over their master's children depends entirely on their master's endorsement.Footnote 46 The same condition applies to siblings in their relations to one another and even to children in their relations with slaves. If the ability to issue commands to other members of the household does not suffice for slaves and children to count as sharing in rule, then it will be no more sufficient to account for how wives share in rule.
The insufficiency of issuing commands for ruling is clearly implied in the most general characterization of ‘rule’ offered in the Aristotelian corpus: the entry for ἀϱχή in the philosophical lexicon of the Metaphysics. The concept of an ἀϱχή as a ‘principle’ is central to Aristotle's metaphysics and epistemology, and as such it bears a number of complex and related senses, most related to the basic meaning of the word as ‘beginning, origin, source, starting point’. The word also carries some less technical but closely related meanings; the ἀϱχή of a road, for instance, is just the place where the road begins (Metaph. 5.1, 1012b34). The entry in the lexicon distinguishes six uses of the term, the fifth of which is its use in political contexts. Though Aristotle inherited from ordinary Greek the use of ἀϱχ- terms to describe the exercise of rule by some people over others, the entry in the lexicon not implausibly treats this sense as related to the others:
ἀϱχή is also said of that according to whose decision things that are moved move and things that change change, as the offices in cities and dynastic powers and kingships and tyrannies are called ἀϱχαί, and so are the crafts, and the most architectonic of these in particular. (Metaph. 5.1, 1013a10–14)
This use of the term is not merely equivocal in relation to the others, whether the mundane (the beginning of a road) or the technical (metaphysical and epistemological principles). On the contrary, ‘it is common to all ἀϱχαί to be the first thing from which something either is or comes to be or is known’ (Metaph. 5.1, 1013a17–19). The use of the term in political contexts thus picks out the exercise of rule as the initiation of collective or cooperative action. By adding that the same sense of the term applies in the realm of crafts, the passage suggests that there is nothing essentially political about rule per se. Rather, rule can be exercised in any collective human enterprise, whether it is a case of action (πϱᾶξις) or production (ποίησις); politics and craftsmanship simply serve as useful illustrations because ordinary language reflects the exercise of rule in these contexts with its talk of ‘offices’ (ἀϱχαί) and ‘architectonic’ craftsmen.
The most distinctive feature of this practical and productive sense of ἀϱχή as ‘rule’ is the role of decision (πϱοαίϱεσις). The involvement of decision distinguishes rule from the other senses of ἀϱχή by bringing it within the scope of intentional human action, but it also distinguishes the exercise of rule from other ways in which human beings can influence one another's behaviour. In the paradigm case, when one person rules and another is ruled, the latter implements a decision that the former has made. Hence ruling differs from offering advice, making suggestions, proposing bargains or inflicting violence. One person rules another when her decision is the source of that other person's action. Yet, as I noted above, Aristotelian decisions are the products of deliberation. If a wife shares in rule, then, we should expect that she will contribute to the deliberation that issues in decisions that govern some range of behaviour of some other members of the household. The question is, which behaviours, and which members?
One plausible answer that has been attractive to many scholars is that the wife and the husband rule in different spheres: the wife rules over the traditionally feminine domestic sphere concerned with spinning wool, preparing food, nursing babies and the like, while the husband rules in the traditionally masculine sphere of farming, protection, and representing the household in politics.Footnote 47 It is clear enough that Aristotle accepts the traditional Greek gendered division of labour, and that he regards it as grounded in physiological and perhaps psychological differences between men and women. In the Nicomachean Ethics he observes that human beings do not form couples for the sake of procreation alone, but for ‘the things that pertain to life’. His explanation is that the tasks required for ‘the things that pertain to life’ are distinct, and women and men are suited for different tasks (Eth. Nic. 8.12, 1162a16–24). The Politics clarifies that the man's task in household management is to acquire, while the woman's is to preserve (Pol. 3.4, 1277b20–5). This distinction captures the traditional division of women's and men's spheres fairly well, and a similar division is in fact central to Xenophon's account of the household in the Oeconomicus. Xenophon's expert household manager likewise appeals to the technical division of labour involved in maintaining a household, and goes on to argue that excellence in these tasks requires distinct mental and bodily aptitudes, ones that correspond to the dispositions and abilities of women and men. So, for instance, women's greater susceptibility to fear makes them more cautious and hence better guardians of what men bring into the household, while masculine courage suits men for defending the household against aggressors (Xen. Oec. 7.22–5).Footnote 48
Aristotle does not explicitly offer this sort of sociobiological explanation in the Politics or the Nicomachean Ethics, but it is consistent with his treatment of male and female dispositions in the biological works.Footnote 49 If it lies behind his endorsement of the gendered division of labour, it would explain why he regards that division and the hierarchy he takes it to imply as natural and appropriate and not mere contingent social facts. The Nicomachean Ethics twice compares the relationship between husband and wife to an aristocracy: ‘for’, as he puts it, ‘the husband rules in accordance with merit and concerning the things the husband should, but the things that are fit for a woman he hands over to her. But if he lords it over everything he turns it into an oligarchy, for he does this contrary to merit and not in so far as he is better’ (Eth. Nic. 8.10, 1160b32–61a1; cf. 8.11, 1161a22–5). Like Xenophon, then, Aristotle apparently thinks that women should rule in the household over the tasks of preservation because they are better suited for it, and that men should rule over the works of acquisition because they are better suited for that. Both will exercise their deliberative capabilities in their respective spheres with a view to directing and co-ordinating the work of others, whether slaves or children. If all goes well, both will thereby develop and display virtues of character and of intellect. The similarities between this view and Xenophon's are so striking that it begins to seem difficult to appreciate why some scholars have praised Xenophon for taking a progressive and counter-traditional view of women while condemning Aristotle as a reactionary defender of the status quo.Footnote 50
The difference, however, is that Aristotle is much clearer than Xenophon that he regards the wife as subordinate to the husband. Though she rules in her own sphere, her husband retains a superior position: every household, Aristotle has it, is a monarchy, and the wife's virtues are, after all, merely ‘assisting’ virtues (Pol. 1.7, 1255b19; 1.13, 1260a22–3). We might wonder why this should be. After all, nothing about the gendered division of spheres per se entails any inequality between them. Deslauriers has argued to the contrary that the husband's authority derives from the superiority of the masculine sphere. The man's tasks take him out of the household and into the city. But since the household, on Aristotle's view, exists for the sake of the city, the activities of politics are superior to and authoritative over the activities of the household. Women are subordinate, that is, because, as Deslauriers puts it, ‘the deliberative faculty of women operates in only a particular domain, the household, which exists for the sake of another domain, the city’.Footnote 51 But this view is, I think, neither philosophically nor interpretatively satisfactory. It seems, first of all, implausible that anyone's deliberative capacities should be strictly limited to a particular domain; if women can deliberate about the female domestic sphere, then they should be able to deliberate about any sphere.Footnote 52 More pressingly, however, the sort of teleological superiority and legislative control that Aristotle sees as characteristic of the city's relation to the household entail nothing about relations of authority within the household. The household may exist for the sake of the city, but the city exists for the sake of the flourishing of its members, including, Aristotle explicitly notes, its women (Pol. 1.13, 1260b8–20; 2.9, 1269b13–19; cf. Rh. 1.5, 1361a5–11). Even within this teleological framework, the view that men are uniquely suited for politics is wholly consistent with supposing that women should have more authority than men in the household. Though the decisions of the political community constrain the activities of households, decisions within the household could be made entirely by women even if political decisions were made entirely by men. So there is no obvious direct route from the gendered division of labour to the gendered division of authority.Footnote 53
In fact, we have already seen reasons to think that the wife's rule is not entirely restricted to the feminine sphere. Aristotle claims that husband and wife have a kind of equality in ruling and being ruled; that is to say that both share in being ruled as well as ruling. We might easily suppose that this means only that husbands are ruled in the female domestic sphere. But this seems mistaken, for two related reasons. First, it just seems false: the husband does not act in the female sphere under the direction of his wife, but leaves it to his wife to take care of matters in that sphere. Second, if the husband merely leaves it to his wife to govern the female sphere, then he is simply delegating authority. But if someone delegates authority to me in some domain, I do not thereby gain authority over that person in that domain.Footnote 54 As Aristotle conceives it, being ruled is centrally a matter of being subject to the deliberative decisions of another person. Delegating authority to someone does not entail becoming subject to that person's decisions. As anyone who has been a part of a bureaucratic organization well knows, if I have authority delegated to me in some subordinate domain, I may be empowered to make decisions within that domain, but I am not thereby given any role in the processes of deliberation and decision that generate the policies that I must observe and implement; I might share in rule in some sense, but the ‘higher-ups’ are not ruled by me in any sense, because I do not share in their decision-making. So too, if the husband is ruled within his own household, it must be through the influence that others have in the deliberation that leads to his decisions. It is in this sense, I am suggesting, that marital rule resembles political rule: the wife, though ruled, also contributes to the formation of the decisions by which she is ruled, and therefore also shares in rule; the husband, though ruling, concedes a role to his wife in forming the decisions by which he rules, and therefore is also in a sense ruled.
How does this take us beyond Saunders's description of marital rule as requiring ‘consultation, argument, and persuasion’? It is possible to consult another person's preferences and to make use of arguments aimed at persuasion without allowing that person to share in the deliberation that issues in a decision. Imagine a Greek father who plans to marry his daughter to a promising young fellow of aristocratic lineage. He might seek his wife's opinion about the match: if she is favourably disposed, he will go ahead; if she is unsure, he will need to persuade her in order to make things go smoothly; if she is firmly opposed, he may even abandon the plan if he thinks the marriage would not be worth the trouble. In any case, his wife does not contribute to the process of deliberation that forms his decision. Rather, her judgements figure in her husband's deliberation as external aids or obstacles to the implementation of a decision he has already made. We often take this sort of stance towards children: we consult their preferences and opt for persuasion over coercion, but we do not enter into joint deliberation with them. Participants in joint deliberation take one another's judgement seriously in deciding together what to do. It is this idea of shared deliberation that can explain both the similarities and the differences between marital and political rule.
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On this account, marital rule resembles political rule because in both cases the person who is ruled also shares in the deliberative decision-making that is ruling. In a democratic political assembly, each member is entitled to raise issues for discussion, to make proposals, to speak for or against those proposals, and, in the end, to vote on those proposals. This is a process of collective deliberation, and all of the members of the assembly contribute to it, even if only by voting. So all of them are exercising rule. Yet the assembly's decision will govern the actions of all of its members, and hence they are all ruled, as well. So too in the household husband and wife deliberate together and reach decisions guiding and constraining the actions of the household's members, including themselves. The difference is that in politics, justified hierarchies are typically temporary and always conditional on the recognized political virtue of the rulers (Pol. 3.13, 1283b40–84a17; 3.17, 1287b41–1288a29).Footnote 55 By contrast, in the household the male always occupies a superior position upon which all other authority depends. Though husband and wife share in common deliberation, the decisions that rule the household are, in the final analysis, his decisions, aided by the contributions of his wife. This, I take it, is why the husband is consistently described as the ruler and why the husband's virtues are ‘ruling’ virtues, while his wife's are ‘assisting’ virtues. The wife ‘assists’ not in the sense of merely obeying or serving her husband, but by contributing to the deliberation and decision-making over which he retains control.Footnote 56 The husband rules in that his deliberation and decision are ultimately the source of the household's collective action; his wife is a genuine co-deliberator, but the authority that she helps to exercise is her husband's. By contrast, when women assume independent authority, they gain control of their husbands, and Aristotle consistently regards that as a bad thing (Eth. Nic. 8.10, 1161a1–3; Pol. 2.9, 1269b33–4). But his disapproval of female control is consistent with his endorsement of female contribution.Footnote 57 Husbands and wives can share in ruling and being ruled even as the male retains the superior and properly ruling position, and it is that permanent hierarchy that distinguishes marriage from politics. In marriage, the wife's deliberative role is an extension of her husband's and owes its authority to his. In politics, the authority of the rulers is, in effect, delegated to them by the ruled.
Aristotle's view of marriage is plainly flawed. It is grounded in claims about female psychology that are empirically false. Even if they were true it is doubtful, to say the least, whether the recommendations that Aristotle draws from them would be justified. None the less, the view is internally coherent and its intuitive plausibility to a fourth-century Greek male is readily apparent. Hence its historical significance is clear. Its philosophical significance lies not in any insights about family life, but in what it helps to show us about Aristotle's theory of politics. That theory makes very strong demands for political inclusion and equality among adult men. Yet those demands have often been watered down by scholars, as though it were enough for political rule that the rulers rule in the interest of the ruled, take their opinions into account, leave them some scope for deliberation, or give them opportunities to exercise authority in some subordinate sphere.Footnote 58 Aristotle's account of marriage shows that this is not enough, because it shows that shared authority is compatible with unconditional hierarchy. Political rule differs from marital rule because it is not enough for political rule that we should sometimes get to make some contribution to the decisions that guide our actions and structure our lives. Aristotelian citizens, unlike Aristotelian wives, are not unconditionally subordinate to anyone. This is the kind of authority that Aristotle regards as crucial for the full development and expression of our nature as rational and political animals, and though much more would need to be said to elucidate the distinctive nature and value of Aristotelian political community, the virtue of his account of marital rule is that it can help us to see more clearly just what it is that needs to be said.
