his understanding of virtue as constituted by habits and actions informed by
nature and culture (Nicomachean EthicsI. 8 and II. 1 ), or of property as a mode
of holding things as one’s own for common use(Politics 1263 a 25 – 26 ), or of the
polity as a diVerentiated unity (PoliticsII. 1 ), reveal him to be not a conceptual
forerunner of contemporary theorists of virtue ethics or private property or
identity politics but rather a proponent of a way of thinking beyond some of
the binarisms that inform and stymie much of contemporary political
thought about these questions. Aristotle is able to move beyond binary
thinking (is virtue a matter of nature or nurture? is property public or
private?) because his dialogic practice of theory, which produces, and is
informed by, complex understandings of ethical and political phenomena,
brings together into plural or diVerentiated unities ideas and practices that
are today often treated as being in an unbridgeable tension. Aristotle, too,
understands the relation between the diVerentiated parts of any whole to be
always in a possible tension but, to him, the diVerence that can produce
tension also and in theWrst instance makes possible these unities as plural
wholes.
It is especially productive to engage Aristotle with the speciWcally
democratic culture and practices of his time and of our own because of
the ways in which his simultaneous commitment to diVerence and unity
oVers a kind of education in democratic citizenship. It does this by,
among other things, modeling the dynamic reciprocity characteristic of
democratic deliberation and rotational rule, or ruling and being ruled in
turn. These signal features of democratic self-sovereignty depend on
the simultaneous recognition of and respect for plurality and unity, as
do Aristotle’s philosophical method as well as his substantive accounts of
ethical and political phenomena. Democratic deliberation depends on
a plurality of points of view and aims to achieve consensus out of
these diVering opinions. Rotational rule involves hierarchy and
obedience and aims to achieve the common good for both rulers and those
being ruled.
These aspects of Aristotle’s theorizing are best exempliWed, perhaps, in
his familiar celebration of the mean as that which aims at ‘‘what is inter-
mediate’’ (Nicomachean Ethics 1106 b 28 – 29 ). Functioning simultaneously as
an ethical attitude—the embodiment of virtue—and as a political mandate—
in defense of a middle class—and positioned between excess and deWcit,
Aristotle’s mean is a uniWed middle. But it is neither a middle nor a
unity in any usual sense. It is not achieved simply by combining opposing
the political theory of classical greece 185