Aristotle, Tyranny, and the Small-Souled Subject

Date01 April 2020
Published date01 April 2020
DOI10.1177/0090591719851802
AuthorJordan Jochim
Subject MatterArticles
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Article
Political Theory
2020, Vol. 48(2) 169 –191
Aristotle, Tyranny, and
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Jordan Jochim1
Abstract
Political theorists converge in identifying modern techniques of domination
as habit-formative and psychologically invasive, in contrast to earlier, more
blatantly coercive forms of repression. Putting Aristotle on tyranny in
conversation with Michel Foucault on subject formation, this article argues
for continuity across the pre- and postmodern divide. Through a close
reading of the “three heads of tyranny” in Politics 5.11 (1314a13-29)—those
being the tyrant’s efforts to form subjects who (1) have small thoughts (2)
are distrustful of one another, and (3) are incapable of action—I argue that
central to Aristotle’s account of tyrannical domination is how tyrants cultivate
the ethical vice of “small-souledness” (Nicomachean Ethics 1123b7), thus
producing subjects with humbled desires for a proportionate distribution
of political power. This article deepens our appreciation of the social and
psychological registers of Aristotle’s theorization of domination and gives
reasons for continuing to take Aristotle’s insights into tyranny seriously today.
Keywords
Aristotle, tyranny, Foucault, domination, justice, desire
Introduction
Political theorists from a diverse range of political and philosophic perspectives
converge in identifying modern techniques of domination as habit-formative
1Department of Government, College of Arts and Sciences, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY,
USA
Corresponding Author:
Jordan Jochim, Department of Government, College of Arts and Sciences, Cornell University,
214 White Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853-7901, USA.
Email: jdj74@cornell.edu

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Political Theory 48(2)
and psychologically invasive, in contrast to earlier, more blatantly coercive
forms of repression. To John Stuart Mill, for example, “the tyranny of the
majority” has emerged as a “more formidable” kind of political oppression than
that found in previous epochs, one that “leaves fewer means of escape, pene-
trating more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself.”1
According to Hannah Arendt, “the self-coercion of totalitarian logic destroys
man’s capacity for [movement,] experience, and thought,” as well as his
“capacity for action,” in a way that far exceeds earlier tyrannical investments in
spreading conditions of “[i]solation and impotence.”2 Leo Strauss claims that
forms of technology and ideology have emerged as part of a “‘conquest of
nature,’ and in particular of human nature” that risks “collectiviz[ing] human
thought.”3 In tracing the obsolescence of the tyranny of arbitrary rule—a “con-
stant, total, massive, non-analytical, unlimited relation of domination, estab-
lished in the form of the individual will of the master, his ‘caprice’”—Michel
Foucault draws attention to forms of disciplinary power that, making use of the
“automatism of habit,” render the human subject “something that can be made,”
as if shaped from “formless clay.”4
Foucault’s work on the formative effects of power has had an especially
pronounced impact on contemporary political theory, fundamentally trans-
forming “the political theoretical landscape of power”5 and, in the view of
some, “dissolv[ing] the bedrock of our social and political thought.”6 In con-
trast to Foucault, ancient Greek political theorists like Aristotle are said to
exemplify a “classical interpretation of tyranny,” beholden to an overly blunt
and severely outdated “physicalist” view of power, as “something naked
[and] forceful” that “emerges out of a barrel of a gun or perhaps from the
edge of a sword.”7 For this reason, scholars maintain that thinkers from antiq-
uity yield scant resources for helping contemporary citizens appreciate the
“multiplicity of ways in which the subject is ‘tyrannized.’”8
Without denying the existence of fundamental differences between ancient
and modern forms of oppression—whether owing, among other things, to the
rise of mass society, the invasiveness and scope of totalitarian regimes, or the
modern imbrications of scientific knowledge and power—this article chal-
lenges the received view that the formative effects of power are a uniquely
modern invention. On my reading, Aristotle illuminates the tyrant’s efforts to
constitute the ruled on both psychic and social—together, what Danielle
Allen calls “psychosocial”—registers.9 Drawing on Aristotle’s account of
tyranny in Politics 5.11, I highlight the complementarity of Aristotle and
Foucault’s views on relations of domination and argue that Aristotle under-
stands tyrannical repression as a mode of subject formation whose effects
move dynamically between city and soul.
Readers of Aristotle overwhelmingly focus on tyranny as a form of govern-
ment or regime type. I argue that Aristotle analyzes tyrannical domination as,

Jochim
171
in Foucault’s terms, a form of “governance,” that is, a “relation of power”
through which the tyrant “acts upon [the] actions” of his subjects in order to
influence their conduct, such that they become who the tyrant would have
them be.10 If the language of “government” captures the formal arrangement
of power in a regime, “governance” indexes how those in positions of political
power navigate the dilemmas of defending their rule by structuring the broader
context of action within their community. As I discuss below, where Foucault
associates disciplinary forms of governance with the cultivation of “docile
bodies,”11 Aristotle illuminates how tyrannical forms of governance aim to
produce the disposition of small-souledness, mikropsuchia, a form of charac-
ter Aristotle associates with diminished desires (Nicomachean Ethics
1125a21–32).
As scholars note, Foucault is notoriously silent on the relationship between
desire and power,12 an omission especially significant considering attention
by political theorists to the economic and political conditions of contempo-
rary life that enervate desires for collective self-rule.13 I consider Aristotle’s
most distinctive and perhaps most enduringly productive insights into tyran-
nical governance by attending to what it means for the tyrant to cultivate
small souls. For Aristotle, to speak of one’s soul is to invite attention to the
interrelations between nominally “inner” capacities for movement and action,
such as desire, and their “outer” use, habituation, and interaction with virtue
and vice in social contexts. If a hallmark of Foucault’s account is his attention
to the microphysical, appearance-regulating techniques that govern a body’s
activities in time and space, Aristotle’s insights are distinguished by his atten-
tion to how tyrannical governance operates in psychosocial registers to affect
both body and soul, desire and activity. For Aristotle, I argue, this encom-
passes desire-driven durational activities in their dynamic relationship with
orientations to the self, others, and justice.
Scholars have attended to the ways in which Aristotle’s discussion in
Politics 5.11 demonstrates the viciousness of the tyrant’s soul,14 how the
tyrant undermines intellectual and ethical conditions for human flourishing,15
and how Aristotle may have been influenced by earlier authors in describing
the tyrant’s techniques of repression.16 Often remarked upon, but rarely sub-
jected to sustained scrutiny, is what Ronald Polansky calls Aristotle’s most
“unique” contribution to antique accounts of tyranny, namely, the “reduction
of these techniques to the three heads.”17 In Aristotle’s words, the tyrant seeks
to ensure (1) “that the ruled have small thoughts, mikra phronein,” (2) “that
they distrust one another,” and (3) that they have an “incapacity, adunamia,
for activities, pragmata” (Pol. 1314a15–25).18
Focusing less on Aristotle’s theorization of the tyrant’s character, this
article explores Aristotle’s account of the tyrant’s situated and strategically
defensive orientation of governance.19 I argue that, against the backdrop of

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Political Theory 48(2)
the assumption that “all wish to overthrow him” (Pol. 1313b32), the tyrant
engages in distinctive forms of preemptive strike. Not merely repressing his
subjects before they resist, the tyrant seeks to diminish their desires for what
they might take themselves to be politically due as citizens. In this way, the
tyrant crafts subjects who are disinclined to resist in the first instance. The
tyrant does this not only by undermining his subjects’ capacities of trust and
thought but also by humbling, tapeinoein, their desires for justice, understood as
a proportionate distribution of power by cultivating small souls (Pol. 1315b7).
Elaborating the political, social, and ethical registers of the “three heads” of
tyranny and their interaction with small-souledness, I demonstrate the impor-
tance of taking Aristotle’s insights into domination seriously today.
The first section of this article focuses on Foucault’s account of power and
specifically on the form of disciplinary power he associates with the
Panopticon. Here I explore how Foucault theorizes the disempowering aims
of domination, as well as discipline’s specific concerns with association, vis-
ibility, and the production of docile bodies. I then...

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