Insect Politics

Ant farms don't seem to be as popular today with young boys as they were when I was a boy. There were plastic ant farms that allowed ants to build their nests in containers with plastic windows so that you could watch them at work. But I preferred to use Mason jars filled with dirt.

One day, I went to my back yard to examine my ant colony, and I was terrified to see that my black ant colony was under attack from a red ant colony. The fighting was vicious. Since this was at the peak of the Cold War, I imagined that my ants were fighting off the Red Army. After a few hours of battle, my ants were completely overrun by the Reds. It was a sad day.

Years later, when I was a college student reading Aristotle, I was pleased to see that Aristotle agreed with me that ants were political animals. According to Aristotle, some animals are solitary and others gregarious. Of the gregarious animals, some are political. Some of the political animals have leaders. Leaders can help a community by directing it to its common ends, but leaders can also harm a community when they lead factions that divide it. The distinguishing characteristic of the political animals is that they cooperate for some common work or function (koinon ergon). Humans, bees, ants, wasps, and cranes are all political animals in this sense.

And yet, Aristotle explains, human beings are more political than other political animals because of the uniquely human capacity for speech. Other animals can share their perceptions of pleasure and pain. But human beings can use speech to share their conceptions of the advantageous, the just, and the good. Through speech, human beings can deliberate about the collective good. A just political community can be judged to be one that serves the common advantage of all of its members, as contrasted with an unjust political community that serves only the private advantage of its ruling group.

If we were to follow Aristotle's lead, we would have to see political science as embracing all of the political animals, which would allow us to compare human politics with the politics of other political animals. I have argued for doing that in various articles and in Chapter 3 of Darwinian Natural Right.

In identifying ants, bees, and wasps as political animals, Aristotle recognized what biologists today see as the highly social nature of the eusocial insects belonging to the order Hymenoptera. These insects live in colonies that can have as many as 20 million members. One or a few members reproduce. Most of the other members act as workers who rarely reproduce. The colony members are all female, with queens being reproductive. Males are produced only for short periods of mating. The size and complexity of these social insect colonies make them comparable to human communities.

Apparently, Aristotle did not recognize that other group of eusocial insects--the termites--belonging to the order Isoptera. In some ways, the termites are more like humans than are the hymenopteran insects, because in termite colonies, a king lives with a queen, and the workers are often both male and female, with some division of labor between the sexes.

There have been great advances in the study of insect societies. Much of this research is surveyed in two recent books--Bert Holldobler and E. O. Wilson, The Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies (Norton, 2008); and Jurgen Gadau and Jennifer Fewell, eds., Organization of Insect Societies (Harvard University Press, 2009).

I argue that this research supports Aristotle against Hobbes. In contrast to Aristotle's claim that human beings were by nature political animals comparable to the social insects, Hobbes insisted on a radical separation between animal societies as founded on natural instinct and human societies as founded on social learning. Unlike Hobbes, Aristotle saw no unbridgeable gulf between animal instinct and human learning, because he thought that almost all animals have some natural instincts for social learning, and some are intelligent enough to live as social and political animals.

The organization of complex animal societies requires communication. Among human beings, the primary forms of communication are audiovisual--as in language and nonverbal signalling. Among social insects, the primary form of communication is chemical signalling. All researchers recognize the complexity of insect communication. Some--like Nigel Franks at the University of Bristol--even argue that ants engage in teaching. Other researchers--like Ed Wilson--argue that insect learning is more hard-wired genetically.

Wilson and Holldobler have identified three forces in the evolution of insect sociality--individual selection, group selection, and collateral kin selection. Through individual selection, individuals cooperate to enhance their individual survival and reproduction. Through group selection, individuals cooperate within a group to outcompete other groups. Through collateral kin selection, individuals cooperate to spread genes shared by collateral kin. Ed Wilson and David Sloan Wilson emphasize group selection as more important than collateral kin selection. But other scientists in the tradition of W. D. Hamilton emphasize kin selection.

In any case, one can see here a deepening of Aristotle's insights, because Aristotle saw political life as rooted in the extension of parental care and in the cooperation of individuals for the common good of their group in competition with other groups.

A biopolitical science bringing together Aristotelian political theory and Darwinian biology would include the comparative politics of humans and insects.

Some of the continuing debates over the evolution of insect sociality are briefly surveyed in two recent articles in Science--one by Elizabeth Pennisi (February 6) and another by Virginia Morell (March 6).

Hobbes, Aristotle, and the Sociobiology of Political Animals

The debate between Aristotle and Thomas Hobbes over whether human beings are political animals by nature is another example of a fundamental issue in the history of political philosophy that depends on empirical natural science.  Aristotle's account of political animals was rooted in his biological science.  In criticizing Aristotle, Hobbes relied on his understanding of the new natural science being developed by Galileo, William Harvey, and others.  When Richard Cumberland wrote in 1672 in defense of Aristotle against Hobbes, Cumberland argued that the biological science of Harvey and Thomas Willis supported Aristotle.  Although Aristotle did not specifically identify apes as political animals, he did conclude from his anatomical studies that apes were an intermediate species close to human beings.  When Edward Tyson in 1699 wrote the first modern anatomical comparison of human beings and apes, he saw that Aristotle was right in identifying chimpanzees as halfway between monkeys and human beings.  Now, I argue, the new Darwinian sciences of sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, and animal behavior sustain Aristotle's position rather than Hobbes's.

Aristotle would agree with the Hobbesian claim that human politics is uniquely human insofar as it manifests uniquely human capacities for language, conceptual abstraction, and shared intentionality.  But Aristotle thought that an adequate political science should understand both the continuity and the discontinuity between human politics and the politics of the other political animals.  We see continuity if we understand that human beings are like the other political animals in cooperating for some common end or function (koinon ergon), in showing social cooperation as an extension of the natural impulses to sexual coupling and parental care of the young, in organizing their social life based on kinship, mutualism, and reciprocity, and in having political leaders that either direct a community to its common ends or divide it into factions.  We see discontinuity if we understand that human beings do all of this in a uniquely human way because their cognitive capacities for reason and speech (logos) allow them to organize their social life around authoritative concepts of expediency, justice, and goodness.  Consequently, human beings are more political than the other political animals, because human cooperation and competition is more complex and extensive in its shared intentionality than is the case for the other political animals.

In De Homine (ch. 10), De Cive (ch. 5, par. 5), and Leviathan (ch. 17), Hobbes makes various arguments against Aristotle, which depend upon three fundamental claims.  First, in the state of nature, human beings are solitary animals.  Second, among the naturally political animals, social cooperation is completely harmonious because there are no conflicts of interest to create competition, but this is not true for human beings.  Third, nature and instinct are necessarily antithetical to artifice and learning, so that social order cannot be natural or instinctive if it depends in any way on artificial or learned activity; and therefore human politics cannot be natural because it arises from cultural learning.

In some of his most famous words, Hobbes describes the state of nature as a lawless anarchy in which human life is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."  But as many of his critics have pointed out, this cannot be true, because it ignores the fact that human beings have always lived as social animals.  Even when there is no centralized state, human beings have lived in bands and tribes organized by social norms of kinship, mutuality, and reciprocity.

Oddly, Hobbes admits this, because he recognizes that even in the state of nature, one sees the "government of small families," as among the American Indians.  Parents were the original sovereigns, who enforced customary rules of behavior within their families, and who selected arbitrators or judges to settle disputes between families.  The customary rules of social life in primitive bands constitute what Hobbes calls "the laws of nature," and these natural laws correspond largely to what evolutionary anthropologists have seen among foraging bands, showing the kind of life lived by our evolutionary ancestors.  So, clearly, the state of nature for human beings must be a naturally political state.

Hobbes was right, however, about the centralized state being a uniquely human contrivance based on a social contract.  But this social contract is natural in the sense that it fulfills the natural human inclinations to social cooperation based on kinship, mutuality, and reciprocity.

Human social cooperation is never perfect because it is always disrupted by conflicts of interest.  Contrary to Hobbes, this is true for other political animals like bees and ants.  As E. O. Wilson has observed, the only perfect society free from conflict might be found among colonial invertebrates--that is, colonies of genetically identical individuals.  Since the social insects are not genetically identical, there can be conflicts of interest.  Reproductive competition between individual insects can create aggressive encounters and dominance hierarchies.  There can be conflicts between colonies, between queens, between workers, or between queens and workers.  This requires some means of conflict resolution in which dominant individuals enforce their will over others.  So human beings are not the only political animals who need "a common power to keep them in awe, and to direct their actions to the common benefit."

Of course, the establishment and maintenance of a human political order requires a tradition of cultural learning for the transmission of the rules of political authority.  Contrary to what Hobbes claims, culturally learned order is not uniquely human.  Aristotle recognized that many animals have natural instincts for social learning, which can create cultural traditions.  Recent studies of animal culture suggest that Aristotle was right about this.

And yet, Aristotle and Hobbes also saw that human social learning is unique insofar as it shows a human capacity for symbolic understanding that makes possible concepts of political authority based on shared intentionality, which is not possible for the other political animals.

I will have more to say about "shared intentionality" as unique to human political psychology.

I have elaborated my points here in three publications:

Darwinian Natural Right: The Biological Ethics of Human Nature (SUNY Press, 1998)

"Aristotle, Chimpanzees, and Other Political Animals," Social Science Information 29 (1990): 479-559.

"The Darwinian Biology of Aristotle's Political Animals," American Journal of Political Science 38 (1994): 464-485.

The Darwinian Emergence of Aristotle's Political Animals and de Waal's Moral Animals: A Reply to Cheryl Abbate

In various publications (Arnhart 1990, 1994, 1998, 2009), and in some blog posts, I have argued that a Darwinian science of animal behavior can support Aristotle's biological science of political animals.  Aristotle's statement that "man is by nature a political animal" is famous.  But it is often falsely assumed to mean that human beings are by nature the only political animals.  As Aristotle explains in his biological writings, the political animals include ants, bees, wasps, and cranes.  But even if humans are not the only political animals, Aristotle indicates, they are distinctive in that they are more political than the other political animals, because humans have a biological capacity for logos, which allows them to organize their political communities through shared symbolic conceptions of justice.

In his biological works, Aristotle sees that some animals are solitary and others gregarious.  Of the gregarious animals, some are political.  Some of the political animals have leaders, but others do not.  The distinguishing characteristic of the political animals is that they cooperate for some common work or function.  Humans, bees, ants, wasps, and cranes are all political animals in this sense.

The uniquely human capacity for speech or rhetorical persuasion makes humans more political than the other political animals, because while other animals can share their perceptions of pleasure and pain, humans can use speech to share their conceptions of the advantageous, the just, and the good.  Through speech, humans cooperate for common ends in ways that are more complex, more flexible, and more extensive than is possible for other animals.  Through speech, humans can deliberate about the common interest as the standard of justice.  A just political community can be judged to be one that serves the common interest of all or most of its members, as contrasted with an unjust political community that serves only the private interest of its ruling group.

I have argued that Charles Darwin's evolutionary theory of morality and animal social life supports Aristotle's biopolitical science.  I have also argued that the biological study of animal behavior over the past 60 years (beginning with Jane Goodall's arrival at the Gombe Stream Preserve in 1960) has largely confirmed this Aristotelian science of animal politics.

Recently, I noticed that Cheryl Abbate (2016) has disagreed with my reasoning in what is essentially a critique of my 1990 article in Social Science Information.  I also noticed that Edward Jacobs (2018) has written a response to Abbate's article, and Abbate (2018) has replied to him.

Abbate's critique consists of two arguments.  First, she claims that my defense of Aristotle's teaching contradicts the Darwinian principle of the psychic continuity between humans and animals--the idea that humans differ from other animals only in degree and not in kind.  Second, she claims that recent studies of animal behavior show that some highly social nonhuman animals have a sense of justice, and so Aristotle is wrong in thinking that this is unique to human beings.

As you might expect, I believe she's mistaken on both points.

DARWIN ON EMERGENT DIFFERENCES IN KIND

Abbate correctly quotes from the crucial passage in Aristotle's Politics (1253a) where Aristotle declares that a human is much more a political animal than other political animals, because "man alone among the animals has speech [logos]," and through speech, "he alone has a perception of good and bad and just and unjust," which is the uniquely human basis of human politics (Abbate 2016, 57).

She then claims that this contradicts the Darwinian principle of "evolutionary continuity"--that all differences between species are only differences in degree and not in kind (Abbate 2018, 160).  She correctly quotes from Darwin's apparent endorsement of this idea in The Descent of Man:

"Nevertheless, the difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind.  We have seen the senses and intuitions, the various emotions and faculties, such as love, memory, attention, curiosity, imitation, reason, etc., of which man boasts, may be found in an incipient, or even sometimes in a well-developed condition, in the lower animals" (2004, 151).

Abbate is silent, however, about the fact that despite Darwin's explicit statement that humans differ only in degree, not in kind, from other animals, he implicitly recognized human differences in kind.  That is to say, Darwin saw that human beings have some moral and mental traits that other animals do not have at all.

In The Descent of Man, Darwin noted that self-consciousness is uniquely human: "It may be freely admitted that no animal is self-conscious, if by this term it is implied, that he reflects on such points, as whence he comes or whither he will go, or what is life and death, and so forth" (105).  Morality is also uniquely human: "A moral being is one who is capable of comparing his past and future actions or motives, and of approving or disapproving of them.  We have no reason to suppose that any of the lower animals have this capacity. . . . man . . . alone can with certainty be ranked as a moral being" (135).  And language is uniquely human: "The habitual use of articulate language is . . . peculiar to man" (107).

Darwin was thrown into self-contradiction--both affirming and denying that humans are different in kind from other animals--because he failed to see how he could affirm emergent differences in kind without affirming any radical differences in kind.  Emergent differences in kind can be explained by evolutionary science as differences in kind that naturally evolve from differences in degree that pass over a critical threshold of complexity.  So, for example, we can see the uniquely human capacities for self-consciousness, morality, and language as emerging from the evolutionary development of the primate brain, so that at some critical point in the evolution of our hominid ancestors, the size and complexity of the brain (perhaps particularly in the frontal cortex) reached a point where distinctively human cognitive capacities emerged at higher levels of brain evolution that are not found in other primates.  With such emergent differences in kind, there is an underlying unbroken continuity between human beings and their primate ancestors, so there is no need to posit some supernatural intervention in nature--the divine creation of the human soul--that would create a radical difference in kind in which there is a gap with no underlying continuity of natural causes.

Edward Jacobs points to this when he describes the evolution of the human mind.  "The moment a certain threshold of mental development was reached (and logos is as good a placeholder name for this threshold as any), we became able to make and grasp persuasive accounts," which made humans more political than the other political animals (155).

Simona Ginsburg and Eva Jablonka (2019) have shown how an evolutionary neuroscience could explain this emergence of the human mind as passing through the three levels of mind identified by Aristotle in De Anima (On the Soul). The basic nutritive and reproductive soul belongs to all living things--plants and animals.  The second level--the sensitive soul--belongs to all animals.  The third level--the rational or symbolizing soul--is specific to humans.  The crucial evolutionary transition marker of the rational soul is language.  The rational soul gives humans the capacity for grasping and sharing the abstract symbolic values of the good and the just that make human politics unique.  Ginsburg and Jablonka suggest that all three levels can be explained by evolutionary biology.

I have written some previous posts on emergent evolution (here and here).;

BEKOFF AND DE WAAL ON THE MORAL LIVES OF ANIMALS

Abbate relies heavily on two cognitive ethologists--Marc Bekoff and Frans de Waal--for providing the evidence that some nonhuman animals have a sense of justice, and therefore Aristotle is wrong in saying that humans alone have a moral sense, which makes them more political than the other political animals.  For Abbate, this proves that humans differ only in degree, not in kind, from other animals.

Bekoff is best known for his studies of canid social carnivores--wolves, dogs, and coyotes--and his argument that their social play shows that they have "codes of conduct" that indicate a moral life of "wild justice" (Bekoff 1995; Bekoff and Pierce 2009; Pierce and Bekoff 2012).

De Waal is best known for his Chimpanzee Politics and other studies of primate colonies in captivity.  He has endorsed what he calls my "Darwistotelian" view of human politics and morality as showing an evolved political nature shared with chimps and other primates. A sample of my many posts on de Waal can be found here, here, here, here, and here.

She does not notice, however, that Bekoff and de Waal show the same self-contradiction that one can see in Darwin.  On the one hand, Bekoff says that "animal morality is different in degree but not in kind from human morality."  On the other hand, he says there are "bona fide differences in kind" (Bekoff and Pierce 2009, 139-40).  He admits that "human morality is unique," because humans are unique in their capacities of language and judgment (Bekoff and Pierce 2009, 132, 139-42).  Similarly, de Waal sometimes seems to say that morality is not unique to human beings, but then he concedes that morality at the level of judgment and reasoning is uniquely human (de Waal 2006, 20, 173-75).

Abbate might say, however, that this is not necessarily contradictory.  If de Waal is right about there being three levels of human morality, and if nonhuman animals show some elements of the lower levels but not of the higher levels, then the fullest expression of human morality is uniquely human, although some animals show some features of the moral life.  Thus, there is both continuity and discontinuity in the moral psychology of animals.  At some levels of morality, there is only a difference in degree.  At other levels, there is a difference in kind.  This is exactly what one would expect from the emergent evolution of animal morality.  And, I suggest, this is Aristotle's position, even though his biology did not have a fully developed evolutionary theory.

According to de Waal, the moral sentiments constitute the first level of morality--the emotional building blocks of morality that include empathy, reciprocity, retribution, a sense of fairness, and reconciliation to resolve conflicts and restore harmonious relationships (de Waal 2006, 166-75).  All of this can be seen in some form in other animals

In stressing the importance of the moral sentiments for moral psychology, de Waal belongs to the philosophic tradition of sentimentalist ethics that includes David Hume, Adam Smith, Darwin, and Edward Westermarck--a tradition that is set against the Kantian tradition of rationalist ethics.  I have written many posts on this, including here, here, here., and here.

De Waal identifies social pressure as the second level of morality.  Through social pressure, individuals are habituated to conform to the social rules of their group that maintain the good order of the community.  These rules are enforced through reward, punishment, and reputation.  In these ways, morality serves as a social contract for a cooperative society. Some of this can be seen in some nonhuman animals.  For example, high-ranking males in chimpanzee groups show "policing behavior"--males break up fights among others, and their intervention seems to be remarkably evenhanded.  Nevertheless, the human morality of social pressure goes beyond animal morality by formulating social rules that are more abstract and systematic than is the case for other animals.

Finally, judgment and reasoning constitute a third level of morality, and this is uniquely human.  So, for example, we are like other social animals in that we care about our reputations--how we appear in the eyes of others--so that we want to be praised and not blamed by others; but we can also use our distinctively human capacity for abstraction and imagination to see ourselves mirrored in the eyes of an "impartial spectator" (as Adam Smith said), so that we can want to do what is praiseworthy, regardless of whether we are actually praised by anyone. We care not only about our real reputation but also about our imaginary reputation.  From this we develop an internal sense of self-esteem or conscience.  There is no evidence for anything like this in nonhuman animals.  (I have written about Smith's concept of the "impartial spectator" here.)

Like de Waal, Aristotle saw both continuity and discontinuity between human beings and other animals in their moral psychology.  In his History of Animals (588a15), he wrote:

"In most of the other animals, there are traces of the qualities of soul that are more evidently differentiated in human beings.  For there are both gentleness and savagery, mildness and harshness, courage and timidity, fear and confidence, spiritedness and trickery, and, with respect to intelligence [dianoia], something like judgment [sunesis], similar in many ways. . . . For some of these qualities differ only more or less with reference to human beings. . . . For nature passes little by little from the inanimate to animals, so that this continuity prevents one from seeing a border or perceiving on which side an intermediate form lies."

Aristotle argues that the moral psychology of wild animals is like that of children: they can have natural virtue and habitual virtue, but they cannot have the deliberative virtue that requires fully developed logos (Politics, 1332b1; Nicomachean Ethics, 1144b1-1145a5).  They can have the natural virtue that comes from being born with a good natural temperament that inclines them to do the right actions.  And they can have the habitual virtue that comes from obeying social rules so that they habitually do the right actions.

Only human adults are capable of deliberative virtue, which requires logos. And logos is the capacity for grasping explanatory accounts--for understanding both theoretical and practical syllogisms (Moss 2014).  In ethics and politics, explanatory accounts do not just prescribe right actions, they also explain why these are right.  Children and animals can be trained to know what they ought to do but without understanding why they ought to do it.  Virtue in the strict sense requires deliberate choice and prudential judgment with full knowledge of both what should be done and why it should be done.  This deliberative virtue with prudence corresponds to what de Waal identifies as the third level of morality--reasoning and judgment.

Because of their unique capacity for logos, human beings are more political than the other political animals--and more moral than the other moral animals--because this capacity for grasping explanatory accounts means that rather than just habitually obeying social rules of justice in their group, human beings will want to know why these are the rules, and they will argue over whether there might be better rules.  For that reason, human politics is always a rhetorical activity in which people have to persuade one another that what their community is doing is just, right, or noble.  That's why Aristotle's Rhetoric is a crucial text for his moral and political philosophy.

The importance of rhetorical speech for human politics and human morality explains why language is the critical marker in the evolutionary transition to uniquely human symbolism and rationality, as Ginsburg and Jablonka have indicated.

ADDENDUM--SEPTEMBER 3, 2025

Abbate's article has been recently reprinted in a book edited by Andrew Linzey and Clair Linzey--Animal History: History as If Animals Mattered (Eugene, Oregon: Resource Publications, 2025).  In this new version of her paper, she makes no attempt to answer my objections.  Is that because my objections are irrefutable?

REFERENCES

Abatte, Cheryl E. 2016. "'Higher' and 'Lower' Political Animals: A Critical Analysis of Aristotle's Account of the Political Animal." Journal of Animal Ethics 6:54-66.

Abatte, Cheryl E. 2018. "Redefending Nonhuman Justice in Complex Animal Communities: A Response to Jacobs."  Journal of Animal Ethics 8:159-165.

Arnhart, Larry. 1990. "Aristotle, Chimpanzees, and Other Political Animals." Social Science Information 29:479-559.

Arnhart, Larry. 1994. "The Darwinian Biology of Aristotle's Political Animals."  American Journal of Political Science 38:464-485.

Arnhart, Larry. 1998. Darwinian Natural Right: The Biological Ethics of Human Nature. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Arnhart, Larry. 2009. Darwinian Conservatism: A Disputed Question.  Ed. Kenneth Blanchard. Exeter, UK: Imprint Academic Press.

Bekoff, Marc. 1995. "Play Signals as Punctuation: The Structure of Social Play in Canids." Behaviour 132:419-429.

Bekoff, Marc, and Jessica Pierce. 2009. Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Darwin, Charles. 2004. The Descent of Man.  Second edition. Ed. James Moore and Adrian Desmond. London: Penguin Classics.

de Waal, Frans. 2006. Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press

Ginsburg, Simona, and Eva Jablonka. 2019. The Evolution of the Sensitive Soul: Learning and the Origins of Consciousness.  Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Jacobs, Edward. 2018. "Aristotle and the Zoon Politikon: A Response to Abbate." Journal of Animal Ethics 8:150-158.

Moss, Jessica. 2014. "Right Reason in Plato and Aristotle: On the Meaning of Logos." Phronesis 59:181-230.

Pierce, Jessica, and Marc Bekoff. 2012. "Wild Justice Redux: What We Know About Social Justice in Animals and Why It Matters." Social Justice Research 25:122-139.

The Biology of Animal Culture Supports Aristotle Against Hobbes

One of the big debates in the history of political philosophy is over the question of whether human beings are political animals by nature comparable to other political animals.  Aristotle said yes, because he thought human beings could be rightly compared with other political animals such as ants, bees, wasps, and cranes.  Hobbes said no, because he thought that while the social insects were instinctively inclined to cooperate for the good of their colony, human political cooperation was learned rather than instinctive, and it had to overcome the natural human tendency to conflict.  Twenty years ago, I argued that modern biological research supported Aristotle's position (Arnhart 1990, 1994, 1998).  The research over the past twenty years provides even more evidence for my argument.

This dispute between Aristotle and Hobbes has been critical for the history of political science.  Most modern political scientists have followed Hobbes in assuming an anthropocentric view of political science, with no comparative study of nonhuman political animals.  In recent years, a few political scientists have revived Aristotle's conception of a biopolitical science as a comparative science that studies all political animals, with human beings understood as the most political animals because of their political use of language or symbolism (logos).

Against Aristotle, Hobbes contended, in both De Cive (chap. 5, par. 5) and the Leviathan (chap. 17), that there were six differences between social animals (like bees and ants) and human beings.  (1) Unlike social animals, human beings compete for honor and prestige. (2) Among social animals, there is no conflict between the private good and the common good, as there is among human beings, because the natural appetites of the social animals incline them as individuals to do what is good for all. (3) Social animals lack reason, which human beings use to criticize the administration of common business and thus create civil conflict. (4) Social animals lack the art of words, which human beings use to argue about what is good and evil and thus fall into sedition and war. (5) Social animals do not distinguish between injury (breach of covenant) and damage; and therefore, unlike human beings, they are not offended with one another as along as their physical appetites are satisfied.  In these five respects, uniquely human attributes create social conflicts not found among the social animals.  A sixth difference between human beings and social animals, according to Hobbes, follows as a consequence of the other five. (6) "Lastly, the agreement of these creatures is natural; that of men, is by covenant only, which is artificial; and therefore it is no wonder if there be somewhat else required, besides covenant, to make their agreement constant and lasting; which is a common power, to keep them in awe, and to direct their actions to the common benefit" (Leviathan, chap. 17).

Hobbes's six arguments presuppose two fundamental premises (compare De Homine, chap. 10).  First, among the naturally social animals, social cooperation is completely harmonious because there are no conflicts of interest to create competition.  Second, nature and instinct are necessarily antithetical to artifice and learning, so that social order cannot be natural or instinctive if it depends in any way on artificial or socially learned activity.  The research done today by Darwinian biologists studying the social behavior of animals denies both premises.

Consider the second premise--the contrast between natural instinct and social learning and the claim that only among human beings does social order depend on social learning.  Aristotle thought that many animals acted not just by unlearned instinct but also by individual and social learning.  Recent studies of animal behavior confirm this.  Among insects, individual learning affects feeding, predator avoidance, social interactions, and sexual behavior (Dukas 2010).  Most insects are solitary, and they show little social learning, except in a few cases such as offspring learning food preferences from their parents.

Social learning is more extensive among social insects, and particularly among the social bees, ants, and wasps (hymenoptera) (Leadbeater and Chittka 2007).  Thus, Aristotle was correct to identify these social insects as political animals.  Today, the most celebrated example of social learning among honeybees is their waggle dance.  Aristotle observed this behavior, and he inferred that it must be some form of social communication.  But it was not until the early 1960s that Karl von Frisch decoded the language of the waggle dance (von Frisch 1967). 

Foraging bees who have found new flower patches return to their nest to recruit their nest mates.  Inside the hive, the forager moves upward while waggling her body from side to side and vibrating her wings.  At the end of each dance, she circles back to the starting point, alternating between clockwise and counterclockwise turns, so that she moves in a figure eight pattern.  The angle of the waggle run relative to the upward direction gives the angle of the flower patch relative to the Sun's position in the sky.  The duration of the dance run is positively correlated to the distance of the flower patch from the hive.  The overall number of waggle runs is positively correlated with the quality of the food in the flower patch.

The same waggle dance is used when honeybees need to decide where to go for a new nest site.  Scouts that have examined a site return to the nest to recruit others to visit the site.  The waggle dance conveys the location and the quality of the potential site.  Different scouts represent different sites.  The better sites recruit more bees to dance for them than the sites of lesser quality.  Eventually, over a period of days, a consensus develops for one site, and the colony moves there.  This is what Tom Seeley calls "honeybee democracy" (Seeley 2010).

It's not clear whether social learning among social insects can create behavioral traditions.  There is some evidence that bees can be trained to forage at certain times of the day, and that once learned, this daily pattern of a colony can be passed down to the next generation of bees (Leadbeater and Chittka 2007).

By contrast to the skimpy evidence for behavioral traditions among social insects, the evidence for socially learned traditions among vertebrates, and particularly chimpanzees, is impressive.  In a famous survey of seven chimp study sites in Africa, it was shown that there were 39 behavior patterns customary in some communities but absent in others, so that each chimp community has its distinctive profile of behavioral patterns, which looks a lot like the cultural diversity of human communities (Whiten et al. 1999).  (As indicated in a previous post, using tools for cracking nuts is one example of a behavioral tradition found in some chimp communities but not others.)

The problem, however, is deciding whether the social learning of behavioral traditions should be identified as "culture," comparable to human culture.  In some previous posts from a few years ago, I have indicated that I have been leaning towards the position of those like Eva Jablonka and Kim Hill (2010), who argue that while the social learning of behavioral traditions is a building block of culture, it is not sufficient, and that human culture is uniquely human insofar as it arises from language and symbolism that can create moral norms supported by moral emotions.

This seems to be Aristotle's position.  On the one hand, some nonhuman animals are political in that they can organize their collective lives through the social learning of behavioral traditions.  On the other hand, human beings are more political than these other political animals, because human beings have a capacity for conceptual abstraction and language (logos) that they can use to formulate and communicate communal standards for the just and the good.  On this  point, Hobbes seems to agree with Aristotle about the uniqueness of human language in allowing human beings to argue about good and evil.

Hill argues that while chimps can have the social regularities of behavioral traditions--such as subordinates deferring to alpha males--only human beings can use symbolic thought and language to create socially recognized norms of good behavior enforced by third-party punishment--such as recognizing that some leaders have the right to rule.

Oddly enough, Hill indicates, the only nonhuman animals that seem to show the third-party enforcement of social norms are honeybees and ants that have individuals who act as "police" in punishing cheaters (Liebig, Peters, and Holldobler 1999; Ratnicks and Wenseleers 2005; Smith, Holldobler & Liebig 2009).

Moreover, the honeybees' waggle dance does seem to be an abstract form of communication that looks like a kind of language.  And yet even this dance language refers to observable realities in the world, and it does not allow bees to conceptualize and agree upon imaginary mental constructions.

REFERENCES

Arnhart, Larry. 1990. "Aristotle, Chimpanzees, and Other Political Animals." Social Science Information 29:479-559.

Arnhart. 1994. "The Darwinian Biology of Aristotle's Political Animals." American Journal of Political Science 38:464-485.

Arnhart. 1998. Darwinian Natural Right: The Biological Ethics of Human Nature. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Dukas, R. 2010. "Insect Social Learning." In Michael D. Breed and Janice Moore, eds., Encyclopedia of Animal Behavior, 3 vols., 2:176-179.

Hill, Kim. 2010. "Experimental Studies of Animal Social Learning in the Wild: Trying to Untangle the Mystery of Human Culture." Learning & Behavior 38:319-328.

Leadbeater, Ellouise, and Lars Chittka. 2007. "Social Learning in Insects--From Miniature Brains to Consensus Building." Current Biology 17:R703-R713.

Liebig, J., C. Peeters, and B. Holldobler. 1999. "Worker Policing Limits the Number of Reproductives in a Ponerine Ant." Proceedings of the Royal Society B 266:1865-1870.

Ratnicks, Francis, and Thomas Wenseleers. 2005. "Policing Insect Societies." Science 307:54-56.

Seeley, Thomas. 2010. Honeybee Democracy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Smith, A. A., B. Holldobler, J. Liebig. 2009. "Cuticular Hydrocarbons Reliably Identify Cheaters and Allow Enforcement of Altruism in a Social Insect." Current Biology 19:78-81.

von Frisch, Karl. 1967. The Dance Language and Orientation of Bees. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Whiten, A., et al. 1999. "Cultures in Chimpanzees." Nature 399:682-685.


Some of my previous posts on these topics can be found here, here, here., here, and here.

Aristotelian Liberalism (6): The Morality of Commercial Friendship

In his zoological writings, Aristotle distinguishes solitary animals and gregarious animals. Of the gregarious animals, some are political. Some of the political animals have leaders, but others do not. The political animals cooperate for some some work or function (koinon ergon). Humans, bees, ants, wasps, and cranes are all political animals in this sense (History of Animals, 488a7-14).

Human beings are more political, however, than these animals because of the uniquely human capacity for speech (logos). Other animals can share their perceptions of pleasure and pain. But human beings can use speech to share their conceptions of the advantageous, the just, and the good (Politics, 1253a1-18). Human beings are the most political animals, it seems, because through speech human beings cooperate for common ends in ways that are more complex, more flexible, and more extensive than is possible for other political animals. Through speech, human beings can deliberate about the "common advantage" (koinon sumpheron) as the criterion of justice (Rhetoric, 1362a15-63b5). A just political community can be judged to be one that serves the common advantage of all of its members, as contrasted with an unjust political community that serves only the private advantage of its rulers (Nicomachean Ethics, 1160a13-14; Pol., 1279a17-19).

But how is it possible for a large-scale political community (like the United States, for example) to be organized around a common end or purpose? The problem in achieving a common end in such a community arises not just from the size of the population but also from the diversity of ends in the individual lives of human beings.

Ancient political philosophers like Plato and Aristotle seemed to argue that the only solution to this problem was for a government to impose a single moral end or way of life on the whole community. This required severe limits on the size of the community, and so it would not work for large political communities like modern nation-states. This imposition of a single moral end also required a coercive enforcement of morality that would deny individual liberty. For such a regime, statecraft would be soulcraft.

By contrast, modern liberal political philosophers have argued that coercive enforcement of a single moral end cannot work, and the attempt to make it work brings about a tyrannical suppression of individual liberty. As an alternative, liberal thinkers have argued for defining the common good of a political community as securing the liberty of individuals to pursue their diverse moral ends. But the critics of liberalism have charged that this promotes a hedonistic atomism that dissolves the communitarian conditions necessary for moral excellence.

In their defense of Aristotelian liberalism, Rasmussen and Den Uyl claim that this debate is misconceived, because there is a failure here to make some crucial distinctions. We need to distinguish state and society. And we need to distinguish procedural ends and determinate ends.

When Aristotle says that our nature as political animals is fulfilled in the "city" (polis), he doesn't distinguish between the "city" as a state or government and the "city" as a society. The social life of human beings requires not only a legal/political order of the state, but also a social order of civil society. Once we see this, we can see how the social cultivation of morality might be carried out in civil society--in families and various kinds of social groups--without any need for the legal/political order to coercively impose a single moral order. The legal/political order can be understood as limited to securing the conditions for moral order to arise in diverse forms in civil society.

Rasmussen and Den Uyl also distinguish between procedural and determinate ends:

"A procedural end is the object of a human purpose, the function of which is to define the conditions under which the pursuit of other (determinate) ends will occur but which does not specify what those ends will be or when and how they will be realized. A determinate end, on the other hand, is a the object of a human purpose with identifiable characteristics which can be used to help specify appropriate and inappropriate courses of action for the realization of that end. The procedural ends that characterize a political community represent the conditions under which any and all specific forms of human activity can take place. They must, therefore, be as open as possible with respect to the determinate ends they will allow" (LAN, 163).

So, Rasmussen and Den Uyl explain, while a liberal political community like the United States does not have one determinate conception of the human good, it does have procedural norms of legal conduct that secure the conditions in which individuals are free to form families and social groups based upon determinate conceptions of the human good. Such a liberal regime can be understood as promoting the Aristotelian idea of actualizing the natural human potential for moral and intellectual virtue. But it does this through the procedural protections of a legal/political order within which civil society flourishes as a social realm of moral education.

Another way of seeing this fusion of Aristotelian ethics and liberal politics, Rasmussen and Den Uyl suggest, is to see how liberalism fosters social cooperation through Aristotelian friendship.

The longest section of the Nicomachean Ethics is Aristotle's study of "friendship" (philia), which is the word that Aristotle uses for any kind of social bond. He distinguishes three kinds of friendship as based on virtue, pleasure, or advantage. Friendships of virtue are the highest kind, and they are based on the friends resembling one another in their virtuous character. Such friendships are the most intimate and the most enduring. Friendships of pleasure last only as long as people find some pleasure in one another. Friendships of advantage arise when people find one another useful in some way.

If one believes that statecraft is soulcraft, then one might assume that "political friendship"--the friendship that binds together citizens in a political community--would be a friendship of virtue based on sharing a single moral end. But, in fact, Aristotle indicates that friendships of virtue are possible only with a few people, because such friendships require knowing one another intimately over a long life. Political friendships are actually friendships of advantage, because citizens should be held together by some conception of their political life as mutually advantageous (NE, 1155a23-27, 1160a11-15, 1167a27-30). A liberal regime could be founded on such political friendships of common advantage.

Moreover, in modern liberal commercial societies, Rasmussen and Den Uyl argue, commercial relationships can foster advantage-friendships and thus contribute to the moral order of civil society. In explaining how commercial exchanges can sustain friendship, they quote the following passage from Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations:

"Man has almost constant occasion for the help of his brethren, and it is in vain for him to expect it from their benevolence only. He will be more likely to prevail if he can interest their self-love in his favor, and shew them that it is for their own advantage to do for him what he requires of them . . . and it is in this manner that we obtain from one another the far greater part of those good offices which we stand in need of."

They observe:

"What this passage shows is that market transactions require an interest in others. It is true that this interest is a means of satisfying one's own interest, but it is an interest in others nonetheless. Suppose then . . . that what all friendships have in common is an interest in others. Some of these (the highest types) have this interest in an unself-interested sense. Other types, however, carry a genuine interest in others, but not for their own sake. Market exchanges require a genuine interest in others, because one's own success depends upon getting others to see one's interest as their interest; in other words, sharing an interest.

"Oddly enough, command economies do not require an interest in others, for obedience, and not persuasion, is their mode of eliciting cooperation. Command structures can, and often do, embody selfishness (understood as a lack of concern for the interests of others) in a pure form, since those issuing the commands need pay no heed to anyone's interests but their own. Voluntary market transactions, on the other hand, will not occur if both parties do not see the relationship as mutually advantageous. This shared interest and advantage, at least for the duration of the transaction, embodies several features that can be found in higher forms of friendship: mutual advantage, mutual interest, cooperation, unity of purpose, and even good will" (LAN, 179).

It's worth noting that in appropriating Smith's account of commercial friendships as supporting moral cooperation, Rasmussen and Den Uyl accept Smith's moral psychology of social life, which they reject later in their book when they denigrate Smith's "moral sociology" (LAN, 214-19).

This Smithian understanding of how commercial exchanges promote friendships of advantage and thus social norms of cooperation has been confirmed by studies in the evolution of cooperation of how "market integration" fosters social norms of fairness in cooperation. Some of this research is surveyed in Joseph Heinrich's recent article in Science and in the book Moral Markets (2008), edited by Paul Zak.

Chimpanzee Political Science

In Darwinian Conservatism (pp. 79-84), I write about the "Darwinian politics of chimpanzees and human beings," particularly as it helps us to understand dominance hierarchies among primates and the need for a "balance of power" to avoid despotic dominance.

Most people--and certainly most political scientists--would ridicule the idea that we can understand anything important about human politics from comparing the behavior of human beings and chimps. Most political scientists assume that human beings are so radically unique in their political behavior that comparisons with other primates is fruitless, if not downright silly. But I believe there are important commonalities across the primate species in their propensities to dominance and deference, so that we learn something about the biological roots of politics by seeing human status hierarchies as manifesting patterns shared with other primates.

I would even go so far as to assert that if political science ever becomes a science, it will be a Darwinian science of political animals. Such a political science would be the scientific study of political life across all the species that show political behavior, and especially those primate species most closely related to human beings.

As I argue in Chapter 3 of Darwinian Natural Right, this conception of political science as the study of all political animals--nonhuman as well as human--began with Aristotle. According to Aristotle, some animals are solitary and others gregarious. Of the gregarious animals, some are political. Some of the political animals have leaders, but others do not. The distinguishing characteristic of the political animals is that they cooperate for some common work or function. Humans, bees, ants, wasps, and cranes are all political animals in this sense.

Aristotle believes human beings are more political, however, than these animals because of the uniquely human capacity for language. Other animals can share their perceptions of pleasure and pain. But human beings can use speech to share their conceptions of the advantageous, the just, and the good. Human beings are the most political animals, it seems, because through speech human beings cooperate for common ends in ways that are more complex, more flexible, and more extensive that is possible for other animals. Through speech human beings can deliberate about the "common advantage" as the criterion of justice (Rhetoric, 1362a15-63b5). A just political community can be judged to be one that sereves the common advantage of all its members, as contrasted with an unjust political community that serves only the private advantage of its ruling group (Nicomachean Ethics, 1160a13-14; Politics, 1279a17-19).

Darwinian biology and the study of primate social systems essentially confirm Aristotle's insights. Although Aristotle did not identify chimpanzees as political animals, he did recognize that the apes were closely related to human beings, because the apes "share in the nature of both man and the quadrupeds," and he supported this with extensive anatomical comparisons of monkeys, apes, and human beings in his biological works.

Despite the common assumption that dominance structures among nonhuman animals are determined purely by physical combat and the rule of the stronger over the weaker, chimpanzees show a primate tendency towards forming dominance structures cooperatively and peacefully rather than through violent competition. Although physical strength is important, the dominance of an alpha male depends on forming coalitions with other adult males and winning the support of the females and the children. (This is made clear in the writings of Frans de Waal and Jane Goodall.)

The tendency to form face-to-face groups organized around a structure of dominance and deference is evident across the primate species, including human beings. A good survey of the evidence for this is Allan Mazur's book Biosociology of Dominance and Deference (2005). But even as he shows the commonality of human beings and other primates in their dominance hierarchies, Mazur also shows the uniqueness of human beings in their capacity for language.

When human beings acquired the capacity for language about 200,000 years ago--perhaps because of the evolution of a few genes supporting neural mechanisms for speech--they then had a capacity for complex cultural learning far surpassing the other primates. Then, with the end of the last Ice Age about 10,000 years ago, the warmer climate provided the conditions for the development of agriculture--with domestication of plants and animals. This allowed for a settled urban existence rather than the unsettled, hunting-gathering way of life of the earliest human ancestors. Human beings could then live in large civizations with millions of people, and they could use language to elaborate cultural rules of formal organization and socioeconomic stratification. Such formal and socioeconomic hierarchies are not found among nonhuman primates.

But even in such civilizations, human beings still show the same face-to-face dominance hierarchies that they share with other primates. The functioning of large organizations depends upon the behavior of small groups within the organization that structure themselves through face-to-face interaction.

Although the formal, bureaucratic structure of government transcends anything found among nonhuman primates, political rivalry as the competition for control of the government shows the same pattern of dominance contests that human beings share with other primates. Sometimes that rivalry for dominance is violent--as in wars, revolutions, and assasinations. But in a stable political community, most of the political rivalry for power can be channelled peacefully through institutional procedures such as elections and debate.

The comparative study of chimpanzee and human politics should show us that in every community there will be a few people with a strong dominance drive that can become despotic if their ambition is not checked by the ambition of others. That's why I defend balanced and limited government as a fundamental principle of "Darwinian conservatism."

The fundamental insight of conservative constitutionalism is that because power-seeking is rooted in human nature, the power of one person or group can only be controlled by the power of another. Conservatives reject the principle of sovereignty--the idea that in any social order there must be some one supreme power. Instead, conservatives defend the principle of countervailance--the idea that social order can arise from a network of independent entities that check and balance one another. To secure liberty, it is not enough that the people be sovereign, because any power that is sovereign will be abused. That's the lesson of the French Revolution, which brought about the popular election of Napoleon as Imperial Emperor. Liberty requires a system of limited government based on countervailing powers.

This principle of balance is manifested in chimpanzee groups in which the alpha male is checked by the power of others. But human beings can use language to elaborate this principle of balance as a constitutional regime that allows the ambitious few to fill the highest offices while protecting the multitude of people from being exploited by those ruling few. And thus, as Aristotle suggested, human beings can devise constituional arrangements for promoting the common good of all rather than just the private interests of the few.

The Biopolitical Science of the Imperfect Honey Bee

Aristotle thought the political animals could be identified as those animals who cooperate for some common work or function (koinon ergon). This suggests that the best political order serves the common good of all its members.  And yet the evolutionary science of animal politics indicates that such perfect harmony in a political order is impossible, because the individual diversity of animals must always create conflicts of interest both within and between their social groups, and therefore there can never be a perfect animal society in which every member works for the common interest of all the members of the society.  This must be true even for those social insects, such as honey bees, that might appear to be perfectly cooperative.

As examples of political animals, Aristotle identified bees, ants, wasps, cranes, and humans.  Today, bees, ants, and wasps are classified as belonging to the Hymenoptera order of insects, which includes over 150,000 living species.  Of these, the honey bees are the best studied insects, because for thousands of years beekeepers have managed them for the production of honey.  Aristotle wrote extensively about honey bees (in The History of Animals and The Generation of Animals), and clearly much of his knowledge came from beekeepers.

Today, we know that most of the bee species are solitary or only weakly social.  The 380 bee species showing well-structured colonies are only 1.3% of all bee species.  The 11 living species of honey bees are only 3% of all eusocial bee species.  The honey bee species found generally in Europe and North America is Apis mellifera.

                                                    Queen Bees Fighting to the Death

Beginning in ancient Greece and Rome, political thinkers have pointed to honey bee colonies as models of political justice in which members do different jobs in a complex division of labor under the monarchic rule of the queen bee for the common good of all (see Morley 2007 and Van Overmeire 2011).  Actually, though, most political philosophers--including Plato and Aristotle--thought the ruler was a king bee, and it wasn't until the 16th and 17th centuries that it became clear that the ruler was really a female bee, which confirmed Xenophon, the one ancient philosopher who suggested that the ruler of the bees was a queen.  In 1609, an English beekeeper Charles Butler published The Feminine Monarchy, Or A Treatise Concerning Bees, which surveyed the scientific knowledge of bees beginning with Aristotle and presented bee society as displaying the best form of government: "For the Bees abhorre as well Polyarchie, as Anarchie, God having shewed in them unto men, an expresse patterne of A Perfect Monarchic, The Most Natural And Absolute Forme of Government" (1.7).  Since this was only six years after the death of Queen Elizabeth, Butler's readers could see this as a tribute to her rule.

This looking to the bees as showing the natural pattern for the best form of government began with Plato.  In his Statesman, the Eleatic Stranger lamented that "no king is produced in our cities who is, like the ruler of the bees in their hives, by natural birth pre-eminently fitted from the beginning in body and mind" (301d-e).  In The Republic, Socrates claimed that in his most just city, philosophers would be reared from birth to rule for the common good just like the king bees in hives (520b).

Aristotle agreed with Plato in recognizing that some bees were political animals by nature, although he also saw that some species of bees were solitary animals (HA, 487b32-488a14, 623b5-15). But Aristotle disagreed with Plato's assumption that the political life of bees was perfectly harmonious.  Aristotle thought there were often several leaders in a bee colony, that they would fight with one another, and that the worker bees would kill the most disruptive leaders (553b14-20, 625a15-18, 626a29-32).  He also thought that bees had to fight against robber bees who would steal their honey (625a15-b7).  And despite the reputation of bees as industrious workers, he observed that some bees were remarkably lazy, which was one of the many traits showing individual variability in their personalities (626a1-b20, 627a12-22).  Indeed, he thought that all animals showed individual differences in their character traits (487a10-14, 629b6-8).  As indicated in some previous posts here and here, the recent biological studies of animal personalities support Aristotle's point here.

Against Aristotle, Thomas Hobbes argued, in both De Cive (5.5) and the Leviathan (ch. 17) that, unlike human beings, the truly political animals like bees and ants lived in harmonious societies without conflict, where there was no conflict between the private good and the common good, because the natural instincts of the social insects inclined them as individuals to do what was good for all members of the society.  Consequently, the social insects do not need the coercive power of the Leviathan to enforce social order, as is the case for human beings.  Hobbes was mistaken about this, because the social insects show many possible lines of conflict--between colonies, between queens, between workers, and between queens and workers.  I have written about this here.

Those biologists who speak of bees and other social insects as "superorganisms" stress the apparent harmony and perfect cooperation in an insect colony in a way that seems to support Hobbes's understanding (Holldobler and Wilson 2008; Moritz and Southwick 1991).  But in their recent book--The Dark Side of the Hive: The Evolution of the Imperfect Honey Bee--Robin Moritz and Robin Crewe show that the imperfection of a bee colony becomes clear as soon as one looks at its individual members.  They write:

"As with any complex social system, honey bee societies are prone to error, robbery, cheating, and social parasitism.  The honey bee colony is thus far from being a harmonious, cooperative whole.  It is full of individual mistakes, obvious maladaptations, and evolutionary dead ends.  Conflict, cheating, worker inefficiency, and curious reproduction strategies all occur.  The perfection that is perceived to exist in their social organization is a function of a particular experimental focus on the colony as a whole rather than exploring the idiosyncrasies of its individual members" (vii).

Bees are individuals with variable temperaments as shaped by their genetic endowment and their life experience.  So, for example, most workers respond to the queen's pheromonal signals by suppressing their ovaries, so that only the queen lays eggs, but some workers activate their ovaries and lay eggs even in the presence of the queen.  To counter this rebellion, some workers police the colony by destroying the eggs laid by workers.

Despite their reputation for industrious devotion to whatever task they undertake in the colony, many bees are remarkably lazy.  If one observes individual bees throughout their lives, many will be seen loafing most of the time.

There is also great individual variation in intelligence. One illustration of this is in their famous "waggle dance," which was observed by Aristotle (624b5-8), although he could not understand the signals.  Karl von Frisch explained this dance as a communication by foraging bees of the direction and distance of good foraging sites.  But he observed that some bees were not as accurate and precise in their dance communication as others.  There was a lot of sloppy dance language showing that there were a lot of stupid individuals (von Frisch 1967: 149, 212).

The primary reason why honey bee societies appear to be harmoniously cooperative is that most of the individual bees give up reproduction in order to raise the offspring of the queen, and thus the workers appear to sacrifice their individual fitness to serve the fitness of the queen.  William Hamilton thought he could explain this self-sacrificing altruism as a product of the close relatedness of the females in a haplodiploid system of sex determination.  In this system, males develop from unfertilized eggs and are haploid (having only one set of chromosomes), while females develop from fertilized eggs and are diploid (having two sets of chromosomes).  Consequently, if the queen mates with one male, her daughters will be more closely related to one another (sharing 3/4 of their genes on average) than to their own offspring (sharing 1/2 of their genes on average); and therefore these super-sisters enhance their inclusive fitness by foregoing their personal reproduction and rearing their sisters.

The problem with this explanation, however, is that honey bee queens are polyandrous in their mating, which reduces intracolonial relatedness.  A virgin queen flies out of her hive to attract a swarm of males, and as many as one hundred of them will fertilize her eggs.  As a result, the colony of offspring that she produces will have many subfamilies, and so her daughters are more likely to meet half-sisters (with a relatedness of 1/4) than super-sisters (with a relatedness of 3/4).  And since the workers are unable to discriminate between half-sisters and super-sisters, they are unable to favor the reproduction of their own subfamilies.

This and other problems with Hamilton's theory has provoked a debate over whether kin-selection is or is not necessary for explaining social cooperation.  Edward O. Wilson has changed his mind about this--switching from supporting Hamilton's theory to doubting it.  I have written about this here.

The "imperfect honey bee" illustrates an often overlooked fact about evolution--that far from providing optimal solutions to problems, it only provides feasible solutions that are good enough for somewhat stable systems but not perfect.  That's the theme of a new book by David Milo--Good Enough: The Tolerance for Mediocrity in Nature and Society.


REFERENCES

Butler, Charles. 1609. The Feminine Monarchie. Oxford: Joseph Barnes.

Milo, David. Good Enough: The Tolerance for Mediocrity in Nature and Society. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Morley, Neville. 2007. "Civil War and Succession Crisis in Roman Beekeeping." Historia 56: 462-70.

Moritz, Robin, and Robin Crewe. 2018. The Dark Side of the Hive: The Evolution of the Imperfect Honey Bee. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Van Overmeire, S. 2011. "The Perfect King Bee: Visions of Kingship in Classical Antiquity." Akroterion 56: 31-46.

von Frisch, Karl. 1967. The Dance Language and Orientation of Bees. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Political Leadership Among Cranes: Aristotle Was Right

                                Whooping Cranes Led in Migration by an Ultralight Aircraft


From his biological studies of animal behavior, Aristotle concluded that human beings, ants, bees, wasps, and cranes were political animals by nature (History of Animals, 488a1-14).  Some of these animals, such as bees and cranes, are ruled by a leader (hegemon), while others are not.

Aristotle was impressed by the politics of the social insects, particularly honey bees.  He described the bee hive as a well-ordered political community (HA, 533a17-554b21, 623b5-629b4; Generation of Animals, 759a8-761a12).

It's not hard for us today to see why Aristotle thought the social insects were political animals, particularly because of the work of entomologists like Edward O. Wilson who have argued that explaining the social behavior of the social insects can be part of a general science of sociobiology, which includes human social behavior.

It's harder to understand why Aristotle identified cranes as political animals.  But now some recent research suggests that he was right.  Aristotle thought that birds show  their prudence (phronesis) in building nests, in cooperating in rearing and teaching their young, in deceiving predators and prey, and in navigating over long distances (HA, 612b18-620b9).  He thought that cranes show their political prudence in their migration, in that a leader guides their flight path and acts as a guard when they stop (614b19-26).

Some recent studies of the migration of American whooping cranes (Grus Americana) confirm Aristotle's claims about leadership among cranes in their migration.  Some of this research is briefly summarized in an article in the New Scientist.

To keep  the North American whooping cranes from going extinct, conservationists have been rearing them from birth and then introducing them into the wild.  To do this successfully, researchers have dressed as cranes so that the birds imprint on the scientists as their parents, and then the scientists can teach them how to fly south for the winter by leading them with an ultralight aircraft.  The eastern migratory population must fly in the fall from Wisconsin to Florida, and then fly back to Wisconsin in the spring.  After they have been led to Florida in the fall by the scientists, the birds can then can fly back in the spring on their own.

This suggests that they must learn their path of migration from leaders.  Presumably, this requires some interaction between their genetic nature and their social learning.  A recent study in Science (Mueller et al. 2013) tried to elucidate this nature/nurture interaction and the role of leadership in migration.  Here's the abstract for the paper:

"Successful bird migration can depend on individual learning, social learning, and innate navigation programs.  Using 8 years of data on migrating whooping cranes, we were able to partition genetic and socially learned aspects of migration.  Specifically, we analyzed data from a reintroduced population wherein all birds were captive bred and artificially trained by ultralight aircraft on their first lifetime migration.  For subsequent migrations, in which birds fly individually or in groups but without ultralight escort, we found evidence of long-term social learning, but no effect of genetic relatedness on migratory performance.  Social learning from older birds reduced deviations from a straight-line path, with 7 years of experience yielding a 38% improvement in migratory accuracy."

Notice that they are showing the complex interaction between three levels of behavioral causality: innate programs (natural instincts), social learning (cultural traditions), and individual learning (individual cognition).  The older and more experienced cranes can become leaders of migration with the younger and less experienced cranes learning from them. 

A similar pattern has been found with homing pigeons, so that individuals with more homing experience become the leaders and those with less the followers (Flack 2012).  There is some evidence from homing pigeons and other animals that this leadership arises not just from greater experience in the leader but also from the leader's individual personality traits (such as boldness and dominance) (Harcourt et al. 2009; King et al. 2009).

If political animals are those animals who can coordinate their behavior for collective action in pursuit of common ends, sometimes with leaders steering that behavior to their ends, then cranes are political animals with political leaders.

Some people insist, however, that this is not politics, and that true politics is uniquely human because it depends on some conceptual understanding of authority that only human beings can have, and that learning the conventions of authority is artificial rather than natural (just as Hobbes argued).  I'll respond to that in my next post.


REFERENCES

Flack, Andrea, et al.  2012.  "What Are Leaders Made Of?  The Role of Individual Experience in Determining Leader-Follower Relations in Homing Pigeons."  Animal Behaviour 83: 703-709.

Harcourt, Jennifer L., et al.  2009. "Social Feedback and the Emergence of Leaders and Followers."  Current Biology 19: 248-52.

Mueller, Thomas, et al.  2013.  "Social Learning of Migratory Performance."  Science 341 (August 30): 999-1002.

King, Andrew J., et al.  2009.  "The Origins and Evolution of Leadership."  Current Biology 19: R911-R916.

The Timidity of John Hibbing and the Grandeur of Biopolitical Science

Perspectives on Politics is one of the quarterly journals published by the American Political Science Association.  The new issue (June 2013) is devoted largely to articles on the theme of "nature and politics," with special attention to the application of biology to politics.  Some of the articles are responses to an article by John Hibbing--"Ten Misconceptions Concerning Neurobiology and Politics."  Some are responses to Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.  And some are responses to Peter Hatemi and Rose McDermott's edited volume Man Is by Nature a Political Animal: Evolution, Biology, and Politics.

Hibbing and his colleagues have been far more successful in terms of influence in political science than the older "Politics and the Life Sciences" crowd.  The Hibbing folks have concentrated on applying biological reasoning to the empirical study of political psychology in ways that have gone far beyond anything done by the PLS folks.

My contribution to this issue of Perspectives on Politics is one of the articles responding to Hibbing's article.  My article is entitled "The Grandeur of Biopolitical Science."  Here is the abstract:

"John Hibbing's essay is a persuasive defense of biopolitical research.  I argue, however, that Hibbing does not go far enough in recognizing the broad vision of biopolitical science as a science of political animals.  We need to see this as a science that moves through three levels of deep history: the natural history of the political species, the cultural history of a political community, and the biographical history of political actors in a community.  I illustrate this by discussing Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation at these three levels of biopolitical science."

Here are the first four paragraphs of my article:

"John Hibbing is timid.  He persuasively defends biopolitical research against the misconceptions of its critics.  For that reason, this essay will surely become one of the most cited articles on biopolitics.  But despite my general agreement, I disagree with how he responds to the fifth misconception: 'Political culture is too idiosyncratic to succumb to biology' (p. 480).  His response shows his diffidence in refusing to go all the way in embracing biopolitics as a comprehensive theory for political science."

"If political science is ever to become a true science, it must become a biopolitical science of political animals.  Biopolitical science would incorporate all the traditional fields of political science within a biological science of politics."

"Hibbing is hesitant about promoting this expansive intellectual project.  To calm those traditional political scientists who fear biopolitics as a threat to their professional careers, he suggests that they have nothing to fear, because biopolitics is just one more specialized tool in the political scientist's tool box.  Hibbing argues that biopolitics is limited to studying the 'bedrock dilemmas of politics' that are universal to all political communities, leaving traditional political scientists to study the 'cultural variations' or 'issues-of-the-day' in politics without any grounding in biopolitical science.  While biology can illuminate 'cross-polity commonality,' biology has no application to 'cultural differences' in politics."

"A more comprehensive view of biopolitics is suggested by the title of a book to which Hibbing contributed: Man Is by Nature a Political Animal.  This points back to Aristotle as the first biopolitical scientist, who saw that human beings as political animals by nature could be compared with other political animals, such as ants, bees, wasps, and cranes.  Although he did not identify chimpanzees as political animals, Aristotle did study them--even dissecting them--as the animals that most resembled human beings.  While he did not develop a theory of biological evolution, he did suggest that a true science of politics might have to be a biological science of political animals.  A modern biopolitical science could fulfil the promise of Aristotle's insight."

Here's my last sentence:

"There is grandeur in this view of political life, as originating through the laws of nature for the emergence of irreducibly complex wholes from the cooperation of simple parts, so that, from ants and bees to chimps and humans, endless forms of political order most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."

For elaboration of what I sketch in this article, see my "Biopolitical Science" in James Fleming and Sanford Levinson's edited volume Evolution and Morality (New York University Press, 2012), pp. 221-65.

In his response to the commentators on his article, Hibbing includes me as one of those commentators who wonder whether biological research could illuminate particular historical events, and his answer is that biology has no application to historical events.  He writes: "Larry Arnhart wants to know why Abraham Lincoln chose the words he did for the Emancipation Proclamation."  He continues:

"This amazing diversity of questions and topics leads me to conclude that biology might not be appropriate for every one of them, a position that Arnhart calls 'timid' and Duster characterizes as laced with 'tension.'  Still, for those political scientists and historians seeking to explain a particular historical event, I simply do not see biology helping much.  Though Arnhart does a nice job of placing all events in a comprehensive framework with biology at its core, he never says anything about the precise manner in which neurobiological techniques can be used to generate and test hypotheses concerning specific cultural events and even admits toward the end of his essay that non-biological factors must be incorporated."

Apparently, this reference to incorporating "non-biological factors" points to the last section of my essay on "biographical history," in which I say that a political judgment--like Lincoln's decision to issue the Emancipation Proclamation--"can only be studied in its contingency and complexity through political biography," and my footnote citation for this sentence refers to Doris Kearns Goodwin's A Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln and Allen Guelzo's Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America.  But to say, as Hibbing does, that this "admits . . . that non-biological factors must be incorporated" ignores what I argue in this section of my essay about how biologists (like Jane Goodall and Frans de Waal) studying the political behavior of animals must study their political biography.

Remarkably, for Hibbing "biology" means nothing more than "neurobiology," and thus the biological study of animal behavior is not really biology.  I agree that neurobiology is an important part of biology, and certainly an important part of any biological science of political behavior.  But it makes no sense to me to say that the biological science of animal behavior is not really biological.  If one includes this science of animal behavior within biology, and if one sees that the biological study of animal behavior includes the study of particular events in the political history of animal groups shaped by unique cultural traditions and unique individuals, then any biopolitical science must include political history and political biography.

It seems that biopolitics as understood by people like Hibbing is much more narrow than my conception of biopolitical science as a comprehensive biological science of political animals. 

One can see in Hibbing's article here one weakness in the kind of biopolitical research that he promotes--a kind of "bait-and-switch" rhetoric of making dramatic claims that attract public attention, but then conceding that these claims are exaggerated.  For example, Hibbing writes: "Biology may not tell us why Barack Obama defeated Mitt Romney in 2012, but it does tell us why some people voted and some people did not."  That's an amazing claim--he can explain biologically "why some people voted and some people did not."  And if the 2012 election was decided by voter turnout, that means that in precisely predicting turnout, Hibbing could have predicted Obama's victory. 

But as I have indicated in a previous post, this claim is dubious.  Apparently, Hibbing is referring to an article by James Fowler and Christopher Dawes entitled "Two Genes Predict Voter Turnout."  The title conveys the dramatic claim that attracts attention.  If they have found that two genes predict voter turnout, that's a remarkable finding that all political scientists would want to understand.  But if you  read the article, you discover that what they're really saying is that two genes raise the likelihood of voting by 5% to 10%.  In other words, two genes do matter in having some small influence on voting turnout, but they probably don't matter very much.

Much of the research that Hibbing promotes is like this.  Political behavior is influenced to some extent by psychological predispositions.  Psychological predispositions are influenced to some extent by genes that influence the brain.  Therefore, genes influence political behavior  to some extent.  That's surely true.  But if the "to some extent" turns out to be minimal, then it's not clear that this is anything very exciting.

The fundamental problem here is that political science has little predictive power in explaining political behavior, because of the irreducible complexity and historical contingency of political events and political actors.  This is also true for biology at the level of animal behavior.  A Jane Goodall or a Frans de Waal can draw conclusions about the general patterns of primate social behavior, but they cannot predict precisely the particular historical events in the social life of particular primate groups.  Each primate group has a unique political culture with unique individuals and thus a unique political history that cannot be precisely predicted.

Some posts on related topics can be found here, here, and here.

Machiavelli's Aristotelian Liberal Republic

As I indicated in my May 19th post, Frans de Waal could not understand the political maneuvering of chimpanzees until he studied them with the help of Machiavelli's book The Prince.  In particular, de Waal saw in chimpanzee politics a democratic or republican structure of egalitarian dominance with a balance of three orders--the one, the few, and the many--the "prince," who is number one, the "great ones," who are high-ranking individuals with ambition to rule, and "the people," who are the great majority of individuals in a society with no ambition to rule, but who do not want to be oppressed by the "prince" or the "great ones," because they want to live their private lives in security and peace.  Machiavelli thought that a stable and peaceful republic would have to balance these three orders in a manner that would satisfy the appetites of all three without anyone having the power to tyrannize over others.  De Waal saw a similar structure of political psychology among chimpanzees: the alpha male chimp is the "prince," the high-ranking adult males are the "great ones," and the adult females and children are the "people."  Among chimps, there can be something like a Machiavellian republican government with consent of the governed and a balance of power between these three orders.

But in Chimpanzee Politics, de Waal also identified Aristotle as a political philosopher who might have understood that as "political animals" human beings share an evolutionary heritage with other political animals such as chimpanzees (1982, 211-212).  Then, in his book The Ape and the Sushi Master (2001), de Waal indicated that in my writing, "Darwin and Aristotle have begun to blend into a single person, perhaps to be called Darwistotle," and he endorsed the "Darwistotelian view" of human politics and morality as showing an evolved political nature shared with chimpanzees and other political animals (81, 349, 359).

Straussian scholars would dismiss all of this as ridiculous.  First, Aristotle does not really believe that human beings are by nature political animals like chimpanzees, they argue, because he sees that human political order depends on the culturally constructive activity of political founders and lawmakers, and human politics as culturally learned transcends animal politics as naturally instinctive.  This argument can be found in Wayne Ambler's 1985 article in The Review of Politics.

Second, the Straussians would say, even if de Waal were right to see a republican balance of three orders among chimpanzees comparable to what Machiavelli recommends, Machiavelli's modern liberal republicanism departs radically from Aristotle's ancient classical republicanism.  In their Introduction to their translation of Machiavelli's Discourses, Harvey Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov assert that Machiavelli and Aristotle differ in how they characterize the few and the many in politics (p. xxviii).  For Aristotle, the oligarchic few and the democratic many make conflicting claims to rule, and thus a republican mixed regime would have to allow both classes to participate in political rule.  But for Machiavelli, only the few are ambitious to rule, while the many only wish not to be ruled by an oppressive few.  This is the Machiavellian political psychology underlying modern liberal republicanism: those few who seek the glory of ruling can satisfy their desire, but with checks on their power so that they cannot oppress the many, and thus the many are secure in their private liberty to live as they please, so long as they do not injure others.

The first point--that human politics is socially learned rather than naturally instinctive--assumes that nature and instinct are necessarily antithetical to artifice and learning, so that social order cannot be natural or instinctive if it depends in any way on artificial or socially learned activity.  But as Aristotle indicated in his biological works, he thought that many animals acted not just by unlearned instinct but also by individual and social learning, and that the political animals had instincts for learning that sustained social order.  Much of the learning necessary for the social life of animals comes from parents teaching their young.  But much is also learned from the competition and cooperation of individuals in the wider community.  Recent studies of animal behavior confirm this by showing that many animals--including chimpanzees--have cultural traditions that distinguish one political community from another.  I have written many posts on this--for example, here and here.

On the second point, Mansfield and Tarcov are mistaken in their assertion of the radical contrast between Aristotle and Machiavelli on the political psychology of republicanism.  Contrary to what Mansfield and Tarcov say, there is a remarkable agreement between Aristotle and Machiavelli in their biopolitical science of republicanism as based on a balance of the one, the few, and the many, in which the few can satisfy their desire for the public glory of ruling, and the many can satisfy their desire for the private security of not being ruled oppressively by the few.  Both see this balanced order of the republican mixed regime as the liberal solution to the problem of faction.

According to Aristotle, some animals are naturally solitary and others gregarious.  Of the gregarious animals, some are political.  The distinguishing characteristic of the political animals is that they cooperate for collective goods, for some common work or function (koinon ergon).  Humans, bees, ants, wasps, and cranes are all political animals in this sense (HA, 488a7-14).  Some political animals distinguish between leaders (hegemones) and followers (HA, 553a26-554b26, 614b19-26, 623b26-29a30).  Leaders can help an animal community by directing it to its common ends, but leaders can also harm a community when they lead factions that divide a community (HA, 553b15-19, 615b17-18, 625a1-26b15).

Although Aristotle did not specifically identify chimpanzees as political animals, he believed that apes belonged to intermediate species close to human beings, in that they "share in the nature of both man and the quadrupeds" (HA, 502a16).  From his anatomical comparisons, which included dissections of monkeys and apes, he concluded that in their feet, legs, hands, face, teeth, and internal parts, the apes are manlike (HA, 502a17-b27; PA, 689b1-35).

Aristotle sees that like other political animals, human beings face the problem of factional disorder (stasis) that arises from the conflict between those few individuals who want the glory of ruling over others and those many individuals who don't want to be ruled exploitatively by the ambitious few: the few desire political honor, the many desire economic security.  Aristotle's solution to the problem is a republican mixed regime in which the desires of both the few and the many might be satisfied.  The ambitious few can win the glory of holding public offices, but they will be constrained by the rule of law and by being elected by the many, who will win security in their private lives and property, protected from exploitative dominance by the many.  Both the few who care for honor (time) and the many who care for gain (kerdos) will be satisfied.  It is important to have a strong middle class to moderate the conflict between the very rich and the very poor, so that there is a balancing of the higher class, the middle class, and the lower class.  A republic of this sort is the most stable and enduring regime because no class of citizens desires to overturn the regime: the few do not need to overturn the regime to satisfy their ambition for glorious rule, and the many do not need to overturn the regime because of their fear of being exploited by the ruling class (Pol., 1295b1-40, 1297b5-28, 1302a33-1304b19, 1308a1-15, 1308b30-1309a15, 1318b17-1319a6). 

Some readers of Aristotle's Politics see it as suggesting that a mixed regime leaning towards a moderate democracy is the best regime that is practically achievable, which is the argument of Clifford Bates in Aristotle's "Best Regime": Kingship, Democracy, and the Rule of Law (LSU Press, 2003).

Machiavelli proposes a republic very similar to Aristotle's.  Like Aristotle, Machiavelli sees the problem of faction (fazione) arising from the conflict between the ambitious few ("the great"), who want to command and oppress the people, and the popular multitude, who do not want to rule, but who want not to be commanded and oppressed by the great (The Prince, chaps. 9, 19; Discourses, I.2, I.4, I.5, I.16.3-5, II.21.2, III.5).  A prince who wishes to rule as the one head over all must mediate this conflict.

Machiavelli presents a historical cycle of the six types of government based on the history of the ancient regimes (particularly, Sparta, Athens, and Rome), drawing from Plutarch and Polybius,  and Lucretius's evolutionary history of human society from primitive times (On the Nature of Things, esp. 5.931-945, 5.1019-1025, 5.1120-1161).

In the beginning of the human world, the original ancestors of the human species lived dispersed like beasts (D, I.2.3).  Then, as the human population increased,

"they gathered together, and to be able to defend themselves better, they began to look to whoever among them was more robust and of greater heart, and they made him a head, as it were, and obeyed him.  From this arose the knowledge of things honest and good, differing from the pernicious and bad. For, seeing that if one individual hurt his benefactor, hatred and compassion among men came from it, and as they blamed the ungrateful and honored those who were grateful, and thought too that those same injuries could be done to them, to escape like evil, they were reduced to making laws and ordering punishments for whoever acted against them, hence came the knowledge of justice."

Remarkably, it seems, this original "knowledge of justice" arises not from any knowledge of a divine or cosmic law of right and wrong but from the experience of human injuries, the hatred of human aggressors, the compassion for their victims, and the knowledge that those injuries could be done to oneself; and from this arose the human inclination to blame those who injured others and praise those who were cooperative.  Human beings organized themselves into bands for defense of the group--perhaps as a defense against wild animals or as a defense against other human groups. To help in that defense of their group, human beings chose those who were more robust and spirited among them to be their head, to lead them in defending the group against attack.  To enforce customary norms of praiseworthy and blameworthy conduct, they established laws and punishments.  As is suggested by Lucretius, this is a description of human hunter-gatherer bands before the establishment of agriculture and agrarian settlements.

Much of this has been confirmed by research in the evolutionary anthropology of hunter-gatherer bands, which has been the subject of many of my posts.  Human ancestors evolved to punish cheaters who harm others, and thus violate the customary rules of good conduct that arose spontaneously in primitive human societies as a defense against human aggressors.  These rules were enforced by reputational mechanisms--people praising the good and blaming the bad--and by punishing offenders through the retaliation of their victims or the victim's family or the larger group.  Thus, as the Epicureans argued, moral order originally arose as a kind of social contract through a largely spontaneous order in which autonomous individuals agreed to those customary norms that protected them from injury.  There is here the seed of liberal morality and politics: people are free to live as they please, so long as they refrain from injuring others; but when they do injure others, they will be punished by those who feel threatened by them.

Although the foraging band was an egalitarian society in which all adults were autonomous, some individuals respected for their talents in mediating disputes and leading the group could become leaders, but their leadership depended on the voluntary agreement of everyone in the group, and any leader who became a bully provoked resistance and retaliation that had a leveling effect.  So there was a natural tendency for a few people to seek dominance over the others, but this natural dominance drive of the ambitious few was checked by the resistance of the many who refused to be exploited by a dominant few.

From the beginning, then, there has been a kind of government by the consent of the governed, in that those few who rule must win the support, or at least acquiescence, of the many, because rulers who are hated by the people provoke the violent resistance of the multitude who do not want to be exploited by their rulers.

This resistance of the multitude to injuries by the ruling elite runs through Machiavelli's history of governments.  The three good forms of government--principality, aristocracy, and popular government--promote the common good rather than the merely private good of the rulers, and thus the people will accept such governments.  But each of these three good forms are inclined to decline into bad forms as the first generation of rulers is replaced by succeeding generations--principality declining into tyranny, aristocracy declining into oligarchy, and popular government declining into the license of mob-rule, and thus these three good forms are unstable.  Each of the bad forms will be overthrown by the multitude when they see that the government is not promoting their peace and security (D, I.2.3).

Those who prudently order the laws, Machiavelli believes, will create the most stable and enduring republic by forming a mixed regime that combines all three of the good regimes: "for the one guards the other, since in one and the same city, there are the principality, the aristocrats, and the popular government" (D, I.2.5).  In such a republic, a prince can govern "by way of freedom" rather than "by way of principality."  The princely desire for power and the popular desire for freedom can be combined.  The popular desire for freedom is expressed in two ways: a small part of the people (perhaps only 40 or 50 people) want to be free to command, but most of the people want to be free to live a secure private life.  A "well-ordered republic" with a prince elected by the people and public offices for the ambitious few under the rule of law so as to protect the private liberty of most people satisfies all three classes of human beings--the one, the few, and the many (D, I.16, I.20).  Such republics also need princes "to make their men military" by training them for military service in a citizens' militia, so that the republic does not depend on foreign mercenaries for its military defense and offense (D, I.21).

This is the liberal republicanism that would be later elaborated by people like John Locke and John Adams.  And yet this Machiavellian liberal republicanism also has roots in Aristotle's mixed regime, as Machiavelli himself suggested in his Discourse on Florentine Things After the Death of Lorenzo di Piero de' Medici, sometimes entitled A Discourse on Remodeling the Government of Florence or Reforming the State of Florence Done at the Instance of Pope Leo X, which can be found online.

Florence had officially been identified as a republic for hundreds of years.  But the Medici family had ruled unofficially, without any legal authority, over the city through most of the fifteenth century.  When Lorenzo de Medici ("Lorenzo the Magnificent") died in 1492, his son Piero was unable to maintain the family's power, and he was forced into exile in 1494.  Then, a new republican constitution was established for Florence under the influence of a charismatic Dominican monk, Girolama Savonarola, who used his popular public sermons to persuade the people to turn Florence into a Christian republic that would become the center of Christian renewal for the whole world.  After almost four years of power, Savonarola was defeated by his opponents, including the Pope, and he was hanged and burned in 1498.

After the death of Savonarola, Machiavelli was elected in 1498 to his first public posts--Second Chancellor of the Republic, replacing a deposed follower of Savonarola, and Secretary of the Ten of War.  For fourteen years, from the ages of 29 to 43, Machiavelli was an important public official for the Florentine republic in its diplomatic service and military security, including organizing a citizen militia.

In 1502, Florence was threatened by the advance of Cesare Borgia's armies.  Florentines began to debate a change in their constitution.  The Gonfalonier (standard-bearer) of Justice had always been elected for two-month terms, which deprived the republic of strong leadership in war and diplomacy.  In Venice, the head of the government, called the Doge, was elected for life.  At the end of August, a vote passed in the Great Council (a widely inclusive popular assembly) declaring that henceforth the Gonfalonier will be appointed for life. 

On September 21, Piero Soderini was elected Gonfalonier for life.  He became the most powerful fully legal head of government  in Florence's republican history. He was in effect the chief executive of Florence.  He defended the Great Council, and he mediated conflicts between the city's popular and oligarchic factions.  Machiavelli was a friend and supporter of Soderini, and most of Machiavelli's positions in the government depended on Soderini's patronage.  Because Machiavelli's father was a tax debtor, Machiavelli was ineligible for Florence's chief magistracies.

One of the fundamental weaknesses in the Florentine republic identified by Machiavelli was the dependence on foreign mercenary soldiers.  Machiavelli argued for establishing a citizens' militia.  His oligarchic opponents warned that it would be dangerous to arm plebian citizens within the walls of the city.  Machiavelli answered this objection by arguing that dividing the powers over the militia would prevent any one leader from using the militia to subvert the government.  Piero Soderini supported Machiavelli's proposal for a people's militia.  Machiavelli began by recruiting and training peasant people in small towns outside Florence.  In 1508, he organized the militia to fight against Pisa, which was in revolt against Florentine rule.

But in 1512, when the armies of the Church and Spain marched against Florence, the city was still too weak militarily to resist the invasion.  In August of that year, Soderini was forced into exile.  Spanish troops entered Florence.  And the Medici family was allowed to return.  On September 16, the magistrates of the city were forced to reinstate the Medici family.  Cardinal Giovanni de' Medici and Giuliano de' Medici became the rulers of Florence.  Two days later, after this Medici coup, Machiavelli's Florentine militia was abolished, and the Great Council was dissolved.  Piero Soderini's image was removed from all public buildings, and his political service for Florence was discredited. 

Machiavelli composed an unsolicited memorandum to Cardinal Giovanni de' Medici. He warned the Cardinal that those Florentine patricians who were attacking Soderini and claiming to be the friends of the Medici family were not true friends, because they were only maneuvering to become heads of state themselves.  "I should like to make friends for your house, not enemies," Machiavelli wrote.  He advised that the Medici's needed to found their state on the support of the people and not on those deceptive patricians who falsely claimed to be their friends.

If the memorandum was read, it did not win any Medici support for Machiavelli.  On November 7, 1512, he was dismissed from all of his governmental offices.  On February 18, 1513, a plot to kill Giuliano de' Medici and overthrow the government was discovered.  Two leaders of the plot were arrested and then beheaded.  Machiavelli was arrested because his name was on a list of potential collaborators found in the pocket of one of the conspirators.  In prison, he was questioned about the conspiracy and tortured.  The interrogators employed the strappado: a man's arms are tied behind his back with a strap tied to a crane that jerks his whole body off the ground, so that his arms are ripped out of their shoulder sockets.  This was done to Machiavelli six times.  Six times he was asked why his name was on the list.  Each time he denied any knowledge of the conspiracy.

While Machiavelli was imprisoned, Pope Julius II died.  Cardinal Giovanni de' Medici was elected the new pope, taking the name Leo X, becoming the first Florentine pope.  Now the Medici were princes of both Rome and Florence.  The new pope declared a general amnesty for political prisoners in Florence.  Machiavelli was released after 22 days in prison.

By the end of 1513, Machiavelli is spending most of his time at his country house in Sant' Andrea in Percussina, not far outside the walls of Florence, with his wife and children.  He writes The Prince and The Discourses, which are widely circulated but not published until after his death.  His play Mandragola is performed for the first time in 1518, and its success makes him famous around Europe.

Lorenzo di Piero de' Medici became the leader of Florence, the person to whom Machiavelli dedicated The Prince.  In May, 1519, Lorenzo died.  Pope Leo appointed his cousin, Cardinal Giulio de' Medici, to become the new head of Florence's government.  Lorenzo had become hated by the people of Florence, and Leo wanted to consider changes in the Florentine government that might soften some of the popular resistance.  He advised the Cardinal to invite prominent people to propose changes in the government.  Machiavelli was one of the people mentioned.

Now, for the first time since the Medici coup of 1512, Machiavelli had a chance to influence the Medici rule of Florence and to try to bring back to Florence something like a republican government.  In his Discourse on Remodeling the Government of Florence,  he returned to the theme of his 1512 memorandum to Cardinal Giovanni, who was now the Pope: for the security and glory of Medici rule, the support of the untrustworthy patricians is not enough, because "no stable republic was ever established without satisfying the general public [l'universale]."

Machiavelli argues that no state can be stable unless it is either a true principality or a true republic.  All other forms of government that are situated between these two are unstable.  A prince cannot rule by himself, because he needs a coalition of supporters, most commonly a nobility.  In a true principality or monarchy, the noble gentlemen make themselves lords over the people, and the prince is lord over the nobles.  This cannot be done in Florence, because it does not have a well-established landed nobility, and so there is great equality in Florence.

But although Florence has no nobility, there will always be three different classes in every city--the elite (primi), the middle (mezzani) , and the lowest (ultimi). Even with the rough equality of citizens in Florence, some of the citizens will have "elevated spirits" (animo elevato), and they will think that they merit being elevated above others.  The Florentine republic under Soderini was unstable because it failed to satisfy the desire of these ambitious few for public offices of high honor, and consequently the state was ruined.  Since there are by nature three ranks of men in every society, a well-ordered republic must satisfy the desires of these three classes.  Machiavelli lays out a constitution that would allocate power between these three ranks.  This would include the appointment of a Gonfalonier of Justice for a term of two or three years, or perhaps for life.  Machiavelli saw this as a "perfect republic."

Machiavelli's reasoning here seems to assume what Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and others have called the "theory of minimum winning coalitions."  In politics, rule by one person is impossible, because even the most autocratic dictator needs some supporters.  The difference between dictatorship and democracy is that the dictator rules with the support of a very small coalition of supporters, which corresponds to Machiavelli's principality, while the democratic leader rules with the support of a large coalition of supporters, which corresponds to Machiavelli's republic.  I have written a post on this.

Alternatively, one could identify Machiavelli's principality as corresponding to what Douglass North and his colleagues called the "limited access order," and Machiavelli's republic could be identified as corresponding to the "open access order."  I have a post on this.

In another post, I have written about ancient Athens as one of the few open access or liberal orders in the premodern world.  One can see in Athens a social order that approximates some of the features of modern liberal republicanism, which was seen by Aristotle.  I have written three series of posts on Aristotle's Darwinian liberalism that begin here, here, and here.

Actually, Machiavelli himself points to Aristotle in his Discourse on Remodeling the Government of Florence.  First, Machiavelli echoes the language of Aristotle (see the Politics, 1302a32-33) in his last sentence: "Nor is there another way of avoiding these evils than to reorganize that city so that it may in itself be firm; and it will always be firm when every one has a part in it and knows what he has to do, and in whom to confide, and that no class of citizen has to desire innovation, either through fear for himself or through ambition."

Second, Machiavelli brings up Aristotle's name as a philosopher who wrote about how to reform republics:

"I believe that the greatest honor that men can have is that which is willingly given them by their country, and I believe that the greatest good that is done, and the most pleasing to God, is that which is done for your country.  In addition to this, no man is exalted as much in any of his actions, as are those who have reformed republics and kingdoms with laws and institutions.  These are, after those who have been Gods, the highest praised: and as there have been few who have had opportunity to do so, and still fewer those who have known how to do it, the number of those who have done it is small; and this glory has been esteemed so much by men who have known nothing but glory, that not being able to establish a republic in fact, have established it in writing; for Aristotle, Plato, and many others have wanted to show the world, that if they had not been able to found a republic as Solon and Lycurgus did, they did not fail from ignorance but from being powerless to put it into effect."

Remarkably, Machiavelli here implicitly compares himself with Aristotle, Plato, and other philosophers who established republics in their writing, even when they could not establish them in fact.  As far as I know, Machiavelli's only other references to Aristotle and Plato in his writing is in The Discourses--one reference to Aristotle (III.26.2) and one reference to Plato (III.6.16).

John Adams quoted this passage from Machiavelli to explain his love of honor from writing constitutions for America.  Adams wrote the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, which is the oldest written constitution still in force in the world.  In that constitution, Adams followed the principle that he had learned from Machiavelli--balancing the one, the few, and the many--by separating and balancing the powers of an executive and of an upper legislative chamber for aristocrats and a lower legislative chamber representing the people.  This Massachusetts constitution had great influence in the drafting of the United States Constitution of 1787, particularly Article II on the presidency, which can be seen as establishing a republican prince.