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From Tyrannicide to Revolution: Aristotle on the Politics of Comradeship

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 August 2020

JORDAN JOCHIM Open the ORCID record for JORDAN JOCHIM [Opens in a new window]
JORDAN JOCHIM*
Affiliation:
Cornell University
*
Jordan Jochim, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Government, Cornell University, [email protected].
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Abstract

Treatments of collective action in political science, classical Greek history, and democratic theory often focus on the episodic and public-facing dimensions of dissent. This article turns to Aristotle for an account of solidaristic political action whose scale and tempo is sometimes obscured by such engagements. Revisiting The Athenian Constitution’s account of the tyrannicides of 514 BCE and the democratic revolution of 508/7 BCE, I argue for the centrality of comradeship to Aristotle’s discussions of these episodes. I demonstrate that Aristotle’s attention to the politics of comradeship is also legible in Politics 5—which notes the dangers political clubs (hetaireiai) pose to tyranny—as well as Aristotle’s references to comrades (hetairoi) in the Nicomachean and Eudemian Ethics. This article contributes to our understanding of the birth of Athenian democracy and how comradeship—a vice, to Aristotle, under ordinary political circumstances—becomes a virtue.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 114 , Issue 4 , November 2020 , pp. 1266 - 1279
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Political Science Association

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Footnotes

This article benefitted from discussions at the 2019 meeting of the International Conference for the Study of Political Thought, the Cornell Political Theory Writing Colloquium, and the Cornell Government Department’s PSAC speaker series. For commenting on previous drafts, thanks are owed to Jason Frank, Bryan Garsten, Sarah Greenberg, Alex Gourevitch, Demetra Kasimis, Alexander Livingston, Patchen Markell, Avshalom Schwartz, and Chris Way. I am deeply grateful to Leigh Jenko and the American Political Science Review’s three anonymous reviewers, whose careful guidance and feedback contributed enormously to the shape and substance of my argument. I am forever grateful to Jill Frank, who provided thorough and illuminating feedback on numerous drafts of this article.

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