This chapter surveys the evidence for the sophistic debate on relativism as evident in the fragments of the sophists, including comic and tragic poets. A widespread interpretation of the Histories claims that Herodotus supports nomos without qualification. By contrast, this chapter argues that this claim fails to capture the complexity of Herodotus’ engagement with those figures who use nomos as a rhetorical ploy to justify what is contrary to popular ethics. Similarly, Presocratic thinkers were working through the challenges presented by those who identified nomos as only a relative set of values as opposed to an objective norm to be followed. The Histories’ exploration of the problem of relating custom and law to justice takes place in the context of the rise and expansion of Persian imperialism. Further, it implicates the despot in a relativizing of justice and constitutes a key explanatory paradigm in the Persian attack against the Greek mainland in the Greco-Persian Wars.

The assassination of the False Smerdis in Book 3 and the ensuing constitutional uncertainty offer Herodotus an inflection point to pause and consider the institution of monarchy in Persia in terms of its strengths and weaknesses. This chapter reexamines the speeches given by the conspirators in advance of the coup and its aftermath. In these episodes, Darius undermines a key nomos held by the Persians, their abhorrence of falsehood. Darius does so as a private citizen but given his subsequent rise to the throne, this invites comparison with the Great Kings. Darius’ disregard for nomos opens a philosophical debate on human motivation and self-interest. In a speech to the Persian conspirators, the future monarch defends "egoism," the philosophy that all action is performed to maximize the individual’s self-interest. This view is set alongside orations by the Persians Otanes and Prexaspes, exponents of cooperative action and altruism, respectively. The chapter argues that fifth-century intellectual culture engaged in a spirited interrogation of the individual in relation to self-interest, often in terms of the social contract. The clash between motivation on behalf of the one versus the many will illustrate the complex negotiation in Persia of ruler and ruled, self and society.

The paper examines the origins of the distinction between physis, “nature,” and nomos, “norm,” and the uses made of it during the period of the Sophists. The two terms did not originally lend themselves to being contrasted, but the contrast becomes natural in light of two mid-fifth-century developments: a growing interest in the different customs of different societies and a proliferation of accounts of the origins of human civilization. While the contrast is employed by others, such as Herodotus and the medical writers, it is the Sophists themselves, above all, who exploit it for sociological and philosophical purposes. Some, such as Protagoras, see nomos as building on physis – that is, on tendencies in human nature; others see an opposition between the two, and suggest that we would be better off ignoring nomos and attending to what our natures dictate. The contrast is also applied to religion, which some Sophists treat as nomos.

This chapter seeks to ground what follows in debates within the International Relations of the Middle East, with a particular focus on how scholars have sought to characterize the rivalry between Riyadh and Tehran. In a departure from these debates, the chapter seeks to understand Saudi and Iranian efforts to exert order over space. Lastly, it brings together geopolitical, ideational, and spatial analysis to set out a (comparative) framework to understand the impact of the rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran on local politics, and vice versa.

One particular twentieth-century scholar stands out in how influential he was in ensuring Gentili’s position as a key protagonist in the history of international law: Carl Schmitt. This chapter argues that Schmitt’s influential emphasis on Gentili is not simply an inheritance of nineteenth-century narratives. Rather, Schmitt places Gentili at the heart of his history of the development of international law and the evolution of the concept of war in a move that should be understood as part of his broader attempt to defend authoritarian rule. In particular, I argue that placing so much emphasis on Gentili provided Schmitt with a way to make absolutist forms of rule seem normatively desirable. Schmitt came to associate absolutism with the humanization and the rationalization of warfare, not through an analysis of historical facts (which would have made the endeavor difficult) but through a partial interpretation of the works of some “great” thinkers, most importantly Gentili’s treatise on war.

This chapter offers an account of the inspiration for their active advocacy of political, social, and educational reform that three key figures of the British nineteenth century found in Plato: John Stuart Mill, George Grote (author of the classic three-volume study Plato of 1865), and Benjamin Jowett (whose translation of the entire Platonic corpus of 1871 was to be hugely influential). For both Mill and Grote, the importance of the probing Socratic method portrayed in the dialogues was paramount. Grote contrasted it with the tyranny exercised over the dissenting individual by the conformism of society at large: what he called King Nomos, with his eye particularly on the Great Speech Plato puts in Protagoras’s mouth in the Protagoras. To his mind, the Republic represented a sad betrayal of the Socratic spirit. It was Jowett who was chiefly responsible for making that dialogue’s moral idealism central to the education Oxford provided for the nation’s future elite, and whose endorsement of its radical proposals for equality for women in education and in politics is particularly notable.

The question of Aristotle’s natural law credentials has often divided interpreters. In the current chapter, I argue that much of this disagreement stems from insufficient attentiveness to both the details of Aristotle’s account of the just by nature in Nicomachean Ethics V.7 and the ambiguity of the term ‘natural law.’ The chapter thus proceeds from the assumption that a precondition for any adequate assessment of Aristotle’s status as a natural law theorist is a close analysis of the V.7 discussion of natural justice. Such an investigation, the main concern of section 1, reveals that Aristotle’s characterization of the politically just as partly natural and partly conventional does indeed entail that nature serves as a normative ground for law. With this conclusion in place, section 2 then turns more directly to Aristotle’s relation to the natural law tradition. Despite important differences between Aristotle’s account of the normative foundations of law and those found in the paradigmatic natural law teachings of the Stoics and Aquinas, I argue, there are nonetheless features of later natural law thought on the purpose and evaluation of law which are genuinely Aristotelian in orientation.

In this opening chapter I closely examine Aristotle’s discussions of the topic of nomos in Nicomachean Ethics X.9 and Politics III.15-16. These passages contain famous statements which associate law with rationality, the promotion of virtue, universality and impartiality. A selective reading of these statements can suggest that law is strictly identifiable with reason. As a corrective to such a one-sided intellectualist reading, I seek to place the rationalism of Aristotelian nomos in its broader political context. This requires engagement with Aristotle’s acknowledgment of the law’s necessary use of constraint over resistant passions in its attempt to guide citizens towards virtue. While Aristotle undoubtedly regards good law as both an achievement of the architectonic legislator’s practical reason and as rational in its content, its effective political application does not presuppose that the majority of citizens grasp the reasons for its directives. Aristotle’s conception of nomos thus resists easy assimilation to the intellectualist view that a political community’s laws are a set of reasons for action directed to autonomous rational agents. Section 1 sets the scene by considering the major passages which have led many interpreters to propose readings of Aristotelian nomos with an intellectualist slant. In section 2, I examine the terms of Aristotle’s informal definition of law in X.9 of the Nicomachean Ethics. Section 3 then situates this definition in the broader frame of X.9 in order to demonstrate the role of nomos as a constraint on desire and the implications of this for the ideal of the rule of law. Finally, section 4 discusses educational laws as a privileged example of the interplay of reason and compulsion in the political applications of nomos.

The ultimate telos for an architectonic legislator intending to establish a good constitution and laws, the previous chapters have argued, is eudaimonia. As an activity of the soul in accord with the best virtue (NE I.7, 1098a17), eudaimonia nonetheless presupposes a political community with just laws that are directed to the common advantage. Aristotle accordingly characterises the common advantage (to koine[i] sumpheron) as the aim of law and associates it with the promotion of eudaimonia in the polis (NE V.1, 1129b15-19). The common advantage may thus be regarded as the proximate final cause of legislative activity. Aristotle’s account of the common advantage nonetheless seems to equivocate between its status as an instrumental good serving the ends of individuals and as an intrinsically desirable state of affairs. In the current chapter, I seek to resolve this tension by conceptualising the common advantage as both a motivational reason leading individuals to enter the polis and a normative reason – identifiable with the political good of justice – which should guide the enactment of law. Section 1 considers some interpretative preliminaries to a correct understanding of the common advantage. Section 2 then examines the motivational role of the common advantage as a reason for political participation and its relation to instrumental and aggregative accounts of the common good. In section 3, I turn to the common advantage’s status as a normative reason identifiable with political justice. Section 4 then argues for the reconcilability of motivational and normative aspects of the common advantage by reference to the medieval interpretation of the polis as a unity of order.

If humans are political animals by nature, then the ordering of their communal life requires the guidance of a prudent law-giver and practically reasonable laws. The purpose of the political community is both to allow individuals to satisfy basic wants and to realise the potentiality of human flourishing. Neither the political community in its fully developed sense nor its laws, are, however, at least without further assistance, naturally arising. They rather emerge through the direction of a law-maker who employs insight and practical rationality to legislate for the community’s good. This ordering of a political community, on the basis of a legislator’s practical wisdom, and prevailing authoritative opinions about justice, is nothing other than its law.

Aristotle does not propound a systematic legal theory in the modern sense. While the Nicomachean Ethics and the Politics contain several memorable statements on nomos, at no point in the practical works does Aristotle purport to provide a scientific account of law as an autonomous system or an analysis of the necessary truths about law that explain it.1 The absence of a systematic legal theory in Aristotle cannot, moreover, simply be attributed to the dictum that an educated person should only seek as much precision as a subject matter allows (NE I.3, 1094b24–5). That such a conclusion would be facile may be seen by a comparison with Aristotle’s treatments of justice and the constitution. These two concepts frame Book V of the Nicomachean Ethics and Book III of the Politics (if not the Politics as a whole) respectively and their explanatory value is confirmed when they are deployed to elucidate other important political phenomena such as stability and change. By contrast, Aristotle’s tendency is to deal with nomos in the context of an examination of more fundamental political concepts. Law accordingly seems to have a derivative explanatory status.

For Aristotle, as seen in chapter 1, the rational content of the law derives from the practical reason of the lawgiver. In the central case, the legislator’s enactments will be oriented by the ends of virtue and human flourishing. Aristotle’s attribution of a decisive role to the practical reason of the lawgiver seems, however, to be in tension with better-known aspects of his political thought. In particular, it is far from self-evident that a robust account of legislative agency is in harmony with political naturalism. The famous assertion in Politics I.2 that there is a natural impulse to form political communities is immediately contraposed with the claim that the person responsible for their foundation is the cause (aitios) of the greatest of goods (Pol. 1253a33). Yet if the polis truly exists by nature and humans are by nature political animals (1253a1-2), then the obvious question arises as to why active intervention by the legislator is necessary at all for a polis. Conversely, if the polis is an artefact of the architectonic legislator’s practical reason, then the distinction between products of the intellect and natural entities seems to preclude the status of the polis as natural. In light of this apparent tension within Aristotle’s account of the origins of political communities, the current chapter seeks to demonstrate their reconcilability. Section 1 considers the architectonic legislator in light of broader Greek assumptions regarding foundational law-making. Section 2 then turns to the status of law-making expertise as a part of political science and examines the mode of practical reason exercised by the legislative founder. Finally, in section 3, and building on recent interpretations which have emphasised that Aristotle operates with an extended teleological conception of nature, I argue that acts of legislative founding and nature can consistently serve as joint causes of the polis because the ‘products’ of the practical rationality of the legislator are themselves an expression of distinctly human nature.

The first two chapters have demonstrated that for Aristotle nomos in the focal sense is a standard for conduct derived from the practical reason of an architectonic legislator. Legislative expertise, on this view, is a privileged sub-branch of true political expertise and it enacts laws with a view to the human good inclusive of the promotion of the conditions for virtue and well-being. The full implications of Aristotle’s thesis that lawmaking is a part of political expertise can only be understood, however, by reference to the claim that legislators should and do enact laws (nomoi) relative to the constitution (Pol. III.11, 1282b8-13, IV.1, 1289a14-22). In its simplest sense, the constitutional relativity of law entails that legislators should and do enact laws that are consistent with the priorities of their regime. More fundamentally, the constitutional relativity of law reflects the dependence of law on the explicit or implicit conceptions of the good life which inform alternative arrangements of ruling offices. In this chapter, I argue that the constitutional relativity of law is best interpreted through the lens of Aristotle’s theory of explanatory causes. On this interpretation, the politeia is the formal cause of the polis and it is structured by the conception of eudaimonia prevalent among the dominant political element. Section 1 defends both the general claim that Aristotle’s constitutional analysis is informed by his theory of explanatory causes and the specific claim that the politeia is a formal cause. In section two, I then connect the status of the politeia as a formal cause to the different conceptions of eudaimonia which determine diverse regime-types and their laws. Finally, in section 3, I examine whether the constitutional relativity of law entails that all law is necessarily partisan by considering its applicability to the best regime.

If a just and well-ordered political community is integral to the good for an individual, then it would seem incumbent on the architectonic legislator and prudent statesperson to aim at the optimal condition of the polis and hence to reform defective regimes and laws. The normative structure of Aristotle’s constitutional theory – with its conception of the best regime as an ideal and appeal to the common advantage as a central criterion for distinguishing correct and defective constitutions – likewise suggests a progressive stance towards correction of political injustice. The overall attitude towards the reform of constitutions and laws which emerges from the Nicomachean Ethics and Politics is nonetheless cautious and conservative. In the current chapter I consider the motivations for this circumspection and argue that it reflects both the importance of habituation to the effective functioning of law and a recognition of the limits of law’s capacity to promote virtue and human flourishing. Section 1 engages in a close reading of Aristotle’s treatment of the advantages and disadvantages of legal reform in the Politics Book II.8 discussion of Hippodamus’ legislative proposal to honour innovation. In section 2, I examine Aristotle’s account of constitutional change and stability in light of his theory of ethical virtue. Finally, in section 3, I turn to political obedience and argue for its dual justification within Aristotle’s practical thought.

Aristotle’s discussion of equity (epieikeia) is perhaps his most influential contribution to jurisprudence. Like the English doctrine of equity it informed, Aristotelian epieikeia is intended to rectify deficiencies arising from the strict application of the letter of the law to all circumstances. The extension of the concept of the ‘decent’ or equitable into the legal domain might nonetheless seem to undermine some of the most desirable features of the rule of law, including impartiality and predictability. In this final chapter, I argue that Aristotle addresses this concern regarding potential arbitrariness by deriving equitable decisions from the rational content of the legislative expert’s judgments. More generally, while the exemplary ethical agent is a measure of practical reasonableness, it is the content of their judgments which ultimately serves as ‘normative bedrock.’ Section 1 examines Aristotle’s use of equity to balance the universality of the law’s pronouncements with the need for adjudicators to assess particular circumstances. Section 2 then turns to Aristotle’s appeal to the judgments of the exemplary practically reasonable agent as a normative criterion and contends that this need not culminate in arbitrariness or decisionism.

Drawing upon Carl Schmitt’s idea of the katechon - a theological figure of the ‘restrainer’ - it is argued that two different accounts of ‘restraint’ operate within contemporary historiography. In one, the USA and the Soviet Union assume the role of the katechon during the Cold War, holding at bay an earthly apocalypse, securing stability through their mutual enmity. In the other, liberal account, it is the Cold War itself that acts as the restrainer, holding back the promises of Kant’s enlightenment project of world government, and of the securing of global peace through law. Each of these accounts has problematic effects: either by operating as an apology for the power of the guarantors of order, or by denying/deferring responsibility for the present state of affairs. We are therefore asked to think, instead, about international law and its history through the lens of Walter Benjamin’s conception of ‘weak messianic power’.