George Duke, Aristotle And Law: The Politics Of Nomos

Document Cited in Related
DOI10.3366/elr.2021.0689
Published date01 January 2021
Date01 January 2021
Pages147-149
Author

Aristotle, “lo Filosofo” (“the Philosopher”) and “maestro di color che sanno” (“master of those who know”; Dante Alighieri, Convivio (Banquet), I.1.1; Divina Commedia, Inferno, IV 131; cf. Metaphysics, 980a), has exerted a major, if not defining, influence on several branches (i.e. philosophical, socio- and bio-political, legal, scientific, etc) of Western consciousness and thinking. And yet, as George Duke points out at the beginning of his Aristotle and Law: The Politics of Nomos (hereinafter, “ALPN”), there has been a “partial neglect of Aristotle's thought on nomos in recent Anglo-American literature” (2). Duke is right: save for some specialist accounts (such as Ernest Weinrib's), the general sentiment has been that, as Donald R Kelley had put it as early as 1990, “[b]eyond [some influential] terminological prescriptions concerning [n]omos, Aristotle had little to say about law” (The Social Measure. Social Thought in the Western Legal Tradition 26; emphasis added). In tackling this lack of scholarly interest, Duke observes that an analysis of Aristotle's understanding of, and approach to, law is made difficult also by the fact that he “[did] not propound a systematic legal theory in the modern sense” (1; see also 16) – or what we, modern subjects, might identify as a “science of jurisprudence” (1). This is somehow puzzling if one considers that Aristotle's was “probably the most comprehensive system of thought ever devised” (R F Stalley, “Introduction”, Aristotle. Politics [1995] (2009), vii).

Duke's analysis is detailed and informative, and his prose pleasant. This is all the more important given that the term “nomos” is a multi-faced one which covers more than what we conventionally identify as “positive law” (4; see also T Zartaloudis, The Birth of Nomos (2019)). A familiarity with Aristotle's philosophy is beneficial, but not necessary, to appreciate Duke's discussion and arguments. Overall, the author does a very good job in navigating through the complex Aristotelian corpus from a jurisprudential point of view (see e.g. his treatment of Aristotle's metaphysical and epistemological elaborations, the understanding of which is simply inevitable if we are to fully grasp his views on law and politics: 9–10, 51, 67 and 111). Also worth mentioning is the author's ability to hinge his reconstruction of Aristotle's views on to a solid historical contextualisation of the political and societal dynamics within which they originated and developed (see e.g...

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