GUIDE TO THE PHILOSOPHY 1938 - 1947.pdf - Rare Books at ...

ARISTOTLE'S MORALS AND POLITICS 91
The Good Citizen in the Bad State. But let us sup-
of the
pose that the State is a bad one; is it still the duty
citizens to revere its constitution and obey its laws? Hie
question is a difficult one, and we shall meet it again in
the course of our study of 1
political theory, for one of die
fundamental objections to any form of authoritarian
State, to any State, that is to say, in which the mass of
the people is deprived of a share in the government,
is that, whatever may be its merits or demerits when it
happens to be a good State, when it is a bad one, its bad*
ness is rendered worse by the difficulty of changing it.
For, being an authoritarian State, it must from its very
nature exact obedience and induce loyalty; and it must
exact obedience and induce loyalty to those elements
in it which are bad no less than to those which are good.
Aristotle's answer to the question, which ^is logically derived
from his general position, reveals one of the flaws in that
position. In an ideal State the education which is required
to make a man into a goftd citizen, that is, into one who
reveres the constitution and obeys the laws, will also, he
contends, make him into a good man. That this contention
is justified will, I think, become clear when we have
considered Aristotle's ethical theory and seen how closely
it is interwoven with his political theory. But if the constitution
is bad, then, Aristotle admits, die kind of educa-
tion which will be required to cause a man to be loyal
to it may be very far indeed from making him into a good
man. Nevertheless, it should, he held, be given and it
should, apparently, still be compulsory and universal.
Even when the State is bad and exists for ignoble ends, it
is, we are told, none the less the business of education to
ensure that citizens are imbued by "the spirit of the
in other
constitution". The zeal for public service is,
words, to be engendered even in the interests of evil
purposes.* Whether this is a statement of what occurs,
1 See Chapter XIV, pp. 555-558- . , L1
1 The question obviously
What, for example, according to the British Tory, is the duty
has .considerable contemporary interest.
of the