II. Aristotle's Social Science

Abstract

HILE SOCIAL SCIENCE is a distinctly modern enterprise, the systematic study of human affairs is not. My discussion of Aristotle focuses on what he calls politike, or the science of the polis. ' Politike is clearly the equivalent of social science with respect to the subject matter it embraces; Aristotle uses the term throughout the Politics and the Ethics to refer to the consideration of topics which we would assign to political science, anthropology, sociology, psychology, and economics. It may, however, be doubted whether the method or approach to the study of human things suggested by politike is in any way equivalent to the current implications of social science.2 Part of my argument will be an attempt to show that politike, for Aristotle, was indeed a science, and even a kind of natural science. The surface plausibility of this reading is indicated by the way Aristotle uses the word itself: while politike most frequently, in both Plato and Aristotle, stands by itself as a noun, its ordinary meaning flows from its adjectival function, modifying nouns like techne (skill or craft, e.g., Politics, 1288b10-1289a25), episteme (science, e.g., Ethics, 1094a24-29), and philosophia (philosophy, e.g., Politics, 1282b23). The question, for Aristotle, appears to be not whether social science is possible, but rather just what kind of a science politike is. In answering this question, I will adopt Aristotle's procedure of beginning with contemporary reputable opinions (the endoxa) about social science, and go on to present Aristotle's own conception as different from and superior to those currently available. In Aristotle's time, debate over the meaning of social science was shaped by the

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