Aristotle and the Politics of Utility

• In Event: Entanglements of Economics and Politics

Abstract

In today’s dominant approaches to utility, utility denotes the satisfaction of individuals’ needs as “preferences” that principally takes place through exchange in the market economy in a context of scarce resources. Utility, then, connotes an activity and a sphere that are understood to be essentially distinct and separate from politics. There is, however, another way to configure utility and politics. In his ethical texts, Aristotle wrote that utility friendship—whose function is the exchange of useful goods—is “political friendship.” In this paper, I expand on this notion by drawing on Aristotle’s etiology of the polis, summed up in his famous claim, “the polis came into existence for the sake of the bare needs of life but continued in existence for the sake of the good life.” By bringing these passages together, I argue that in Aristotle there is what I call a “politics of expansive utility” that is grounded in abundance, not scarcity, and is crucial for understanding how political activity can take place at all. This is because the exchange of useful goods is entangled in a historical and ongoing process whereby exchangers’ usefulness is also evaluated. In this process, individuals’ abundant potential capacities (dynameis) are contested, refined and translated into better forms of exchange that enable leisure time. Through this process and in the resulting leisure time, humans’ special capacity for politics—understood as refined forms of speech and action in community—is developed and so the politics of expansive utility becomes the condition for human politics tout court that is itself a condition for the common good and happiness (eudaimonia). As such, I argue that Aristotle deviates from contemporary theories of utility because subjective valuation moves beyond the exchange of objects—which appears to displace politics—and confronts the question of specifically human utility—as both usefulness for the common good and happiness (eudaimonia)—that can inform a political theory of radical democracy.

Author

• Tristan Bradshaw, Northwestern University