The Bee and the Sovereign (II)

Abstract

What is a political animal? Centuries of political theory have responded to the implications of Aristotle’s assertion that the human is a “political animal in a greater measure than any bee or any gregarious animal” while more recent decades witness a great unfolding of the politics of the animal. If we are to take Aristotle’s Politics as a foundational text, the fracture point between the politics of animals and the political ani- mal occurs not only in the definition of what is or is not human but in the capacity to form a polity. Aristotle, not surprisingly, prioritizes humans over other creatures in a gesture that depends on the enumera- tion of capacities humans alone purportedly possess, especially speech (as opposed to “mere voice [which] can indicate pain and pleasure”), which has the power to “indicate the advantageous and the harmful, and therefore also the right and the wrong.”¹ Human speech thus indexes moral judgment, “the special property of man in distinction from the other animals ... it is partnership in these things that makes a household and a city state.” ² Moments later, however, another dimen- sion of the political appears. “Thus also,” Aristotle insists: