The Political Regime

Overview

About eighty pages, from the same tenth-century Baghdad philosopher who wrote The Attainment of Happiness and On the Intellect, dated like most of his work only approximately, to around 940. It circulates under two titles: The Political Regime, referring to its second and longer part, and The Principles of Beings, referring to its first. Both names are accurate, because the treatise genuinely is two things joined together on purpose: a compressed account of metaphysics and cosmology, followed by a political theory Al-Farabi presents as flowing directly out of that cosmology.

This structure is the treatise’s signature move and distinguishes it from the more purely political Attainment of Happiness. Where that shorter work states the conclusion that the philosopher, prince, legislator and prophet are one and the same figure, The Political Regime shows the reasoning that leads there, starting from the top of reality itself and working systematically downward until it reaches the organization of the well-run city.

Charles Butterworth’s 2015 translation was the first complete rendering of the whole treatise into English, which tells you something about how technical and resistant to easy summary it is; earlier scholarship often engaged mainly with excerpts or with Al-Farabi’s related and more famous Virtuous City, which covers similar ground in a somewhat different arrangement.

The argument

The six ranks of being. The treatise opens not with politics but with metaphysics, laying out a hierarchy of causes that will supply the model for everything political that follows.

At the summit is the First Cause, one, simple, the source from which everything else that exists ultimately derives, corresponding in Al-Farabi’s system to what philosophical tradition, following Aristotle read through a Neoplatonic lens, identifies with God as the necessarily existent being on which all contingent existence depends.

Beneath the First Cause come the secondary causes, a series of separate immaterial intelligences, each one thinking itself and thereby giving rise to a further intelligence and to the motion of one of the celestial spheres, until the sequence reaches the sphere nearest the earth. Associated with this last sphere is the Active Intellect, the same figure familiar from Al-Farabi’s treatise On the Intellect, whose role here is to govern and actualize the sublunary world, the region of change, generation and corruption in which human beings live.

Below the Active Intellect come soul, form and matter, the principles that combine to produce the particular changeable things of ordinary experience, human beings among them. Al-Farabi is careful to trace how each lower rank depends on and is ordered by the one above it, and this dependency, running in one direction from a single unified source down through many derivative and increasingly multiple and material levels, is exactly the structure he will transpose onto political life.

Why human beings need cities. The treatise’s political section begins from a claim about human nature rather than from convention or contract. No individual human being, Al-Farabi argues, is equipped by nature to achieve on his own all of the perfections, material, moral and intellectual, that a complete human life requires. Association with others is therefore not an artificial arrangement imposed on naturally solitary creatures but a natural necessity following directly from what a human being is.

Associations come in degrees of completeness. The most complete is the union of all the inhabited parts of the earth under a single order; less complete but still adequate is the nation, sharing language and customs across a substantial territory; further down is the city, which Al-Farabi treats as the smallest association capable of genuine self-sufficiency and therefore the smallest political unit worth taking seriously in its own right, with the village, the neighborhood, the street and the household ranked below it as merely partial, dependent associations.

The virtuous city and its ruler. A city achieves the good only when its inhabitants cooperate, each contributing according to natural disposition and trained capacity, toward the shared end of happiness for the whole population, rather than each pursuing private advantage in isolation. This cooperation requires ordering, and ordering requires a ruler whose relationship to the city mirrors the First Cause’s relationship to the whole of existence: one, at the summit, the source from which the right functioning of everything beneath flows outward and downward, with no rank above the ruler to answer to within the city itself.

Al-Farabi lists the conditions such a ruler must meet, extensive and demanding: bodily soundness fit for the tasks of rule, a naturally excellent understanding and memory, intelligence and eloquence, love of learning and truth, freedom from excessive desire for food, drink or sensual pleasure, love of honesty and hatred of falsehood, greatness of soul and love of honor consistent with virtue, indifference to wealth for its own sake, natural love of justice and hatred of oppression, firmness combined with flexibility of character, and resolve without stubbornness. Where all these conditions are found together in one person, that person is fit to be the supreme ruler; where they cannot be found in a single individual, Al-Farabi allows that a smaller group jointly possessing them might govern in combination, though he treats this as a lesser arrangement than rule by the one fully qualified individual.

The classification of failed cities. The treatise’s most frequently cited section catalogs the ways cities go wrong, and the classification is precise enough that later readers, medieval and modern, have kept finding contemporary regimes to place within it.

The ignorant city is one whose inhabitants have simply never grasped true happiness at all, and instead have adopted one of several false substitutes as their collective end: the necessary city, aiming only at bare subsistence; the vile or base city, aiming at wealth and material acquisition; the city of depravity or turpitude, aiming at sensual pleasure; the timocratic city, aiming at honor and public esteem; the tyrannical city, aiming at domination and conquest over others; and the democratic city, aiming at unconstrained freedom for each citizen to pursue whatever he wishes, which Al-Farabi treats not as an ideal but as a city with essentially no shared end at all, since its citizens pursue as many different goals as there are individuals.

The wicked or immoral city is a harsher case: its inhabitants once knew or could have known true happiness and the correct beliefs about it, but their actions and desires are nonetheless directed toward the same false ends as the ignorant city, so that wickedness here consists in a gap between correct belief and corrupt practice.

The errant city is misled at the source: it holds false opinions about the divine and about true happiness because a leader falsely claimed prophetic revelation or divine sanction for a mistaken teaching, so that the whole community’s corruption traces back to being deceived at the founding by someone Al-Farabi treats as either self-deceived or a deliberate deceiver.

How to read it

Read the metaphysical opening seriously rather than skimming past it to get to the politics. The whole argumentative force of the treatise depends on the parallel between cosmic order and political order, and that parallel only lands if you have actually followed the six ranks of being first.

Trace the ruler’s twelve conditions against the First Cause’s position at the summit of being. Al-Farabi is not merely listing admirable personal qualities; he is specifying what it would take for one human being to occupy, within a city, something like the structural role the First Cause occupies within the cosmos as a whole.

Spend real time with the taxonomy of ignorant cities. Butterworth’s translation lays it out clearly, and it is worth pausing on each type, the necessary city, the vile city, the city of turpitude, the timocratic city, the tyrannical city, the so-called democratic city, and asking which real political arrangements, ancient or contemporary, fit each category and how well.

Read this treatise alongside Al-Farabi’s Attainment of Happiness. That shorter work states the conclusion, that philosopher, prince, legislator and prophet name one reality, without showing the metaphysical derivation; this treatise supplies the derivation the other work assumes.

Compare Plato’s Republic throughout. Al-Farabi’s virtuous city, ruled by someone who has grasped ultimate truth and organizes the whole community around it, is a direct descendant of Plato’s philosopher-king, transposed into a framework of Neoplatonic cosmology and Islamic prophetology that Plato’s Athens had no equivalent for.

Questions it raises

• Does grounding political order in cosmic order strengthen the case for a single supreme ruler, or does it smuggle in an analogy that political life does not actually need?
• Al-Farabi’s so-called democratic city, where citizens pursue as many different ends as there are individuals, is treated as a failure rather than an ideal. What is he assuming about what a city is for?
• Is the distinction between the ignorant city, which never knew the truth, and the wicked city, which knew it and abandoned it, a meaningful moral distinction or merely a difference in how blame is assigned?
• Can a group of people jointly possess the twelve conditions Al-Farabi requires of a single ruler, or does dividing them among several people change what the conditions were meant to secure?
• If association is natural and necessary for human perfection, what obligations does that impose on someone who prefers solitude?
• Which contemporary political arrangements best fit Al-Farabi’s categories of ignorant, wicked and errant cities, and does forcing them into his scheme illuminate them or distort them?