Social Sciences in China (Chinese Edition)

No.10, 2017

 

Between Family and State: The Family-State Relationship in Plato and Aristotle and Its Implications

(Abstract)

 

Xiao Ying

 

Kinship is not only a source of natural emotions and family ties; it also influences large-scale social organization such as the formation and operation of the state. The thought of Plato and Aristotle constitutes one of the main sources of Western thought and society. Examination of the relevant discussion of these issues in the two philosophers contributes to deepening Chinese research on the logical consequences of kinship in social formation. In Plato and Aristotle’s ideas of the relationship of family and state, kinship was seen as a source of the universal natural emotion of familial or fraternal affection. Their inherent distinction between differences between kin and strangers and the near and far have attracted attention at the social level. As this natural emotion impeded the construction of universal fraternal relations in the city state and was the source of the opposition of virtue and desire, the public and the private, and the city state and the family, the philosophers attempted to abolish or restrict its role at the institutional level in order to prevent it from damaging the goals and operation of the city state. This proposition originated in the theoretical assumption of a “dual concept of the natural,” an assumption that exerted a profound influence on the modern Western relationship between the family and the state.