- Length
- 320 pagesWalzer, Al-Farabi on the Perfect State, Oxford, 1985 - Arabic with facing translation
- Reading
- HardPresupposes texts it does not explain; a guide helps
- Availability
- Specialist pressIn print from an academic publisher, priced accordingly
The Virtuous City
The book that made Greek political philosophy available in Arabic by solving the problem nobody in Athens had: what to do when the community already has a revealed law. Al-Farabi's answer - that the prophet and the philosopher understand the same thing, one in images and one in demonstrations - shaped Islamic and Jewish philosophy for five hundred years.
- Date
- c. 940
- Author
- al-Farabi
- Region
- Baghdad, Damascus and Aleppo
- Language
- Arabic
- 1985 English, Richard Walzer Arabic with facing translation and commentary; in copyright Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Reply — Answers a named earlier work
- Form
- Treatise
- Method
- Demonstration — Proof from premises the opponent already grants
- Transmission
- Translated — Reached its later readers in another language
- Standing
- Historical — Read for what it shows about its moment
- Years back to what it answers
- 1315 years
The foundation of political philosophy in Arabic, and the model every later Islamic philosopher worked from or against.
What the book says
A book that begins with the structure of the universe and ends with a taxonomy of failed societies, on the argument that these are the same subject. The first part describes a hierarchy descending from a First Cause that is one, immaterial and necessary, through a series of intellects associated with the heavenly spheres, down to the lowest of them, which governs the sublunary world and is the source of human thought. The middle part turns to human beings: the soul and its faculties, how thinking happens when the active intellect illuminates the mind, and what perfection would consist in. Only then does the city appear, and it appears as the completion of the same order. A human being cannot reach perfection alone; a city is the smallest unit in which it is possible; and the virtuous city is one organised like a healthy body, each part performing its function under a head. That head is a philosopher who is also a prophet - someone in whom the intellect is perfected and whose imagination can render what he understands in images the rest can follow, which is what revelation is. The last part catalogues the alternatives: ignorant cities that pursue wealth, honour, pleasure or domination, wicked cities that know better, and cities that have changed for the worse.
What it argues
That the order of the cosmos, the order of the soul and the order of a good society are one order seen at three scales, and that a city is therefore not a convenience but the condition of human completion. The distinctive doctrine is about revelation. Philosophical demonstration and prophetic imagery are two presentations of the same truths, differing in mode rather than in content: the philosopher grasps by proof what the prophet renders in images, and religion is the popular presentation of philosophy rather than its rival. This is why the ruler must be both. It also implies a hierarchy of understanding within the city, with most citizens holding in imagery what a few hold in argument.
What it answered
Plato's Republic, at thirteen centuries' distance and through Arabic translation. What al-Farabi keeps is the rule of knowledge and the analogy between soul and city; what he supplies is the missing piece for a monotheistic community, an account of how a revealed law and a philosophical demonstration can both be true. He is also answering the theologians of his own time, who held that reason must be subordinated to revelation, by proposing an arrangement in which neither is subordinated because they are not in competition.
How it argues
By construction, from the top down, and without visible argument for the starting point. The First Cause is described rather than proved; what follows is a deduction of consequences. This is a deliberate order: the reader is being shown a single structure and where they stand in it, and the political conclusions are meant to be seen as following from the metaphysics rather than as recommendations. The catalogue of defective cities at the end is the most vivid part and the most imitated.
The moment
Tenth-century Baghdad and the courts of Syria, at the height of the translation movement that had put Greek philosophy into Arabic. Al-Farabi worked in a milieu where Aristotle's logic was studied technically and where Plato was known largely through summaries and through the Neoplatonic tradition - which is why the cosmology in the first half is emanationist and looks nothing like anything in Plato's own text. He was known as the Second Teacher, Aristotle being the first.
How it travelled
Into Hebrew and Latin, and into other people's systems. Ibn Sina built on al-Farabi's account of the intellects and prophecy and largely displaced him; Ibn Rushd took up the political programme and applied it to the Republic directly in a commentary that survives only in Hebrew; Maimonides told a correspondent that al-Farabi's works on logic were the ones to study. In Latin Europe he was known but less influential than his successors. Modern interest revived in the twentieth century, substantially through Leo Strauss, whose reading of al-Farabi as writing esoterically for two audiences at once has itself been much argued over.
The strongest objection
That the solution to the religion problem is a hierarchy in disguise. If prophecy is philosophy in images for people who cannot follow demonstrations, then the believers are being told a true thing in a form they cannot check, by rulers who know better - and the arrangement offers them no way of discovering that they are in that position. Al-Ghazali later attacked the whole philosophical programme from one side, and the theologians attacked it from the other; but the sharpest form of the objection is the democratic one, which is available to a modern reader and was not much available then: a city whose unity depends on most of its citizens holding the truth in a form they cannot examine has not solved the problem of authority but relocated it.
Why read it
For the last part, which is short and remarkable - a taxonomy of the ways a society goes wrong, written a thousand years ago, in which the city of domination and the city that has changed for the worse are described with unnerving accuracy. Read the cosmology knowing it is Neoplatonic scaffolding rather than the argument's load-bearing part.
- First printed
- 1895
- First in English
- 1985
- Digitised
- Partial
Several related works cover the same ground, including a companion on the political regime, and the relations between them are not fully settled. Walzer's 1985 edition prints the Arabic with a translation and commentary.
There is no public-domain English version. Walzer's is the standard and is in copyright.
Where it stands
Historical as a system and live as a problem. Nobody holds the cosmology, but the question the book exists to answer - how a philosophical account of the good life relates to a revealed one held by the same community - is not a medieval question, and the answer given here is still the most economical one anybody has proposed.
On quoting this book
The Arabic is public domain; the only full English translation is modern and in copyright. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
The relation between this work and al-Farabi's other political writings is unsettled, and whether they represent one position or a development is argued. The Straussian reading - that he wrote to be understood differently by different readers, concealing a view that philosophy is superior to religion - has been enormously influential and is rejected by many specialists as reading later concerns into the text. How much of the Platonism is Plato and how much is late Greek summary is difficult to determine, since al-Farabi did not read Greek and the Republic was not available in Arabic in full.