Die griechische Zeitschrift cogito veröffentlichte in ihrer Ausgabe 5 (applied ethics) ein Interview mit Martha Nussbaum, in dem diese einige interessante Bemerkungen über die politischen Verflechtungen des Neoaristotelismus fallen lässt:

Well, there are many different ways in which a kind of quasi-Aristotelian theory of the good has entered into what we might call liberal political theory; after all it didn't start with me. It started long ago, for example in England with T. H. Green and Ernest Barker, who were perfectionist socialists. They used the Aristotelian notion of human functioning to argue in favour of compulsory education. They were an important and a clear precedent for my position. In fact, I didn't read them until much later, but anyway I now see that they were important and a precedent; their form of liberalism was very comprehensive, it was closer to something like Joseph Raz's view today. I would call that a form of comprehensive liberalism, because a notion of autonomy is used across the board to talk about lives that are well lived and so on. I think the political form of liberalism, in which we don't advocate a comprehensive doctrine of autonomy but rather certain ethical principles for the political realm, is more defensible in a world in which, for example, we have religions that don't think autonomy is a particularly great good. We don't show respect for them if we say that only autonomous lives are worthwhile. But as to the political form of liberalism, my own view is that we can defend it best if we use the idea of capabilities as our political goal, rather than thinking of the good in terms of income and wealth alone. (...)

So yes, I do think that these ideas about human functioning and human flourishing are actually quite widespread. And surely were widespread before I was born: a student has told me that the Social Democratic Party in Japan was founded by a pupil of Barker who brought Aristotelian ideas of human functioning to Japan and used them as the basis for a social democratic conception. I actually believe that Sen's idea of capability had such an origin, because Indians studied in Oxford, and Green and Barker taught many generations of leaders from the developing world. And I think the kind of humanist Marxism in the various Indian Marxist parties in which Sen grew up was also influenced by a kind of Marxian version of Aristotelian idea – which are very prominent, for example, in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. Wherever the ideas come from, I think the important thing is now that they do enrich the debate within liberalism and I think they should be defended in a way that's still recognizably liberal. By that I mean with an emphasis on the idea that each person is the ultimate beneficiary, not large groups of people, not even families, but each person seen as an equal of every other person. And I also think that it's a hallmark of liberalism that ideas of choice and freedom are really very, very important. Of course I think one has to stress that we don't have choice if people are just left to their own devices. The state has to act positively to create the conditions for choice. I think the libertarian position is actually quite incoherent, because there is no such thing as absence of state action. Even to defend contract and property rights, and the rule of law itself, the state must take positive action.

Dass der Marxismus aristotelische Anleihen als ethisches Intuitionen gebraucht, ist bekannt, auch wenn ich die Kritik für zutreffend halte, daß er in der Tradition des Liberalismus (angelsächsisch gesprochen) gefangen blieb. Bemerkenswert finde ich den Hinweis, dass über die linksliberalen Theoretiker Thomas Hill Green und Sir Ernest Barker der neoaristolische Bogen wieder zu Marx bzw. zur Nussbaumschen Sozialdemokratie führte. (Nussbaum geht u.a. in diesem Aufsatz auf die aristotelische Seite von T.H. Green ein). Nussbaum selbst musste nie (trotz ihrer Ablehnung von dem, was wir jetzt Neoliberalismus nennen) in Gegensatz zu Rawls liberaler Theoriekonzeption gesetzt werden, ihre Fähigkeitenliste konnte immer auch als Präzisierung für Rawls Ausgangsbasis verstanden werden.

(via: Eurozine)