The Anatomy of Courage in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics Lorraine Smith Pangle Abstract: This paper analyzes Aristotle’ s discussion of courage, the first and paradigmatic virtue in his account of moral virtue, as the perfection of human beings’ natures as both political and rational. It identifies unrecognized complexities in his definition of courage as “a mean with respect to fear and confidence,” in his subtle analysis of political courage, and especially in what he reveals to be the conflict-riddled reasons people find courage noble and good. While working to moderate the excessive fieriness of traditional heroism and to render citizens’ courage more sober and moderate, Aristotle shows why political courage can in fact never be made perfectly rational, pointing to a key limit to human rationality altogether. Courage is a quality that every political community needs, but not one that modern liberalism, with its rationalist principles of self-interest rightly under- stood, is well equipped to promote or even fully to understand. In times of grave national crisis, citizens and leaders of advanced liberal democracies have shown a great capacity for dedication and sacrifice. But increasingly our aim is to have peaceful societies in which all problems are resolved by reasoned discussion, both domestically and internationally. Most European nations today show little appetite for military spending or engagements, even to defend the freedom of their nearest neighbors. In the United States a gulf has opened between the spirit of society at large and that of the military, with its fierceness and its code of honor that both seem like throwbacks to an earlier, less liberal and less rational form of civil society. American military recruits now come disproportionately from a few states and from a segment of the population that is at once more violence prone, more patriotic, and more religious than society at large and especially than the educated elites. The choice to serve in the military scarcely fits into social scientists’ paradigms of rational behavior and is often understood mainly as a response to limited job opportunities. Americans have a similarly uncomfortable relationship to our policemen, occasionally revering them as Lorraine Smith Pangle is Professor of Government and Co-Director of the Thomas Jefferson Center, University of Texas at Austin, 1 University Station A 1800, Austin, TX (lsp226@gov.utexas.edu). The Review of Politics 80 (2018), 569–590. © University of Notre Dame doi:10.1017/S0034670518000475 569 https://doi.org/10.1017/S0034670518000475 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core . IP address: 72.182.56.83, on 23 Sep 2018 at 23:37:38, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms .