Aristotle’s Theory of Deviance and Contemporary Symbolic Interactionist Scholarship: Learning from the Past, Extending the Present, and Engaging the Future

Although his work has been largely overlooked by symbolic interactionists and other students of deviance, Aristotle (c384-322BCE) addresses community life, activity, agency, and persuasive interchange in ways that not only are remarkably consistent with contemporary symbolic interactionist approaches to deviance, but that also conceptually inform present day theories of deviance and provide valuable transhistorical comparison points for subsequent analysis. Following (1) a brief overview of an interactionist approach to the study of deviance, attention is given to (2) classical Greek conceptions of good and evil (especially as these are articulated by Plato) before turning more directly to (3) Aristotle’s notions of wrongdoing as this is reflected in his considerations of community, morality, agency, and culpability. While informed by Aristotle’s considerations of causality (as addressed in Physics and Metaphysics), this statement builds most centrally on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Rhetoric. Striving for a broader understanding of deviance as a humanly engaged feature of community life, the paper briefly compares Aristotle’s “theory of deviance” with Prus and Grills (2003) interactionist analysis of deviance. The paper (4) concludes with an assessment of the relative contributions of contemporary interactionist scholarship and Aristotle’s materials for the study of deviance as a community-engaged process.