Of what use is a Republic of Letters?
Aristotle’s Politics has been rightly identified as the founding text of political science. Together with the Ethics, it comprises what he calls “the philosophy concerning human affairs,”[1] his practical rather than theoretical philosophy. It is practical in two senses: ethics and politics examine not the unchanging principles of nature but human actions, and they rightly culminate not only in knowledge of truths, but also in right action that enacts those truths.
Our study of Aristotle’s practical philosophy is not yet complete if and when we have grasped his arguments and compared them with the alternatives. Rather, we ought to test them by application to our own political context, and where they are found adequate, seek to implement them in our own lives as citizens. We ought to descend into the very midst of contemporary political disputes, and see what light Aristotle’s Politics can shed on them.
This essay attempts to do so with a special focus on perhaps Aristotle’s most fundamental and straightforward principle for analyzing regimes: that correct regimes seek the shared interests of the whole political community, whereas deviant regimes seek the exclusive advantage of the ruling class, that is, a mere part. Aristotle would not balk at, but would simply take for granted, the contention that the unavoidable starting-point in American political debate must be putting these United States of America first, prioritizing that which advantages America, and securing the national interest of Americans.
Ancient Premises
To be sure, the Politics contains both programmatic statements and perplexing nuance aplenty, so it is far from clear how certain important aspects of his thought are to be applied. Consider three examples.
Slavery? There are natural masters and natural slaves. The former stand in relation to the latter as the soul rules over the body, but the conventional legal categories of master and slave do not come close to corresponding to this natural division.[2] Nature seems to fail in its attempt to distinguish natural masters from natural slaves; and in any case, there is “nothing great or dignified” about the science of mastery.[3] There is sufficient ambiguity in his treatment of the issue to discount any simplistic interpretation of Aristotle as a blithe, much less enthusiastic, apologist for slavery.
Sex? A husband’s rule over his wife is natural, because the male is “by nature more expert at leading,” whereas in the female “the deliberative element . . . lacks authority.”[4] Yet the husband rules his wife not in a kingly or despotic manner, but in a “political” fashion—the kind of rule that is fitting for equals. The husband must therefore “seek to establish differences in external appearance, forms of address, and prerogatives, as in the story Amasis told about the footpan. A man always stands thus in relation to the female.” Now, anyone checking Aristotle’s reference here to Herodotus’ Histories will be forced to wonder what kind of compliment Aristotle meant to pay his own sex.[5]
Likewise, his quotation of Ajax’s dictum to Tekmessa—“to a woman silence is an ornament”—jumps off the page, yes, but is similarly perplexing when put in context to its original in Sophocles’ Ajax.[6] Aristotle is no egalitarian and never entertains the possibility of female political participation. But neither does he provide as simple and straightforward a case for patriarchy as we might have expected; he seems to suggest a more complicated relationship between the sexes.
Ethnicity? Foreigners are used to consolidate regime-change and are employed by tyrants as their bodyguards and companions.[7] Diversity, far from being our strength, is a source of factional conflict—“until a cooperative spirit develops,” which requires not only time but also a shared project, which itself presupposes common assent to said project.[8] A polis (city) requires a certain degree of ethnic heterogeneity, but is neither equivalent nor reducible to an ethnos (nation).[9] A city proper must be founded, whereas nations seem to grow over time out of large kinship networks.[10] In sum, cities are firmly founded when they enjoy the broad ethnic commonality that engenders trust in a common project and avoids various downsides of diversity.
Moreover, this is especially so when their people are of a “good stock.” The Greeks, standing at a mean between the free but unruly Europeans and the cultured but slavish Asians, are the population best suited for good government; yet the Carthaginians, climatically but not ethnically similar to the Greeks, are among the only three peoples worth discussing for their exemplary real-world regimes.[11]
Ancient Citizenship
It is while discussing Carthage that Aristotle names some distinguishing marks of good government: “It is a sign of a well-ordered regime if the people voluntarily acquiesce in the arrangement of the regime, and if there has never been factional conflict worth mentioning, or a tyrant.”[12]
These are “signs” that a good order has been achieved, rather than criteria that must be checked off a list; unlike us, Aristotle refuses to reduce his regime-analysis to principles of legitimacy such as the consent of the governed. Indeed, in certain situations, rule against the consent of the governed may be the best that can be achieved for that population, as when a vicious people provoke their neighbors into a just war of conquest. But this scenario is not desirable in itself, for either party involved.
So what kind of regime produces this good order in a community? Aristotle describes six basic regimes, based on quantitative and qualitative principles. The “authoritative element” in a city is one, or few, or many; and these regimes are either “correct,” because they are ruled “with a view to the common advantage,” or they are “deviations,” because they are ruled “with a view to the private advantage of the one or the few or the multitude.”[13] Hence, there are three basic correct regimes—kingship, aristocracy, and polity—contrasted with their deviations, which are best understood as turnings-away from what they ought to be—tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy.
Aristotle allows for considerable nuance in his quantitative analysis: authority is exercised through a great many offices, and almost every regime is some kind of blend between multiple regime-types. Similarly, it might be said that a regime is partially “correct,” insofar as a set of offices supervising certain aspects of political life do so for the “common advantage,” and it is partially “deviant,” insofar as other offices govern in corrupt and self-serving ways. Last but not least, Aristotle elaborates accounts not only of the “best regime simply” and the “best practicable regime,” but also of the best regime “on the basis of a presupposition”:[14] given a certain population, certain circumstances, certain historical and geographical factors, what is the best regime for this community?
Nevertheless, Aristotle never abandons his qualitative principle. The correctness of a regime depends upon its governing for the advantage of the whole political community. “Those regimes that look to the common advantage are correct regimes according to what is unqualifiedly just,” he notes, “while those which look only to the advantage of the rulers are errant, and are all deviations from the correct regimes; for they involve mastery, but the city is a community of free persons.”[15] In other words, the criterion for evaluating political regimes remains a strict binary. What this will look like may vary considerably based on circumstance. But in every case, we ought to look to whether or not the actually existing regime actually “looks to the common advantage” or “only to the advantage of the rulers.”
Indeed, Aristotle only rarely uses the phrase “common good” (to koinon agathon),[16] and where he does it seems interchangeable with “common advantage” (to koinē sumpheron). Similarly, ordinary citizens and statesmen rarely use the term “common good” today, but much of what that term comes to mean in the Western tradition is captured in our more familiar phrases: “the public interest,” “the national interest,” “what’s good for the country.”
A correct regime governs for the advantage of its own city as a whole—that is, “a certain multitude of citizens” defined as a “community in living well both of households and families for the sake of a complete and self-sufficient life.”[17] Regimes that fail to govern in this way, whatever they might say about themselves, are “errant” or deviant. They govern for the advantage of a part of the community—for the rulers themselves, their families, their favored client-groups—rather than the whole community. They thereby attack the very principle of the polis as a community.
Aristotle notes that there is no contradiction between the common advantage and the true advantage of each part. In a well-ordered city (as in a well-ordered household), everyone benefits when the authoritative element rules well, not least by sharing in the goods that are truly common to the society; hence, he identifies the “errant” regimes as “those which look only to the advantage of the rulers,”[18] which secure the private advantage of part of the community to the exclusion of the common advantage, and thus to the detriment of the private advantages of the non-ruling parts.
Though Aristotle does not reduce the legitimacy of a regime to the principle of consent, he supplies pragmatic as well as principled arguments for citizens ruling and being ruled in turn.[19] According to Aristotle’s ethical-political philosophy (which thinkers like Tocqueville would characterize as “aristocratic” rather than “democratic”), this participation in rule is itself a good: it provides occasions for the citizens to enjoy the “happiness” that is characteristic of “the active life,” exercising prudence and the moral virtues in “noble actions.”[20] Other ways of life might afford plenty of occasions for the exercise of the virtues in private life, in a small circle of friends, or in business enterprises, and the like; but these venues for virtue pale in comparison to politics, the architectonic practice that makes possible all others.
The nobility (that is, moral excellence) of a citizen exercising political authority is largely due to the fact that his speeches and deeds are rightly aimed at securing and advancing the advantage of those under his care—his fellow citizens and his country. Citizenship itself is a kind of friendship, as contemporary advocates of “civility” never tire of reminding us. Justice is not fully reducible to “helping friends and harming enemies”; but no good polity, or sane account of justice (including those advanced by Socrates in Plato’s Republic), disregards the goodness and the necessity of doing so. In a society where this does not occur, and where a ruling class disregards this precept all the while aggrandizing itself, there are no fellow citizens, only subjects under a shared tyranny.
Modern Questions
What happens when we put this account into the parlance of our times?
For Aristotle, any correct American administration would enact “America First” policies; any American regime failing to do so would, by definition, be a deviant one. Just so, any correct French regime would enact “France First” policies; any correct Brazilian regime would enact “Brazil First” policies. This is the only basis for true patriotism, good citizenship, and excellent statesmanship. Giving priority to the common advantage of one’s own polity is the principle for correct rule; the national interest should be simply assumed in public life as the starting-point for those partisan disputes which are coeval with politics.
Despite the connotations of the phrase “America First” in the 1940s, the fact that it is now controversial, or simply unusual, for a politician to claim to unabashedly promote the good of his own country, remains a terrible indictment of the ideological corruption of our time. This corruption is far more fundamental than any partisan disagreement, because it attacks the basic roots of politics, confusing the primary terms of political analysis and undercutting the categorical possibility of loyal service to one’s nation. Almost everyone implicitly acknowledges this common-sense truth when they attempt to persuade their fellow citizens of their preferred policy prescriptions. No good rhetorician would neglect to argue that adopting his policies would be beneficial. Admitting that your policies would, in fact, harm your country is the quickest way to lose a debate.
What exactly it looks like to put America First in any area is up for debate. Will stricter tariffs—in 1825, 1925, or 2025—strengthen or weaken the American people and the American nation? Will a loosening of immigration law, or a deliberate policy of lax enforcement of existing immigration law, or the active importation of foreigners against the constitutionally-expressed consent of the American people, be good or bad for America? Will a restriction, or maintenance, or expansion of existing levels of legal immigration help us or harm us? Is continuing to fight Russia in Ukraine to the advantage, or rather the disadvantage, of these United States?
In every case, the advantage of our own country is the proper reference. Why should anyone professing any other purpose get a hearing from a self-respecting people assembled to consider their political future? As Aristotle describes in his Rhetoric, deliberative rhetoric is rightly concerned with the future (“What should we do?”), and looks primarily to the interests of its audience—that is, the advantage of the citizens assembled to consider “their Safety and Happiness” as we continually try “to secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our posterity.”
Advantage here does not exclude justice—the focus of forensic rhetoric—or nobility—the focus of ceremonial rhetoric—but takes rightful precedence over them. Justice assumes advantage (being good is good for us), and nobility is manifest in its earnest and effective pursuit: “the good of the individual by himself is certainly desirable enough, but that of a nation and of cities is nobler and more divine.”[21]
However, the main point is that there is no third option in politics: politicians, policies, and whole regimes are either correct, because they tend toward the common good, or incorrect, because they secure the interest of a part to the detriment of the whole. To be sure, regimes may be “mixed,” in one of two senses. They may look to different regime-principles to define different offices (adopting oligarchic principles here, and democratic principles there); or, those in authority may imperfectly or inconsistently pursue the common interest (doing so only in certain areas or occasions). But this muddiness in analyzing real regimes does not come from some new goal to be pursued by legitimate authority.
Rather than speaking forthrightly of how a certain policy or politician will advance the common good—that is, will “put America first” or “secure the national interest”—we sometimes hear claims that such-and-such a policy is desirable because it will “benefit humanity” or “advance human rights” or “uphold free-market principles” or “defend global freedom” or “maintain the international order.” If he heard such things, Aristotle would conclude one of two things. Intentionally or not, either such claims serve as fig-leafs for oligarchy or some other deviant regime; or they are misleadingly abstract ways to describe policies that properly serve the common advantage of a flesh-and-blood political community. In either case, we should follow Aristotle’s example and cut to the chase: demand from our government that it serve our national interest, and from our political commentators that they speak to us of this, or of nothing at all.
Modern Belonging
But don’t we—and shouldn’t we—have higher loyalties than political duty? What about truth? Or Truth Himself? Instead of saying we are “America First,” should we say we are a “Republic of Letters First”? What about the other societies we belong to, from the family and local community to the Church? All these things have their due; nonetheless all depend upon the political, without which no republic of letters can be kept.
That said, Aristotle’s principle is concerned, narrowly, with the evaluation of political communities. A well-ordered regime respects the many manifestations of our rational and social nature; and good citizenship, in whatever imperfect form we find ourselves, must recognize this. Aristotle begins his Politics not with the polis, much less with the individual in a mythical state of nature, but with the fundamental partnerships that humans form: male and female for the sake of reproduction, and ruling and ruled for the sake of preservation. Together, these relations make a household, “a community constituted by nature for the needs of daily life”; and “the first community arising from the union of several households and for the sake of nondaily needs is the village.”[22]
Just as ethics is done not for mere living but living well, these more basic societies of household and village not only propagate and preserve, but humanize and civilize their members to flourish. Yet they cannot disregard their basic function: to perpetuate and protect life. Even as Aristotle affirms the “priority by nature” of the polis to the household and to each individual,[23] by beginning with the naturalness of the household and the village, he prepares the ground for what the Catholic tradition calls subsidiarity. The natural priority of the polis does not justify, much less require, the abolition of our more fundamental societies (indeed, Aristotle takes Plato’s Republic to task on this very point).[24] Rather, “preservation of the community” is the “task” of the citizen, and “the regime is this community”;[25] but only a disordered regime would violate the lower societies of household and village.
For example, as a citizen, then, a Briton should put the common good of Great Britain first, that is, before the exclusionary advantages of a part of Great Britain or the British regime; and he should hold the British government to this standard. Insofar as the British government fails to respect the nations (England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland) contained within it, or the local communities contained within them, or the other societies (including families) that make up the polity as a whole, it is a deviant regime. It should go without saying that, insofar as the British authorities sacrifice their most vulnerable citizens in order to invaders preserve power and ideological fancies of the ruling elite, it is a tyranny.
Such is merely the minimal threshold for any well-ordered regime—the basis for the perfection of our nature. Aristotle argues that we are naturally political because we are naturally rational; but nowhere does he reduce our rationality to political concerns. We are political animals because our reason enables us to perceive and deliberate about “the advantageous and the harmful, and hence also the just and the unjust,” and “community in these things is what makes a household and a city.”[26] A Briton who willfully ignores, or fails to resist, the violence visited upon his society is failing as a rational and political animal—failing to perceive, and act upon, what is advantageous and just for his fellow countrymen—failing, in other words, as a man qua man.
But we are not merely political animals, because we are not merely practically reasoning animals. We reason not only about the moral and political matters that are “up to us,” but also about a wide range of necessary and speculative truths found in mathematics and the sciences, in metaphysics and theology. Precisely because “the human being is not the best of things in the cosmos,” prudence and politics are not the “most serious” of our intellectual virtues and pursuits. Rather, the life dedicated to cultivating and exercising the scientific intellectual virtues in the contemplative activity of philosophy, is even higher—indeed, it is a divine life—than the noble life dedicated to moral deeds.[27]
Such a life depends upon political order of some kind. But it also includes, for anyone aspiring to comprehensive wisdom, an understanding of the enduring principles of human nature, and thus, our political nature. The supremacy of the contemplative life over the active life in no way abolishes, but rather assumes and affirms, the good of politics.
For the Kingdom and the Power
But Christians may notice something amiss in the pagan account. Taken to its extreme, the quasi-divine contemplative life of Aristotle’s philosopher is an exclusive and elitist rival to and parody of the transpolitical destiny to which Christ has called all of us. Though unknown to classical antiquity before the Incarnation, this revelation entailed a revolution, providentially prepared for by universalizing trends in classical philosophy and in the Roman conquest of the Mediterranean.
“The idea which men had of the duties of the citizen were modified,” as Fustel de Coulanges writes as he reflects on the Christian culmination of these trends. “The first duty no longer consisted in giving one’s time, one’s strength, one’s life to the state." For “politics and war were no longer the whole of man; all the virtues were no longer comprised in patriotism, for the soul no longer had a country.” Indeed, “man felt that he had other obligations besides that of living and dying for the city.”[28]
That said, Coulanges somewhat overstates his case. Precisely because “politics and war were no longer the whole of man” (as Aristotle also recognized), Christians are able to be more perfect patriots. As the Church has long affirmed, Christians can and must be good citizens here on earth precisely because their ultimate citizenship is in Heaven. We are commanded not only to love God but also our neighbors as ourselves, to see Christ in them and act as Christ toward them. We find ready occasions for doing so in our families, our neighborhoods, our communities, and, yes, our nations—our earthly fatherlands. As St. Peter concisely declares: “Honor all men. Love the brotherhood. Fear God. Honor the emperor.”[29]
We even find this truth affirmed in one of the early Church’s most striking documents, the Epistle to Diognetus. Though its most memorable passages emphasize the apparently antipolitical character of the Christian community—“For [Christians], any foreign country is a motherland, and any motherland is a foreign country”[30]—the Catholic Church, at least, has noticed the author’s insistence that Christians “play their full role as citizens.”[31]
Moreover, when the author turns to giving Diognetus advice on how to live as a Christian, he says that “knowledge of the Father must be your first lesson.” For “if you love Him, you will become an imitator of His goodness.” Any “man should be an imitator of God; he can, since God has willed it so,” but his happiness is not to be found in dominating one’s fellows, or in wanting to have more than his weaker brethren, or in possessing riches and riding rough-shod over his inferiors,” because “such things are wholly alien to His greatness.” Yet, the author concludes, “if a man will shoulder his neighbor’s burden” and “be ready to supply another’s need from his own abundance,” then “by sharing the blessings he has received from God with those who are in want, he himself becomes a god to those who receive his bounty—such a man is indeed an imitator of God.”[32]
Even as the relation between Christians and the world is like “that of a soul to the body,” the Epistle author does not counsel abandoning the world; on the contrary, “though they are confined within the world as in a dungeon, it is Christians who hold the world together.”[33]. His practical advice to Diognetus is: embrace the life of an exemplary citizen, indeed, of an aristocrat benevolently ruling his neighbors.
Christians when entrusted with authority ought to imitate the way God the Father provides for, guides, and rules Creation and the creatures under His care. “Such is the high post of duty in which God has placed them, and it is their moral duty not to abandon it,” the author says about Christians who are persecuted by the world.[34] But the same could be said about Christians who exercise the ordinary duties of citizens as much as the extraordinary duties of statesmen.
Our Republic of Letters
As for scholars who speak of citizenship in a “Republic of Letters,” they should consider what those letters teach. The very best of those letters—the Great Books, for lack of a better term—teach that we are naturally political. Even those great minds who fail to understand our political nature recognize our obligations as citizens, that is, to our own political community. Thinkers as opposed as Aristotle and Hobbes recognize the need for education to support citizenship; the shocking differences between their methods for doing so merely indicates the strengths and weaknesses in their overall philosophies, rather than some supposed error about the basic truth—that education is always political.
Plato’s Socrates insists that he is a good citizen—the best citizen—in stinging his fellow Athenians like a gadfly stings a drowsy horse; he does not oppose membership in a “Republic of Letters” to his citizenship as an Athenian, but justifies his philosophizing as serving the Athenian advantage. To be sure, it would degrade our citizenship in the “Republic of Letters,” as well as our real political citizenship, if we attempted to subordinate the former to the latter. Yet even Socrates—who described a philosophical afterlife conversing with demigods, heroes, and poets as a veritable metaphysical republic of letters—did not flee his poisoned city, but justified his choice to stay and die as a duty to Athens.
Good deliberation and effective action on behalf of one’s country require perception of the truth. As Cicero, John Adams, and many other great scholar-statesmen recognized, scholars do not cease to be citizens by virtue of their scholarship, and teachers are involved in shaping citizens whether they like it or not; they would do well to attempt to harmonize their pursuits as academics with their duties as citizens. I can think of some who have tried.
In sum: pursuing the common advantage is necessary to the just political order. This goal is good in itself, so it is unsurprising that it is both intuitively grasped by ordinary citizens in their political discourse, and argued for by the most impressive thinkers in our tradition. Indeed, at their best, both the philosophic and Christian traditions affirm, rather than abolish or seek to overturn, this natural truth. Aristotle would agree that the indispensable starting-point for every political deliberation is securing the national interest. It is a sign of increasing sanity, of liberation from the ideological burdens under which the Western world has been laboring for generations, that we can once again speak frankly of prioritizing the national interest—not of vague progressive bromides such as Hope or Change or being With Her; nor of economistic pieties such as Increasing GDP Über Alles; but simply of Making America Great Again—as a baseline priority for politics.
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Robert Bartlett and Susan Collins (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 10.9. ↩︎
Aristotle, Politics (2nd ed.), trans. Carnes Lord (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 1.5.8; 1.6.9. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations are from this edition. ↩︎
Aristotle, Politics, 1.5.10; 1.7.4. ↩︎
Aristotle, Politics, 1.12.1; 1.13.7. ↩︎
Aristotle, Politics, 1.12.2. Amasis is a commoner who becomes king of Egypt and is initially held in “no esteem, because he was formerly a man of the people and of no very distinguished house.” Amasis takes a golden footpan, “in which formerly the Egyptians used to vomit and piss and wash their feet,” and turns it into “an image of a god and set it up at the most suitable part of the city”; the Egyptians venerate it whenever they pass by. Amasis then reveals what he has done, comparing himself to the footpan, and urges the Egyptians to treat him similarly: “for if he had been formerly a man of the people, he was now and in the present their king, and so he bade them honor him and respect him. That was how Amasis conciliated the Egyptians to the justice of their slavery to himself.” Herodotus, The History, trans. David Grene (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 2.172–173. ↩︎
Aristotle, Politics, 1.13.11; Sophocles, Ajax, 293. In the play, Ajax has been driven mad by Athena, and is going to slaughter the cattle captured by the Achaians, thinking they are not beasts but men who have dishonored him; the phrase quoted by Aristotle are Ajax’s words to Tekmessa as she pleads with Ajax as he goes out to slaughter the herds. Ajax subsequently commits suicide out of shame at his actions. ↩︎
Aristotle, Politics, 3.2.3; 5.10.10; 5.11.14. ↩︎
Aristotle, Politics, 5.3.11. ↩︎
Aristotle, Politics, 1.2.5; 7.4.11. ↩︎
Aristotle, Politics, 1.2.15-16; 1.2.6-7 ↩︎
Aristotle, Politics, 7.7; 2.11. ↩︎
Aristotle, Politics, 2.11.1. ↩︎
Aristotle, Politics, 3.7.2. ↩︎
Aristotle, Politics, 4.1.3; cf. bk. 7; 4.11; 4.12–13. ↩︎
Aristotle, Politics, 3.6.3. ↩︎
E.g., Aristotle Politics, 3.13.20 (1284b5). ↩︎
Aristotle, Politics, 3.1.2; 3.9.14. ↩︎
Aristotle, Politics, 3.6.3. ↩︎
Aristotle, Politics, 7.14.2–3; 3.13.12. ↩︎
Aristotle, Ethics, 10.7–8; Politics 7.1–3; ibid, 3.9.14 ↩︎
Aristotle, Ethics, 1.2. ↩︎
Aristotle, Politics, 1.2.2, 1.2.5. ↩︎
Aristotle, Politics, 1.2.12. ↩︎
Aristotle, Politics, 2.2–5. ↩︎
Aristotle, Politics, 3.4.3. ↩︎
Aristotle, Politics, 1.2.11–12. ↩︎
Aristotle, Ethics, 6.7; 10.8. ↩︎
Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City (Garden City, New York: Doubleday Anchor Books), Bk. 5, Ch. 3, p. 395. ↩︎
1 Peter 2:17, RSV. ↩︎
Anonymous, Epistle to Diognetus, in Early Christian Writings, trans. Maxwell Staniforth (New York: Penguin Classics, 1987), §5. ↩︎
Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, On the Participation of Christians in Politics Life, §1, quoting Epistle to Diognetus, §5; cf. Catechism of the Catholic Church, §2240. ↩︎
Epistle to Diognetus, §10. ↩︎
Epistle to Diognetus, §6. ↩︎
Epistle to Diognetus, §6. ↩︎
Pavlos Papadopoulos is associate professor of humanities at Wyoming Catholic College and senior fellow at the Albert Magnus Institute. His writing has appeared in The American Conservative, The American Mind, City Journal, and Law and Liberty. *More of his writing can be found on the Substack, “The Papadopoulos Post.” He invites you to follow him on X.
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