Politics

Introduction

The Politics is Aristotle's major treatise on political community, composed during his second Athenian period at the Lyceum (335–323 BCE). It is the foundational text of Western political theory in the empirical-comparative mode: where Plato's Republic constructs an ideal city from first principles, the Politics analyzes the actual political constitutions known to Aristotle (reportedly 158 of them, of which only the Constitution of the Athenians survives intact) and develops its theory through engagement with the data of political practice.

The central thesis is that the political community (the polis) is the natural completion of human life. Humans are political animals (zōion politikon) by nature; full human flourishing requires participation in political life; the right form of political organization is therefore a precondition for eudaimonia. The Politics is the working out of what the right form would be — across the variety of human conditions, regime types, and historical circumstances.

Form, length, date, language

The Politics is a treatise in eight books, totaling approximately 90,000 words in Greek. Like most of the surviving Aristotelian corpus, it consists of lecture notes rather than a polished work for publication; the style is compressed and the organization within books is sometimes irregular. The composition is conventionally placed in Aristotle's second Athenian period at the Lyceum, between 335 and 323 BCE. The original language is Attic Greek.

The ordering of the eight books has been a continuous scholarly puzzle. The traditional manuscript order places the books on the household and the discussion of slavery and economics (I), the critique of previous theories (II), and the analysis of citizenship (III) first; the books on the ideal state (VII–VIII) last. Many scholars have argued for re-ordering on the basis of internal evidence. The current most-cited scholarly opinion follows the traditional order while noting its irregularities.

Why it was written

The Politics is the political-philosophical companion to the Nicomachean Ethics. The Ethics analyzes the individual good life and notes at its close that the full account of human good requires a political treatment, because individuals are necessarily embedded in political communities and the character of those communities is foundational to whether individuals can flourish. The Politics is that promised political treatment.

The specific intellectual context is the dispute with the Platonic political tradition. Plato in the Republic had constructed the just city from the analogy of the just soul; Aristotle rejects the analogy as too tight and develops a different methodology. The political community is not the soul writ large; it is its own kind of thing, with its own structure and its own variability, and the study of it must begin empirically.

Structure and argument

Book I. The household (oikos) is the foundational unit of political community. Aristotle analyzes the relations within the household (husband-wife, parent-child, master-slave) and the place of property and wealth-getting in the natural order. The defense of natural slavery (1254a17–1255a3) is among the most-contested passages in the Western philosophical canon; modern scholarship treats it both as a historical artifact of Aristotle's culture and as a position with arguments that demand serious refutation rather than dismissal.

Book II. Critical review of earlier political proposals, especially Plato's Republic and Laws. Aristotle's central objection to the Republic is that the proposed unity of the city through community of women, children, and property destroys the very plurality that makes a city a city rather than a household.

Book III. The analysis of citizenship and constitutional types. A citizen is one who participates in deliberation and judgment; the kinds of regime are classified by who participates and in whose interest the regime governs. The six-fold typology: rule by one (kingship if for the common good, tyranny if for the ruler's), rule by few (aristocracy / oligarchy), rule by many (polity / democracy). The classification has shaped Western political theory for 2,400 years.

Books IV–VI. The middle books develop the empirical political science: the actual range of regimes; the causes of regime change and revolution; the strategies for preserving particular regime types; the political role of the middle class. Aristotle's recommendation of polity (a mixed regime balancing oligarchic and democratic elements, with a strong middle class) is one of the most influential pieces of comparative political analysis in the tradition.

Books VII–VIII. The ideal political community. The proper end of political life is the flourishing of citizens, which requires sufficient external conditions (population, territory, education), proper constitutional structure, and an education system organized around the development of virtue. Book VIII focuses on the education of the young, especially the role of music in moral formation.

Key passages

• 1252a1–1253a39 — the opening on the political community as natural; man is by nature a political animal.
• 1254a17–1255a3 — the defense of natural slavery.
• 1261a10–1264b25 — the critique of Plato's Republic.
• 1278b8–1279b10 — the typology of constitutions.
• 1295a25–1296a21 — the doctrine of polity and the political role of the middle class.
• 1323a14–1326a25 — the conditions for the ideal city.
• 1337a11–1342b34 — the books on education.

Reception history

The Politics shaped the entire subsequent tradition of Western political thought. Roman political theory absorbed it through Cicero. The Islamic philosophical tradition (Al-Farabi's Virtuous City, Averroes's commentary on Plato's Republic) developed Aristotelian political theory within Islamic political contexts. The Latin West recovered the Politics in the thirteenth century through William of Moerbeke's translation; Aquinas wrote an extensive commentary that integrated Aristotelian political theory with Christian theology and shaped medieval and early modern Catholic political thought.

The Renaissance recovery of Greek brought new translations and commentaries (Leonardo Bruni, Pier Vettori). The early modern political tradition (Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, Rousseau) developed substantially in dialogue with the Aristotelian framework, sometimes by extending it (Montesquieu's classification of regimes is recognizably Aristotelian), sometimes by rejecting it (Hobbes's denial that humans are naturally political).

The modern reception has been more variable. The nineteenth century treated the Politics primarily as an object of historical interest. The twentieth-century revival of Aristotelianism, especially through Hannah Arendt (The Human Condition, 1958), Alasdair MacIntyre (After Virtue, 1981; Dependent Rational Animals, 1999), Martha Nussbaum (Aristotelian Social Democracy), and the broader communitarian critique of liberalism in the 1980s and 1990s, restored the Politics to serious contemporary engagement.

Contemporary engagement

Major recent scholarly work includes the Clarendon Aristotle Series volumes on individual books, Fred Miller's Nature, Justice, and Rights in Aristotle's Politics (1995), C.D.C. Reeve's translation (Hackett, 2017), the Cambridge Companion to Aristotle's Politics (Marguerite Deslauriers and Pierre Destrée, eds., 2013), and Malcolm Schofield's continuing essays. The standard English translations are those of Carnes Lord (Chicago), Reeve (Hackett), and the Loeb (H. Rackham). Active scholarly debates concern the interpretation of natural slavery (apologetic, critical, or historical), the relation between the Politics and the Ethics, the proper ordering of the eight books, the contemporary applicability of Aristotelian political categories, and the relation between Aristotle's politics and modern democratic theory.

Further reading

• Aristotle — the author
• Aristotelianism — the tradition
• Nicomachean Ethics — the ethical treatise the Politics completes
• Republic — the Platonic political work the Politics engages and rejects
• Justice — the central political concept
• Eudaimonia — the end the political community serves

The foundational empirical-comparative treatment of political community in the Western tradition.