Eugene Garver's fine book Aristotle's “Politics”: Living Well and Living Together completes the trilogy of his interpretive analyses of Aristotle's Rhetoric, Nicomachean Ethics, and Politics. Garver is one of the few scholars to have presented such a comprehensive interpretation of the main works of Aristotle's practical philosophy. He thus brings to his study of the Politics impressive breadth regarding the moral and political questions at the center of Aristotle's thought. Well equipped to think through the difficult puzzles of the Politics, he strives in this work to examine an overarching issue: “the relations among (1) political philosophy, (2) the practical wisdom of the statesman, and (3) political action” (p. 1). Understanding these relations is the central aim of Garver's study of the Politics.

His study is arranged in six chapters covering the eight books of the Politics, each chapter framed by questions related to this aim. In a novel treatment of Aristotle's account of natural slavery in book 1, for example, Garver argues that this account is as much concerned with the problem of despotism as it is with the problem of slavery and slavishness. He presents a compelling case that, in seeing despotism as an ever-present threat in political life, Aristotle locates the source of this threat in the thumos (“spiritedness”) also necessary for citizenship, properly speaking. “To rule and be ruled in turn,” Aristotle's definition of distinctively political rule, requires citizens who are not slavish but have the spiritedness necessary to assert their claim to rule. Yet this same quality or “virtue” fuels the despotic desire to rule over others. In making this argument, Garver shows how Aristotle's thought offers penetrating insights into enduring political problems: “Slavishness and the desire to dominate others have not disappeared along with the abolition of slavery. Even if poleis aren't around anymore, the tension between Aristotle's claim that man is a political animal and his observation that relatively few people live politically is a problem that remains with us” (18). By Garver's account, political philosophy uncovers such fundamental problems, while practical wisdom deliberates about their meaning in a specific time and place.

In this connection, Garver offers a helpful, and bracing, gloss on a puzzling line in Aristotle's account of thumos: “For as to what some assert should be present in guardians, to be friendly to those they know and fierce to those they do not, and thumos is what makes them friendly” (1327b38–40, Garver's translation). If, in addition to intelligence, thumos is necessary for distinctively political relations, friendship, it seems, would be found only among those who live as political animals and possess the virtues of citizenship (35–36). Whether Garver is wholly correct in this regard, he clarifies here, and in the rest of his study, the profound challenge Aristotle presents for liberal thought given the powerful link in his thought between political life and human happiness: “Man is a political animal before he is an ethical animal or a happiness-seeking animal. Human rationality is more intimately connected to man's political nature than to either virtue or happiness” (48).

In considering the role of political philosophy regarding enduring human problems, on the one hand, and present policy, on the other hand, Garver shows that political action calls in diverse ways upon the resources of political philosophy and those of practical wisdom: Philosophic reasoning clarifies the fundamental distinctions in human affairs; the enduring distinction, for example, between the natural wholeness of the polis as the sphere of our perfection and its particular “constitution” or “regime” (politeia) informed by a specific notion of justice. On the basis of this reasoning, then, the “statesman” is able to act in particular circumstances, while judging what must be done with the proper specificity. Political judgment must be informed by philosophic reasoning, yet it is directed toward the means and ends appropriate to the circumstances. Regarding these circumstances, universal principles or the best ends may not apply. The best regime of books 7 and 8 of the Politics, for instance, is not everywhere or perhaps anywhere possible, yet it remains the case that the political community properly understood aims at our completion. Those who would judge and act well in any particular case, however, must attend to the admittedly contested principle of justice that constitutes their community. Indeed, Garver suggests that the contestation over different principles of justice opens up the space for political deliberation, as happens in book 3 of the Politics.

In a complex analysis of the applicability of the four causes (efficient, material, formal, and final) to Aristotle's treatment of the political association, Garver suggests that the “form” of this association is necessarily grounded in a specific notion of justice, the effect of which is to sever this association from its final cause and proper function, the good life and the completion of our nature (see 66–76). The disputes about justice that plague every political community cannot be resolved by a notion of the single best life; those who would understand the causes and effects of these disputes in political life must thereby be open to the diverse views they represent. Such an insight also leads Garver to make an illuminating comparison between the prevailing liberal view of justice and the state and that of Aristotle: “Our emphasis on moral diversity has led to a search for political unanimity and neutrality. Aristotle's emphasis on a single best life leads him, on the contrary, to a greater openness to political diversity than we see today” (66). In actual political life, the “right” may be prior to the “good,” as Garver suggests is even true of Aristotle's treatment of the regime in book 3. Yet this priority exists not because there is no one best life for human beings as such. Rather, the different constitutions result “from the underdetermination of political structure by political goods, including the ultimate political good, living well” (69).

In highlighting this aspect of the treatment of justice in book 3, Garver shows how Aristotle opens up the serious consideration of different claims of justice and so the various regimes they constitute. He shows why, especially with a view to stability and cautious reform, Aristotle is willing to give advice even to tyrants and to regimes that he labels “deviant.” More generally, Garver brings out the character of the argument in the Politics in any one part: the discussion of the natural polis of book 1, the treatment of the different kinds of regimes of books 3 through 6, or the account of the best regime in books 7 and 8. In each of these investigations, Aristotle pursues problems that are appropriate to the subject matter and that demand the different resources of political philosophy and practical wisdom.

Hence, Garver's effort to understand the relations among political philosophy, practical wisdom, and political action reveals the deeply dialectical character of Aristotle's investigation, treating this investigation as a series of arguments informed by different kinds of problems and shaped by their rhetorical context. In his second chapter, for example, Garver uncovers an argumentative thread grounded in the treatment of property that links Aristotle's disparate critiques of Plato's Republic and Laws, of the proposals of Hippodamus and Phaleas, and of the three actual regimes he highlights—Sparta, Crete, and Carthage. Just as negotiating and containing disputes over justice are key to political stability but are not the only concern of the statesman or political philosopher, so too the effort to establish the best possible property arrangements is partial when it is not oriented toward the good life at which the polis, by nature, aims. The ways in which political philosophy must attend to the possible orientations or aims of political association inform Garver's analysis of books 3 through 6: political philosophy must consider not only the best political community simply, but also the one best suited to the circumstances, the one most correct in accord with a regime's presupposition or “hypothesis,” and the one that is best possible for all. Garver's analysis culminates in Aristotle's best or ideal regime of books 7 and 8 and in his effort to understand “how this inquiry into the ideal, and how political philosophy in general, could be practical” (172).

Garver's interpretation of the Politics makes for dense reading, but his study captures the complexity of the relations among political philosophy, practical wisdom, and political action in Aristotle's own thought. The book concludes with an epilogue that focuses on what is central to this thought: the claim that human beings are political animals. In drawing out five different senses in which we can understand this claim, and especially by showing how the Politics itself informs enduring political questions, Garver thinks through the ways in which philosophy can be practical without being subsumed by practical ends. Garver's fine study is clearly the fruit of deep reflection on this very problem.