One of the most common and tiresome contemporary academic pathologies is a felt obligation to talk about a classic text by locating oneself in relation to current controversies. While the notes show his awareness of the secondary literature, especially in English, Thomas Pangle is not guilty of this modern vice. His book should be judged in relation to the Politics, not other commentators, because by design it really does not stand alongside competing interpretations. The “teaching” he uncovers is not what Aristotle says but what he means, a meaning revealed indirectly and only to the most thoughtful. After an Introduction laying out what he takes to be “The Rhetorical Strategy Governing Aristotle’s Teaching,” to which I will return, Pangle devotes the five chapters of the book to Aristotle’s presentation in the Politics, for the most part treating it not only book by book but chapter by chapter.

“Book One: The Distinctiveness and Supremacy of the Political” begins by informing us that the beginning assertion that politics is the architectonic community not only “implicitly subordinates private philosophic association” but also that “of more obvious moment is the tacit subordination of religious association, public as well as private” (p. 25). Chapter 2, “Book Two: Previous Conceptions of the Best Regime” tells us that “book two as a whole may be not inaptly characterized as a covert, deep bow to the practical shrewdness and wisdom of Plato” (p. 92).

Chapter 3, “Book Three: The Debate over Justice among the Regimes,” takes us through Aristotle’s series of aporiai, sticking to Aristotle’s argument as it unfolds rather than the implicit, tacit, and covert meanings he turns us toward. The aporiai point to “a basic contradiction in the very heart of what we mean by political virtue and nobility,” the contradiction between the political life as a supreme good and as the “sacrifice of one’s own true good in devotion to the good of others” (p. 130). There might be sacrifice in Plato’s Republic, but not in the Politics. Aristotle’s criterion for a correct as opposed to corrupt constitution is that it aims at the common good, rather than the good of the rulers. He does not say that correct constitutions aim at the good of the ruled, let alone the good of the ruled to the detriment of the rulers. That syncretism of Plato and Aristotle aside,

“Aristotle implies that a thoroughly self-conscious meditation on the contradictory character of our primary enchantment with political rule leads eventually to our disenchantment—and thereby to our liberation to the truth that the genuinely virtuous existence, of human fulfillment and flourishing, is to be found in pursuits belonging to a private life that views political participation and rule as necessary interruptions” (p. 131).

But this is so only if political philosophy cannot be content with articulating permanent problems and places of argument, but must lead beyond contradictions to some settled resolution and a life without tension. There is no reason to think that Aristotle has such ambitions.

Chapter 4, “Books Four through Six: Ameliorating Actual Regimes” notes a nice shift from Book III: “In book 3 we wrestled successively with some thirty perplexities (aporiai); Aristotle practically identified ‘political philosophy’—in his one explicit use of the term—as wrestling with ‘perplexity.’ In books four through six, ‘philosophy’ is never mentioned as, as Newman remarks with some wonder, ‘aporiai well-nigh disappear.’ Linked to this is the fact that reference to ‘nature’ diminishes dramatically; the word ‘nature’ appeared eighteen times in book 3; it appears only six times in book 4, four times in book 5, and twice in book 6” (p. 168). In considering Aristotle’s analogy between the kinds of democracy and oligarchy and kinds of animals, which becomes prominent as his uses of the term nature disappear, Pangle notes that “while we may speak of ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ animal species, we do not speak of any species as the ‘perversions’ or ‘deviant,’ ‘wholly incorrect’ forms of other species that are their ‘correct’ versions” (p. 173). He similarly challenges the biological analogies when discussing the ideal regime of Books VII and VIII: “In the composite that is the city, even under the best regime, there is a collapse or blurring of the basic distinction, found in other natural composites, between preconditions and true parts” (p. 245). These are important qualifications of Aristotle’s analogies between polis and organism, and I wish they had been developed further.

Finally in Chapter 5, “Books Seven and Eight: The Simply Best Republic,” Pangle’s theses that Aristotle’s real teaching consists in his showing the superiority of the contemplative life, and that he consistently occludes the importance of religion in the state, are most emphatic. He concludes: “Certainly … the most important results of our mentor’s thought experiment have been conveyed with sufficient clarity. We have been shown with some precision how and why the city at its republican best, how civic virtue, is essentially or by nature limited in its openness to the virtues of the life of the mind, the life of philosophy” (p. 267).

Pangle examines the movement of the Politics to find Aristotle’s “teaching.” He proposes in the Introduction to treat Aristotle’s Politics as a work of rhetoric, but the index includes no entry for either “rhetoric” or “Aristotle’s Rhetoric,” and his first reference to the Rhetoric gives an impossible page number (1300a3ff at 269n8). Pangle’s “didactic rhetoric” is not Aristotelian rhetoric but rather a rhetoric of signaling and teaching by indirection. This choice leads to a neglect of the rhetoric of presenting reasons. In Cicero’s terms, Pangle sees “our teacher of rhetoric” and “our exemplary orator” (p. 140) as engaging in a rhetoric of moving, not teaching, prods (pp. 4, 74, 248) instead of proofs.

To take just one example that can stand for the whole, Pangle says that “what renders Aristotle’s criticism of Plato’s Republic most obviously tongue-in-cheek is that he completely overlooks (see esp. 1274b9-15) the dialogue’s notorious leitmotif: governance by philosopher-kings, and the unfolding elaboration of an education of such governors” (p. 72). But Politics II begins by saying that the examination of the best polis should start by asking what things citizens should share and hold in common and which things they should possessed individually. If Aristotle limits his consideration of the Republic to that question, there is no need to hypothesize him speaking tongue in cheek or teaching through indirection to account for an anomaly that is not there.

Aristotle says nothing in the Politics about his intended audience, and so Pangle builds his picture from Aristotle’s few comments in the Ethics. (One could instead declare this to be another of Aristotle’s significant silences, but Pangle does not choose to take it as significant.) Since ethics and politics are part of a single science, this seems reasonable. But I wonder. After all, Politics II records the opinions of people, such as Plato and Hippodamus, who devised ideal constitutions but were not themselves political rulers, while the Ethics has regard only for the opinions of phronomoi, suggesting a different and more independent role for political philosophy in the Politics than the Ethics. Pangle, instead, thinks that Aristotle is “unobtrusively setting before his alert readers another figure—‘the knower of the political art’—who, in contrast to the serious ruler, ‘must necessarily be a man of practical wisdom.’” To infer from this that “the true politikos or ‘statesman’ is not at all necessarily an actual ruler” (p. 115) seems a larger stretch, made seemingly plausible by his references to Plato and Xenophon, the intellectual’s dream that intellectual authority can become political authority. The initial idea of “didactic rhetoric” invites this conflation of philosophical and political authority. That conflation is the putative hidden meaning of the Politics.

In this way Pangle uncovers a hidden teaching in Aristotle’s Politics that is as far as possible from what the Politics actually says. For Pangle, Aristotle’s message is double: first, that the private life of philosophy is the best life, and, second, that the guidance of philosophers is the salvation of politics itself. No wonder such guidance has to be secret. Pangle’s account of what Aristotle means is at maximal distance from what Aristotle says because the Politics articulates the autonomy of practical reason, carving out for philosophy a role in that articulation, but allowing the judgments of the phronimos and statesman ultimate authority over practical decisions about what to do and about how best to live. Looking for the hidden role of philosophy effaces the differences between the Ethics and the Politics, and the differences, within the Politics, between the role of political philosophy in articulating, but not settling, the permanent disputes between democratic and oligarchic justice, arithmetic and geometric equality in Book III, and its role in adjudicating between the conflicting claims of the political and theoretical lives in Book VII. The philosopher, like the pambasileus whose importance Pangle rates far above Aristotle’s brief questioning of what to do if such a creature could ever appear, allows us to rise above the contradictions, tensions, and problems of political life. Aristotle’s secret teaching is plausible only if one thinks that practical problems are indications of a defect in thinking, rather than an accurate diagnosis of a world in which we can live well by living together.