With its crisscrossing borders and rival encampments, the landscape of contemporary political theory resembles in some respects more the geography of a perpetually disputed territory than a settled discipline of academic inquiry. Susan D. Collins approaches her study of Aristotle with an eye to the question of citizenship in hopes that this locus of timely concern and common investigation might serve as one place where combatants from contesting schools with competing approaches find it possible to come together for mutually productive exchange. Noting how the events of September 11 and its aftermath have prompted a kind of collective introspection around the question “what is a citizen?”—a matter very much at the heart of the epistēmē politikē exhibited in the Nicomachean Ethics and the Politics—Collins would turn the spotlight that has come to be directed at citizenship toward a consideration of what Aristotle can contribute to this broadening inquiry. In short, she seeks to recover the most important premodern engagement of this question in expectation that it can serve to enliven and even to reconfigure a conversation about contemporary citizenship that has been percolating in liberal political theory for at least two decades. Collins separates herself, however, from the cluster of contemporary theorists with whose work on citizenship she ably engages, finding the approaches of these different scholars too confined to the horizons of a modern politics within which all ultimately, if variously, locate themselves.

Collins begins her account of Aristotle and the Rediscovery of Citizenship with a survey of recent academic debates that have unsettled the underlying convictions to which liberal citizenship has long attached itself. She points, in the first instance, to the gathering clouds of epistemological uncertainty that encircle contemporary philosophy and to a corresponding loss of confidence in the promise of the Enlightenment to ground morality, and therein political life, on rational and nonteleological foundations. She contends, in turn, that the descending fortunes of Kant's rationalist ethics over the last half-century track to a significant extent the course of liberal theory—in particular, John Rawls's shifting presentation of his influential construction of “justice as fairness.” Kant placed the locus of moral conduct in the rational agent's self-determination, a move that enabled him to abandon altogether traditional formulations of nature as encompassing prescriptions for the human good, while yet arriving at intelligible standards for moral action. Rawls, in turn, built originally on Kantian premises, culling the rules of justice from procedures and the institutions they prescribe that likewise derive from reason's self-legislation. The dictates of right reason, famously brought to light by the device of “the original position,” thus supply the basic structure of the just society. In this way, moreover, Rawls delineates in the form of a proper constitutionalism his unflagging (if eventually recalibrated) commitment to “the priority of the right over the good.” Since liberty, according to Rawls, always gives rise to a plurality of views about the good, he makes “fairness,” defined in terms of strictures that command rational assent, the end of justice (11–13).

With agile concision, Collins traces the path followed by Rawls from an originally Kantian embrace of rational autonomy as constituting our essential humanity to subsequent attempts at reconfiguring the fundamental elements of his account of justice in order to deflect charges that he simply privileges a particular rationalist metaphysics while ignoring powerful post-Kantian critiques of the autonomy of reason. Collins likewise surveys the critical blows landed by Rawls's most notable antagonists. These include compelling objections to the final recasting of his theory into a pragmatic construction, drawn from a historically rooted “overlapping consensus” of ideals and convictions, that seeks to be a strictly “political, not metaphysical” formulation of liberal justice (19). Collins suggests that the matter of citizenship lies near the center of a now decades-long debate about Rawlsian justice. Indeed, one might further argue that, in tandem with Rawls's retreat from his Kantian commitments toward a merely political modus vivendi, a concern with citizenship has pressed ever more to the foreground of liberal theory. A persistent interrogation by critics like Michael Sandel of the axiom that the right is prior to the good—the ground upon which Rawls has always rested his attempt to fashion a public square for liberal society where justice might be sequestered from abiding disputes about the good—illustrates perhaps why.

As Collins explains, Sandel persuasively contends that sustaining “the right” (or liberal rights) is ultimately a set of moral claims, as historical episodes like the controversy over slavery make plain (25–27). And these claims are necessarily tied to ideas about how human beings should lead their lives, if not also to fundamental convictions about the content of our humanity. Prudence in the conduct of public affairs may counsel against inciting, whenever possible, competing views of the good. Nevertheless, a survey of those occasions on which liberal values have been seriously challenged (Islamic fundamentalism being only the latest instance) by those with rival answers concerning how human beings should politically order themselves unveils the fact that the defense of liberal rights always involves recourse to the human good. As Collins notes, however, Rawls would constrain discourse in the public square with strictures that enforce the priority of the right over the good by proscribing speech, at least about constitutional matters, touching on the idea of the good (19–20). Moreover, Rawls explains and justifies the need for such constraint ultimately in civic terms, that is, as behavior prescribed by “the duty of civility” (Justice As Fairness: A Restatement [Harvard University Press, 2001], 90). In the name of liberal tolerance for diverse views of the good, Rawls disallows the kind of discourse for which the Lincoln-Douglas debates have long served as a model. By the same token, the toleration and respect by which Rawls characterizes his ideal citizen is achieved only by a practice of dutifully refusing to take into account the views that matter most to those citizens (27–28). A version of the question directed at Rawls by Sandel cannot fail to occur to us: How can a society that frowns upon serious public engagement of the most important matters maintain the vitality of its public square? It appears that a robust civic life capable of nurturing the well-formed citizenry, which liberal-democratic institutions presume, may be fatally compromised by the imperatives of Rawls's own liberal theory.

Responding to Rawls's construction of the public square, or what he terms “public reason,” deliberative democrats counter that genuine respect for our fellow citizens necessitates engaging their formative convictions about how we ought to live. Communitarians, in their turn, highlight the myriad ways in which sites of comprehensive reflection like the family and the church, as well as informal associations in neighborhood organizations, fraternal clubs, and the like, shape the civic disposition, stoke the moral energy, and hone the panoply of skills that full participation in public life demands. Civic republicans (including Sandel) emphasize the cultivation of discrete virtues, a sense of duty toward the common good, and the historical and political knowledge that effective public engagement presupposes. In relating these things, Collins clearly relishes the historical irony she exposes within contemporary liberal theory, for which Aristotle's Politics, with its guiding interest in the task of fashioning citizens, has suddenly become more timely than Hobbes's Leviathan.

Rounding off her account of the opening provided for a fresh consideration of Aristotle is Collins's assessment of the dispute between Stephen Macedo and William Galston. Macedo advocates a “wholly self-aware liberalism” that would actively turn citizens' deepest convictions in directions congruent with liberal politics, while Galston upholds “expressive liberty” as the core tenet of modern liberalism (31–33). In contrast to Rawls, Galston is prepared to make a comprehensive defense of the liberal reverence for “the ability to live one's life in a manner that freely expresses one's deepest convictions about the sources of value and meaning” (33), arguing that it is required by the very nature of the moral universe we inhabit where a plurality of highest values and final goods coexist with mutual authority and in no self-evident order. Galston readily acknowledges that the liberal state imposes boundaries on the quest for a meaningful life, a point colorfully summed up in his pronouncement, “No Aztecs allowed” (Liberal Pluralism: The Implications of Value Pluralism for Political Theory and Practice [Cambridge University Press, 2002], 23). But if a commitment to immutable rights articulates a bounded space to which every liberal search for meaning must confine itself, the encompassing dimensions of the civic culture championed by Macedo trespass, Galston argues, on liberalism's defining commitment to the right of each individual to pursue the good life in accordance with the dictates of private conscience.

For her part, Collins pesters Galston with the kinds of questions one can easily imagine Aristotle posing about the idea of a moral universe composed of mutually exclusive highest goods and purposes, inasmuch as the lives by which these guiding values instantiate themselves often stand in irreducible tension with one another: “These lives themselves,” she notes, “ask us to choose among them.” And even if persuaded by Galston's account of moral pluralism, one must recognize that his challenge to Macedo points unavoidably to the task of mediating the implicit dispute between them concerning “what makes a human life worthwhile and good” (36). At the same time, Collins uses the exchange between Galston and Macedo to underscore the fact that every attempt to examine the issues of citizenship from within the horizons of contemporary liberal theory necessarily bases itself on liberalism's fundamental distinction between public and private. As a consequence, achieving clarity about liberalism's own comprehensive claims—whether expressed in terms of the relation between the right and the good, or of the connection between educating citizens and the individual pursuit of value and meaning in life—requires seeking out a vantage point from which we might bring into critical focus the liberal world itself. At the center of Collins's careful labor to recover Aristotle's teaching on citizenship lies the conviction that his writings on moral and political life offer an especially powerful means of attaining such clarity, precisely because his treatment of these matters does not begin from liberal premises and is not bound by modern horizons.

Broadly stated, this conviction articulates a not unfamiliar rationale for approaching debates about contemporary liberalism as opportunities for reconsidering the defining quarrel prosecuted by the early moderns against their predecessors that has long segregated the study of Aristotle from research focused on modern politics or the liberal state. A basic affinity with this approach to the questions currently shaping the enterprise of liberal theory, not to mention contemporary social science, spawns both my admiration for Collins's considerable achievement in this book as well as my discontent with aspects of that achievement. Collins succeeds in bringing into sharp focus a number of ways in which Aristotle's consideration of political life from outside the arena of modern politics helps to illuminate the issues of citizenship. The body of the book consists of five chapters that unfold, in the first instance (chs. 2 and 3), Aristotle's examination of the morally serious life with its concrete focus on the virtues and the common good—the two ends, as Collins identifies them, at which the law as educator aims. Collins proceeds to show how the trajectory of Aristotle's treatment of moral virtue in its ascent to justice highlights a tension between virtue's orientation towards the common good and its guardianship of the just life as such, that is, its status as the source of the human good. Next (chs. 4 and 5), she examines the way in which Aristotle's treatment of citizenship clarifies the necessity of obedience to the law, while setting out the grounds of a possible liberation from it. And finally (ch. 6), she explores the negotiation of this tension between a life regulated by law and one liberated from its all-embracing authority, which she suggests is citizenship in its most comprehensive form. As Collins reports it, Aristotle's moral and political thought winds its way toward an explication of citizenship as the consummately serious life. But her account falls short of fully explaining why Aristotle so often takes a circuitous path to this end. Why, for example, does Aristotle find it necessary to advance his teaching by drawing and then redrawing key distinctions, like that between rest and activity (116, 160)? Collins hints at an explanation when she attributes to Aristotle a desire to give “full due to the nobility and greatness of the political life” while he also “illuminates the tensions within it” (177), but she never marshals these hints into a proper explanation of the texts with which she is concerned and how one must read them. In the end, however, she sets before us a complex portrait of citizenship as a life both of action and contemplation that pays due regard to politics and the importance of good governance, while asserting its independence in pursuit of the human good and, in turn, of associations that stand outside of politics.

Aristotle's treatment of the political community as constituting, in every case, a distinct regime that necessarily plays an architectonic role in shaping its participants proves a key feature of the story that Collins wants to tell. She sums up her story at one point in this way: “Whether it does so well or badly, every political community educates its citizens” (40). Aristotle's conceptualization of the different polities as discrete regimes supplies the lens, as it were, by which citizenship becomes fully visible to us as an encompassing education. And it is with the aid of this lens that Aristotle enables us to see clearly and to think more concretely about contours of the civic terrain that liberalism persistently obscures. Collins repeatedly emphasizes that liberal theory's foundational commitment to separating “care of the soul” (to use the traditional language) from the appropriately public business of attending to the material requisites of a bodily existence keeps the idea of citizenship out of sharp, conceptual focus. But Collins's attention to Aristotle's conceptual framework in this regard leaves something to be desired. On the one hand, some might complain that she fails to draw out the full consequences of Aristotle's insight into the nature of political communities as regimes. It is in the guise of a regime that every polity is compelled to represent itself as the instantiation of an answer to the question of how human beings are meant to live, or, to put it in moral terms, as a just order and way of life. By extension, the pressures associated with its status as a particular regime impress upon each polity the need to fashion a citizenry in accordance with the conception of the just life that it would instantiate. In this way, Aristotle makes accessible the civic logic at work in those episodes of American history—for example, the suppression of Mormon polygamy—where outlying groups have been forced to conform to majoritarian norms in the name of good citizenship.

On the other hand, those active in the conversation that presently defines liberal theory (those Collins seems to be addressing in her opening chapter where she recommends the study of Aristotle's teaching on citizenship) may fault her for conflating the modern liberal state with the ancient polis, the basic unit of political organization to which Aristotle attaches his concept of the regime. It is worth recalling that Aristotle distinguishes between cities as regimes and other, looser forms of association, what he terms “alliances” for purposes of security and exchange. At the same time, he makes clear that, as a given regime, the city exists for the sake of “living well,” that is, as a social-political order structured from top to bottom around a conception of the good life (Politics, 1280a.31ff.). Is it possible, then, that Aristotle himself would not recognize the liberal state as a true regime, but rather, citing perhaps Hobbes, would identify it as a kind of alliance meant to serve the ends of security and material prosperity? If so, is it conceivable that Aristotle might even credit Rawls, who is adamant in rejecting the idea that the liberal state is a political community (Justice As Fairness, 198–200), for recognizing that a certain kind of procedural fairness is the most that any alliance can reasonably pursue?

Also relevant here is the fact that the concept of the regime first enters Aristotle's analysis in order to clarify the nature of the city. Who rules, and by what formulation of the just life, ultimately determines what kind of polity a given geographical entity (whether Athens or Sparta) turns out to be. Is the liberal state appropriately conceived as a single order, more or less united under a common set of values and ideals, or is it at best a plurality of regimes in perpetual competition with each other? If the latter, does it follow that Aristotle's analysis of politics applies most meaningfully to sub-units of the liberal state, to what Galston represents as that plurality of groups and associations which organically define themselves in terms of a conception of the good, and which typically function as the locus of meaning for inhabitants of the modern state? In short, the assumption that Aristotle's analysis of political community, based on the concept of the regime, can be readily applied to the liberal state calls for a defense, even on Aristotle's own account. At a minimum, therefore, a fuller consideration is required than Collins provides of just how the liberal state fits the parameters by which Aristotle designates a regime. Nevertheless, Collins's book is an exciting example of the rich insights available to those willing to call on Aristotle for help in sorting out and thinking through the issues of citizenship. At the same time, it stands as a bold and commendable attempt at bridging the divide that too often segregates the historical study of political philosophy from its contemporary practice.