When L. published the first edition of his translation of Aristotle's Politics in 1984 he regretted that the text was ‘less studied than might seem appropriate for a work of its unchallenged eminence’ (Aristotle's Politics [1984], p. 8). This has changed considerably over the last three decades. Important books have been written by (among others) K. Cherry, M. Davis, J. Frank, R. Kraut, F. Miller, M. Nichols, S. Salkever, A. Saxonhouse and B. Yack. Journal articles proliferate, as do edited collections (a Cambridge Companion is the most recent). Collectively, these efforts represent a renewed and continuing appreciation of the Politics not simply as a seminal historical text but as a challenge to and resource for modern and postmodern political theory.
Current scholarship on the Politics has been enhanced further by the publication of two important books, the second edition of L.'s translation and a sustained interpretation of the work by P. Both authors are political scientists, but their mastery of Greek (P. has translated Plato's Laws) and their synoptic knowledge of classical history and the Western philosophical tradition make them important conversation partners with classicists, historians, philosophers and students of Western thought generally. These books can be read profitably together; those encountering P.'s study could do no better than to have L.'s translation to hand.
L.'s initial intent was to offer English readers as close to a literal translation of the Politics as possible, avoiding the distorting influence of historical or philosophical frameworks that settled interpretations of Aristotle's meaning in advance. These sorts of difficulties afflicted most of the English translations widely available at the time. The common practice of translating polis as ‘state’ presumed and encouraged an understanding of politics that was more Hegelian than Aristotelian. Reading the Politics as tracking a gradual evolution of Aristotelian political science from Platonic origin to post-Platonic revision slammed the door on efforts to treat the text as a coherent whole. Aristotle's spare language led translators such as E. Barker to supply extended additions, elaborations and reconstructions that threatened to substitute the translator for Aristotle. L.'s singular contribution enabled English readers to encounter the Politics on its own terms.
The translation offered in the second edition retains the virtues of the first while making the English presentation more accessible and cleaner. Changes in the choices of English terms are generally helpful. The only cavil is that the anthrōpos who is a zoon politikon (1.2) is still presented as ‘man’, not ‘human being’. This mutes the complicated trajectory of Aristotle's presentation of virtue as it moves from the excellent citizen (politēs) to the excellent man (anēr) in 3.4 to the excellent human being (anthrōpos) in 7.2. In general, however, L.'s philological care (concerning alternative manuscript readings or ambiguities in the Greek) is again fully evident throughout, and he has expanded notes that give the modern reader access to the historical events and cultural resources that would have been well known to Aristotle's audience. Presenting the notes as page footnotes rather than as endnotes, a small but significant change in format, allows more sustained and continuous engagement with the text's argument and rhetoric.
L. has also taken advantage of the rich scholarship produced on the Politics in the years between the two editions. His notes within the text and in his introductory essay engage these works in ways that clarify, usually without prejudice, interpretative differences or textual complications. The notes accompanying the translation of 1.6 (p. 11) now highlight the controversies and ambiguities surrounding Aristotle's definition and seeming defence of natural slavery. And after engaging more current interpretative work, the second edition's introductory essay (p. xxv) is less confident than the first's on the proper order of the eight books.
Commitment to a philosophically neutral translation does not prevent L. from offering a substantive interpretation, presented largely in the introductory essay. It is here, particularly, where L.'s reading connects (sometimes in agreement, sometimes not) with P.'s volume. The title's ‘teaching’ functions as both noun and verb (p. 1), referring not simply to a set of substantive claims but also to a rhetorically complex activity of civic education. For P., this education mainly proceeds not through a series of systematic arguments but through a ‘didactic rhetoric’ (pp. 6, 14) that draws upon, reconstructs and criticises the accepted opinions (endoxa) of the audience. Unlike more analytic commentators, P. does not treat Aristotle's engagements with endoxa simply as philosophical corrections of conceptual mistakes, though there is surely some of that going on (p. 24). Instead, P. presents the Politics as a series of lectures that are more like dialogues (P., p. 3; cf. Salkever, ‘Reading Aristotle's NE and Politics as a Single Course of Lectures’, Cambridge Companion to Ancient Greek Political Thought [2009], pp. 209–42). While Aristotle's voice is hardly absent, it is articulated within a multivocal presentation where (alternatively) the best, the most influential, the most revealing or, sometimes, the most extreme arguments for or against particular political arrangements are articulated and subjected to a criticism that is itself often provisional and sometimes open ended.
This approach makes attention to the Politics' audience essential. In the immediate historical context of Aristotle's Lyceum, this audience is comprised of ‘gentlemen (kaloikagathoi, spoudaioi) who are in the best case community leaders and the “consciences” of their society’ (p. 2). Within and perhaps beyond this population, Aristotle addresses the ‘morally serious [who exhibit] a range of potentials for participation in greater and lesser degrees of philosophical enlightenment’ (p. 24). This characterisation of the Politics' audience builds upon while extending L.'s judgement that the text ‘appears to be addressed less to philosophers or students of philosophy than to educated and leisured men who are active in politics’ (p. xix; contrast P., p. 5). Eventually, P.'s Aristotelian audience includes modern and postmodern readers open to the Politics as an alternative to more immediately familiar forms of political thought. The Politics' dialogues should involve us and Aristotle emerges as one of our teachers, not as a revered source of timeless certainties but as a guide and a partner in conversations on matters of human importance (p. 24).
For P., Aristotle's teaching as noun takes two not altogether compatible paths. Addressing a political audience receptive to ‘the noble and beautiful way of seeing and articulating political life’ (p. 24), Aristotle offers a view of a healthy political community that fosters a ‘fulfilling excellence and flourishing felicity that entails active participation in communal self-government’ (p. 10). The Politics emerges at first blush as a classical republican text, standing against its modern counterpart/competitor that, in P.'s view, ‘attempts to reduce civic virtue and justice to those rules and behavioral characteristics that are obviously necessary means to collective preservation in freedom and prosperity’ (p. 9). Yet P.'s Aristotle does not leave things there, for his presentation of political nobility continually points to the greater attractiveness of the philosophic life. In revealing the limits of even the best politics, Aristotle's teaching may instil in his readers a greater appreciation of political moderation, softening the potential aggressiveness of classical republics (seen, for example, by Alexander Hamilton in Federalist 9 as ‘wretched nurseries of unceasing discord’). At the conclusion of the Politics, ‘[w]e have been shown … 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’ (pp. 267; 123).
Though P. consistently develops this thesis over the course of his interpretation, one of the things that makes the book so interesting is that it does not confine itself to this metanarrative; additionally it initiates or prompts other questions about Aristotle's contributions to our political thinking. Eventually, differences between L.'s and P.'s readings allow us to inquire further about philosophy's meaning and presence within the Politics, and about the way in which philosophy and politics may relate to one another in our own context.
P. insists that we read Aristotle as a careful and subtle author and the Politics as an intricately constructed text. There are, for example, Aristotle's choices of words. His first criticism of alternative theorisations of politics (in 1.1) indicts those who see no differences in various forms of ruling and being ruled for not arguing nobly (kalōs). After elaborating on their shortcomings, Aristotle concludes that what they say is not true (ouk alēthē). Here, P. detects (p. 26) an implicit Aristotelian question about possible differences between the noble and the true; the audience's receptivity to the nobility of political life may be paralleled by resistance to what's true. P. therefore treats the Politics as a text that largely comes from Aristotle's hand. Responding to L.'s judgement that Chapter 11 of Book 1 is ‘not clearly related to [Aristotle's] main line of argument’ (p. xxvi), P. argues subtly and plausibly that it is both related and important (pp. 59–62). Within Aristotle's careful composition, uses of Greek poetry are more than pleasing ornamentations; such references and quotations often challenge rather than reinforce cultural images. When the title character of Sophocles' Ajax insists that silence becomes a woman, he intensifies a tragedy where the silencing of woman spells disaster for the manliest male (p. 68). The brutal context of Iphigenia's statement (Iphigenia at Aulis 1400) that it is reasonable for Greeks to rule barbarians dissolves confidence in the distance between Hellenes and barbarians that the surface of the Politics seems to affirm (pp. 31–2).
In his role as author/teacher, Aristotle provokes his audience to reflect actively on both the theoretical framing and the practical implications of his political investigations. The city is ‘prior by nature to both the household and to each of us’ (1.2, L., p. 5). But what exactly is nature in this political context? While Nature (P.'s deliberate capitalisation) is nearly deified initially (p. 31), the developing text problematises physis in intriguing ways (pp. 41–2). P. also asks us to see more possibilities for democratic politics than some of Aristotle's contemporaries and many current commentators acknowledge. Complicating readings that see him as a political and moral elitist who defends the ethics of the kaloskagathos as the highest human virtue, Aristotle exposes arguments in favour of aristocratic politics as deeply flawed (p. 147). By contrast, the inclusivity of democratic regimes sets the context for an appropriately cautious and critical approach to the vexing problems of and disputes (3.2, L., p. 62) about citizenship (pp. 97, 103–4, 140, 147).
There are times when P.'s provocative readings may go too far. By employing a hermeneutic that detects esoteric meanings in the Politics (p. 51), P. encourages us to see Aristotle's audience too dichotomously, the potentially philosophic or truly ‘thoughtful’ and everybody else. It seems odd to call a teaching ‘esoteric’ when it relies on a critical engagement with publicly performed tragedies. L.'s observation (p. xviii) that ‘the term “esoteric” is never used by Aristotle’ is important here. ‘Thoughtfulness’ may not index what L. Strauss referred to as ‘a natural order of rank among men’ (The City and Man [1964], pp. 51, 53; P., p. 5) but gesture towards indeterminate possibilities across broader populations of readers. Finally, while P.'s claim that Aristotle continuously relies on piety and theology as cornerstones to a healthy polity (pp. 87–8, 246–7) encourages us to revisit L.'s assessment (p. xxxv) that ‘the matter of religion is almost entirely ignored in the Politics as we have it’, L.'s assessment still seems to be the more plausible.
L. and P. agree that the substance of the Politics should be taken seriously, particularly as an antidote to ‘the relativism and nihilism that pervade the contemporary academy’ (L., p. xxxvii) or ‘our “social” science crippled … by its ignorance of the irreducibly decisive role of the political’ (P., p. 10). Engagements with contemporary practical philosophy and social science are surely essential if the Politics is to be a resource for our own thinking. Yet the sharp edges of L.'s and P.'s encounters (contrasting with their generous treatments of other commentators on Aristotle) carry costs. One is that we may downplay continuities between Aristotle and our own familiar modes of thought. To the extent that Aristotle challenges established gender categories, he resists rather than reinforces androcentrist political theory. P. notes that education within Aristotle's healthy polis must essentially involve ‘mothers and daughters’ and not only ‘fathers and sons’ (pp. 19, 138). If the cultural separation between Hellenes and barbarians is hubristic, the Greek construction of the other becomes ignoble and untrue. Aristotle may thus validate some of the critical concerns of postmodernism while also showing that those concerns are hardly new and that the postmodern response is not the only one available.
Aristotle's critical gaze may also be turned towards his own seeming resolutions. Both L. and P. treat the city outlined in Book 7 as Aristotle's representation of the best regime that one might pray for, one ‘ruled by a cultured aristocracy dedicated to the pursuits of peace and leisure’ (L., p. xxxvi) or informed by a truly noble civic virtue whose value and limits are revealed by the possibility of philosophy (P., p. 267). Both assessments may downplay fundamental deficiencies in that regime, particularly its reliance on a slavery that Aristotle regards as unnatural and therefore unjust, a practice whose ‘baffling problem … will haunt the entire treatise’ (P., p. 62; cf. 31). However, recognising the significant injustice that infects this best regime can encourage rather than undercut recourse to an Aristotelian political philosophy able to instruct modern and postmodern theory. The best regime of Book 7 may need philosophy (7.15) not simply as the substance of intellectual culture and not even as the image of a better life beyond politics, but as a kind of critical judgement sensitive to possibilities of injustice that lurk even within its own seeming answers to political prayers. This textual insistence on the continuing need for critical philosophy can challenge the rushed verdict of, for example, J. Habermas (Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, p. 201) that Aristotelian political theory is hopelessly premodern, attached to an ethically homogenous polis eclipsed by social differentiation and moral pluralism. Instead, Aristotle's polis may be a complete and self-sufficient community because it provides an institutional context enabling human beings to practise the activities of, and therefore to flourish as, political animals, discovering ‘the advantageous and the harmful, and hence also the just and the unjust’ (1.2, L., p. 4) through the exercise of logos. As long as justice remains a question (or puzzle, aporia) and as long as logos remains our best resource, Aristotle's teaching, as both noun and verb, can be regarded as a text persisting across historical time and cultural space. The case for appreciating the Politics as such a resource is strengthened considerably by these two fine books.
