Politics

What It Is

Eight books, about three hundred pages, from around 330 BC, and the founding work of political science as an empirical discipline. Aristotle and his students at the Lyceum gathered the constitutions of a hundred and fifty-eight Greek cities and studied them the way he studied animals: collect the specimens, sort them, ask what makes each kind flourish or sicken. Only one of those constitutional studies survives, recovered from an Egyptian papyrus in 1891.

The prose is difficult in the way all Aristotle is difficult. These are working notes, not a finished treatise, and the argument sometimes changes direction between chapters or doubles back.

What it is not is utopian. Aristotle had read the Republic closely, admired it, and thought it was wrong, and he says so in Book 2 with an exactness that still stings. His interest is in constitutions that exist, for populations that behave the way people actually behave.

Why It Matters

Almost every idea in modern constitutional thought is here in embryo. The classification of regimes by who rules and in whose interest. His account of which class a state must have in strength if it is to stay stable, which is still the argument every developed democracy makes about itself. The analysis of why revolutions happen, which is the most useful of the eight books and reads as though written last year.

The claim that a human being is by nature a political animal, that we do not merely tolerate the city but need it to become fully human, is the deepest thing in the book and the hardest for a modern reader to accept. It denies that the individual comes first and the community afterwards. Hannah Arendt spent a career on that sentence.

Aquinas made it Christian, the Italian republics used it, the American founders read it, and the vocabulary of political argument in every legislature on earth is still substantially Aristotle's.

Book 1 contains his defence of natural slavery. Do not skip it and do not excuse it. It is the most instructive failure in the history of philosophy, because it shows a first-rate mind, working carefully, mistaking the arrangements of his own society for the order of nature. Every generation does this. His is the clearest example we have of how it is done.

Before You Read

Twelve to fifteen hours. Harder going than the Ethics and less rewarding page by page, but the payoff in Book 5 is worth the climb.

Read the Nicomachean Ethics first. Aristotle regarded the two as one project, and the Politics assumes the account of the good life the Ethics gives.

The order need not be linear. Books 1, 3 and 5 are the core. Books 7 and 8, on the ideal state and education, are the most Platonic and the easiest to leave for a second reading. Book 4, a taxonomy of constitutional variations, is where most first-time readers slow down. Move through it briskly and come back. And read it with a country in mind. It rewards that.

Which Translation to Read

• Joe Sachs (Focus Philosophical Library, 2012; now published by Hackett) — recommended. Sachs does for the Politics what he did for the Ethics: he strips out the fossilised Latinate vocabulary and makes you meet the argument in plain, hard English. His introduction and glossary are the best available to a reader who is not a specialist. The cost: his choices are idiosyncratic and will not match the standard citations, and there is less scholarly apparatus here than in the university editions. View on Amazon →
• Carnes Lord (University of Chicago Press, second edition 2013). The literalist's choice, with an introduction that is one of the finest short essays on the work in English. The cost: he holds close to the Greek at the expense of English rhythm, and the reading is slow.
• C. D. C. Reeve (Hackett, second edition 2017). The clearest and best annotated, from the philosopher behind the New Hackett Aristotle. The cost: the apparatus is so heavy it can feel like reading a commentary that happens to contain a text.

Take Sachs to read, Lord to check, Reeve to study.

Getting the Most From This Book

Read Book 5 twice. It is Aristotle's account of how constitutions come apart, written by a man who had watched it happen. Nothing in the modern literature on democratic backsliding improves on it; most of it is a footnote to it.

Keep asking what he counts as evidence. His method, gathering cases and reasoning up from them, is the thing Plato never did.

Read the introduction first. Sachs's is a philosophical essay rather than a summary, and it will help.

The commonest mistake is to read the Politics as a museum piece, a record of what a clever Greek thought about city-states that no longer exist. The subject is not the polis. The subject is what holds a community of people together and what pulls it apart, and there has been no better book about it.