The collapse of the Soviet Union and other Marxist regimes around the world seems to have left liberal democracy as the only surviving ideology, and yet many scholars of political thought still find liberal democracy objectionable, using Aristotle's Politics to support their views. In this detailed analysis of Book 3 of Aristotle's work, Clifford Angell Bates, Jr., challenges these scholars, demonstrating that Aristotle was actually a defender of democracy. Proving the relevance of classical political philosophy to modern democratic problems, Bates argues that Aristotle not only defends popular rule but suggests that democracy, restrained by the rule of law, is the best form of government. According to Aristotle, because human beings are naturally sociable, democracy is the regime that best helps man reach his potential; and because of human nature, it is inevitable democracies will prevail. Bates explains why Aristotle's is a sound position between two extremes -- participatory democracy, which romanticizes the people, and elite theory, which underrates them. Aristotle, he shows, sees the people as they really are and nevertheless believes their self-rule, under law, is ultimately better than all competing forms. However, the philosopher does not believe democracy should be imposed universally. It must arise out of the given cultural, environmental, and historical traditions of a people or its will fall into tyranny. Bates's fresh interpretation rests on innovative approaches to reading Book 3 -- which he deems vital to understanding all of Aristotle's Politics. Examining the work in the original Greek as well as in translation, he addresses questions about the historical Aristotle versus the posited Aristotle, the genre and structure of the text, and both the theoretical and the dialogic nature of the work. Carting Aristotle's rhetorical strategies, Bates shows that Book 3 is not simply a treatise but a series of dialogues that develop a nuanced defense of democratic rule. Bates's accessible and faithful exposition of Aristotle's work confirms that the philosopher's teachings are not merely of historical interest but speak directly to liberal democracy's current crisis of self-understanding.

Aristotle in his Politics devotes a large portion to his theory of the best regime. Renewed interest in this idea, along with scholarly disagreements on what Aristotle says, make this reading an important contribution to classical political studies. Chuska's approach is a defense of Aristotle's theory, showing it to be necessary and helpful, despite controversy over his purportedly narrow-minded discussions of non-Greeks. Relying on the text of Politics as well as Greek history and other works by Aristotle, Chuska expands on the theory of the best city.

Offering fresh interpretations of Aristotle's key work, this collection opens new paths for students and scholars to explore.

Twenty-three centuries after its compilation, 'The Politics' still has much to contribute to this central question of political science. Aristotle's thorough and carefully argued analysis is based on a study of over 150 city constitutions, covering a huge range of political issues in order to establish which types of constitution are best - both ideally and in particular circumstances - and how they may be maintained. Aristotle's opinions form an essential background to the thinking of philosophers such as Thomas Aquinas, Machiavelli and Jean Bodin and both his premises and arguments raise questions that are as relevant to modern society as they were to the ancient world.

Applies Aristotle's argument - that citizenship is like friendship - to the liberal and democratic societies of the present day.

This book offers a systematic exposition of Aristotle's legal thought and account of the relationship between law and politics.

Aristotle's political imagination capitalizes on the virtues of a middle-class republic. America's experiment in republican liberty bears striking similarities to Aristotle's best political regime--especially at the point of the middling class and its public role. Author Leslie Rubin, by holding America up to the mirror of Aristotle, explores these correspondences and their many implications for contemporary political life. Rubin begins with the Politics, in which Aristotle asserts the best political regime maintains stability by balancing oligarchic and democratic tendencies, and by treating free and relatively equal people as capable of a good life within a law-governed community that practices modest virtues. The second part of the book focuses upon America, showing how its founding opinion leaders prioritized the virtues of the middle in myriad ways. Rubin uncovers a surprising range of evidence, from moderate property holding by a large majority of the populace to citizen experience of both ruling and being ruled. She singles out the importance of the respect for the middle-class virtues of industriousness, sobriety, frugality, honesty, public spirit, and reasonable compromise. Rubin also highlights the educational institutions that foster the middle class--public education affords literacy, numeracy, and job skills, while civic education provides the history and principles of the nation as well as the rights and duties of all its citizens. Wise voices from the past, both of ancient Greece and postcolonial America, commend the middle class. The erosion of a middle class and the descent of political debate into polarized hysteria threaten a democratic republic. If the rule of the people is not to fall into demagoguery, then the body politic must remind itself of the requirements--both political and personal--of free, stable, and fair political life.

With Aristotle’s Teaching in the “Politics,” Thomas L. Pangle offers a masterly new interpretation of this classic philosophical work. It is widely believed that the Politics originated as a written record of a series of lectures given by Aristotle, and scholars have relied on that fact to explain seeming inconsistencies and instances of discontinuity throughout the text. Breaking from this tradition, Pangle makes the work’s origin his starting point, reconceiving the Politics as the pedagogical tool of a master teacher. With the Politics, Pangle argues, Aristotle seeks to lead his students down a deliberately difficult path of critical thinking about civic republican life. He adopts a Socratic approach, encouraging his students—and readers—to become active participants in a dialogue. Seen from this perspective, features of the work that have perplexed previous commentators become perfectly comprehensible as artful devices of a didactic approach. Ultimately, Pangle’s close and careful analysis shows that to understand the Politics, one must first appreciate how Aristotle’s rhetorical strategy is inextricably entwined with the subject of his work.

This book presents a wide-ranging overview of Aristotle's political thought that makes him come alive as a philosopher who can speak to our own times. Beginning with a critique of subjectivist accounts of well-being, Kraut goes on to assess Aristotle's objective and universalistic account ofeudaimonia and excellent activity. He offers a detailed interpretation of Aristotle's conception of justice in the Nicomachean Ethics, and then turns to the major themes of the Politics: the political nature of human beings, the city's priority over the individual, the justification of slavery, thedefence of the family and property, the pluralistic nature of cities and the need for their unification, the distinction between good citizenship and full virtue, the value and limits of popular control over elites, the corrosive effects of poverty and wealth, the critique of democratic conceptionsof freedom and equality, and the radically egalitarian institutions of the ideal society. Aristotle's political philosophy, as Kraut reads it, provides a model of the way in which a rich understanding of human well-being can guide the amelioration of a world in which agreement about the human goodis rarely, if ever, achieved.

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