Aristotle (384–322 BCE)

According to an ancient biographer, Aristotle (384–322 BCE) slept with a bronze ball in his hand poised over a pan; when the ball dropped, the rattling of the pan would wake him. What he did with all of that time awake was to make fundamental contributions to many fields of study and to do more than anyone since to set the agenda for Western philosophy. For readers 16 centuries later, there could be no doubt who was meant when Thomas Aquinas referred simply to “the Philosopher” or Dante to “the master of those who know.”

Ancient booklists make clear that the majority of Aristotle's works, including most of his works on politics (including the books On Justice, On the Statesman, On Kingship, and a collection of 158 constitutions), have long been lost. Of the surviving works, the Nicomachean Ethics and the Politics have been especially important for political theory. The theory to be found there is remarkable for being simultaneously sensible and systematic and for its emphasis on both the natural and ethical dimensions of politics.

At 17, Aristotle went to Athens and became a member of Plato's academy. He remained there for 20 years, until Plato's death in 347. A few years later, Aristotle joined the court of the king of Macedon, Philip II, probably as tutor to his son, known to history as Alexander the Great. Aristotle went back to Athens in 335 and set up his own school of philosophy, the Lyceum. Both his long apprenticeship with Plato and his foundation of a school to rival that of his teacher resonate in his extensive engagement with Plato's arguments.

When we turn from Plato's dialogues to Aristotle's texts, it is easy to overlook their dialectical character and to be impatient with their difficulty. “Learning is painful,” Aristotle says in the Politics (VIII.5), and he sometimes writes as if to assure his students that they are learning. Ancient readers, however, were as exorbitant in their praise of Aristotle's style (Cicero refers to his “golden river of speech”) as modern readers have been stinting (a nonetheless admiring Thomas Gray wrote in 1746 that “he has a dry conciseness, that makes one imagine one is perusing a table of contents rather than a book: It tastes for all the world like chopped hay”). This is because Aristotle was best known in antiquity for his polished public works, often dialogues, whereas the works now extant were akin to programmatic drafts or lecture notes and were subsequently edited by others. There is something compelling about the elliptical manner Aristotle reserved for his philosophical intimates, but it is an acquired taste and requires a complex stomach.

It will help, however, to recognize that the tensions and the doubling-back that we see in Aristotle's work often emerge as he first tries to discover what is worthwhile in one opinion that is held by the many or the wise, and then moves on to another on the same subject as a way of homing in on the truth. Together with a recognition that our text occasionally papers over a gap or preserves two attempts at the same topic, this helps to account for the “on the one hand … on the other hand” character of the work. Because “more or less everything has been discovered” (Politics II.5), he believes that we should proceed by considering the practices and positions that we have inherited. These, together with Aristotle's own reflections on them, refer to and relate to one another in complex ways, and the organization of his political theory is accordingly more like a fractal than a linear series of points.

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