Review Essay

Abstract

"Even amidst the renaissance of Aristotelian studies in the past fifty years or so, the Politics has attracted less philosophical attention than the Nicomachean Ethics. The reason for this disparity is not far to seek: the Politics seems significantly more culture-bound than the Ethics, and so less relevant to life in modern, pluralistic nation-states than in pre-modern, culturally homogeneous city-states. Hence even those who have invoked Aristotle to critique the dominant modes of modern political thought and practice have tended to focus on the Ethics, drawing from the Politics only a few ideas about human beings as naturally political animals and justice as the common good. The Ethics, it is widely held, continues to speak to us in detail, but the Politics has less to teach us. In the third and final installment in his study of Aristotle’ practical philosophy, Eugene Garver seeks to reverse this conventional judgment.1 The previous volume maintained that the central ideas of the Ethics are more foreign and less attractive than often supposed. The book under review, which can be read independently of the others, argues that the Politics remains valuable for us today precisely because the many glaring differences between Aristotle’s world and our own help us “better to see ourselves by contrast” (p. 16). Garver explores frequently overlooked tensions in the work and refuses to accept easy solutions, but he keeps his sights set on how reading Aristotle “can help us think through our own problems” (p. 14). The result is a challenging and refreshingly distinctive treatment of the Politics. I will argue that several of Garver’s main claims are mistaken as interpretations of Aristotle, and I will suggest that the Politics has at least as much perennial relevance on the more orthodox interpretation I prefer as on Garver’s alternative. "