Aristotle: Political Philosophy

"Yes, here we move seamlessly from the Ethics to the Politics . Richard Kraut has written several books about Aristotle and Plato. He’s a wonderful man. He’s the only one of these that I know personally. He’s at Northwestern University and warmly encouraged me to write my book about six years ago when I had a visiting position over there. He told me to stop worrying about not being a recognised philosopher yet and just do it. I was terrified about the backlash from academic peers. The terror, judging from the reviews by academics, was completely justified. Ordinary people and non-academic reviewers like it, but academics—senior male ones, at any rate—mostly don’t. Richard Kraut has written several excellent books. I could have chosen his Aristotle on the Human Good (1989) but my favourite of all his books is Aristotle: Political Philosophy (2002). Kraut is personally committed to public engagement, so he writes with unusual clarity. He says that he wants to write for newcomers to Aristotle. But there’s plenty that’s original and new for political theorists and philosophers as well. It’s a brilliant balance, because while everywhere you can sense that Kraut’s completely engaged with all the most up-to-date scholarship, he wears it lightly. It doesn’t submerge his narrator’s voice at all. Doing that ‘living well’ together as political animals that advance the living city-state, and how to do it together. It’s a sort of maximisation and magnification of those virtues on a collective level. Aristotle was more pro-democracy. This is where Kraut comes in. Most Aristotelians are clear that he believed that democracy, if it’s working well, is the best constitution. It’s interesting in his own life how, whenever he could, he returned to Athens. He lived far more of his adult life in Athens, in the democracy, than anywhere else, even though he was only a resident alien. He could never even have the full citizen rights. I don’t think he had much choice. People talk about this as though he had a range or alternatives. People who did not do what they were told by Philip of Macedon—the dreadful one-eyed tyrant and autocrat—were killed. Poisonings and feuds were the stuff of everyday life in Pella. It’s actually rather surprising that Aristotle stayed alive. Philip after all besieged Aristotle’s hometown of Stagira in north-eastern Greece and killed or enslaved its inhabitants. People talk as though you could get letters of summons from Philip of Macedon, and be able to say ‘well, no, actually’… “Poisonings and feuds were the stuff of everyday life in Pella. It’s actually rather surprising that Aristotle stayed alive” But what I like about Kraut’s book, and it’s similar to what I said about Rubenstein, is that he’s clear that we need to use Aristotle’s political ideas to help us live together today. He is very relevant right now. There’s a continuing thread here in what I’m saying. He says, “there are riches in Aristotle’s political thought that are unrecognised or undervalued, and that his perspective deserves to be included in contemporary debates about social and political issues.” Aristotle himself was addressing the future political leaders studying with him in the fourth century BCE, and modern public policy makers can still benefit from his ideas about a good society, justice, citizenship, equality, democracy, community, property, family, class conflict, and the corrosive results of extreme poverty and wealth. It’s a superb book. It’s inspiring, beautifully written, and from the very best Aristotelian mind around."