Aristotle offers a conception of the private and its relationship to the public that suggests a remedy to the limitations of liberalism today, according to Judith A. Swanson. In this fresh and lucid interpretation of Aristotle's political philosophy, Swanson challenges the dominant view that he regards the private as a mere precondition to the public. She argues, rather, that for Aristotle private activity develops virtue and is thus essential both to individual freedom and happiness and to the well-being of the political order. Swanson presents an innovative reading of The Politics which revises our understanding of Aristotle's political economy and his views on women and the family, slavery, and the relation between friendship and civic solidarity. She examines the private activities Aristotle considers necessary to a complete human life—maintaining a household, transacting business, sustaining friendships, and philosophizing. Focusing on ways Aristotle's public invests in the private through law, rule, and education, she shows how the public can foster a morally and intellectually virtuous citizenry. In contrast to classical liberal theory, which presents privacy as a shield of rights protecting individuals from one another and from the state, for Aristotle a regime can attain self-sufficiency only by bringing about a dynamic equilibrium between the public and the private. The Public and the Private in Aristotle's Political Philosophy will be essential reading for scholars and students of political philosophy, political theory, classics, intellectual history, and the history of women.

In the Politics, Aristotle sets out to discover what is the best form that the state can take. Similar to his mentor Plato, Aristotle considers the form that will produce justice and cultivate the highest human potential; however Aristotle takes a more empirical approach, examining the constitution of existing states and drawing on specific case-studies. In doing so he lays the foundations of modern political science.

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.

Aristotle's Politics is widely recognized as one of the classics of the history of political philosophy, and like every other such masterpiece, it is a work about which there is deep division. Many readers of Aristotle are uncertain whether his Politics has any contribution to make to contemporary debates about political life and political theory. The essays in this volume aim to address, implicitly or explicitly, this very question about the relevance of Arisotle's thinking in contemporary political philosophy. Written by leading scholars in lucid and accessible style, the nine essays in this volume will be a critical resource for newcomers to Aristotle.

According to Aristotle, man's essential sociality implies a distinctive conception of politics, one in which all political associations exist for the sake of the moral perfection of human beings. This stands in sharp contrast with the modern view of politics that man is not "by nature" political; rather, man chooses to create political associations for the sake of securing the protection of his life and property. Many political theorists have begun to express doubts about this modern view, calling for a return to Aristotle's vision of a politics that is deeply moral. In Aristotle's Politics Today, distinguished political philosophers representing a diversity of approaches examine the meaning, relevance, and implications of Aristotle's political thought for contemporary social and political theory. The contributors engage a broad range of topics, including Aristotle's views on constitutionalism, the extension of Aristotelian ideas to issues in international relations, the place of Aristotelian virtue in modern democratic politics, and Aristotle's conception of justice.