Examines Aristotle's approaches to how to develop a political community based on the notions of justice and friendship.

Aristotle's treatments of revolution and property rights are also covered, and the major presuppositions of his political theory are critically examined and related to contemporary issues including the liberalism-communitarianism debate.

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.

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Do we believe the law good because it is just, or is it just because we think it is good? This collection of essays addresses the relationship of justice to law through the works of Homer, Herodotus, Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles and the Islamic thinker al Farabi. The issues explored include the foundations of our understanding of justice; the foundation of authority of law; the relative merits of the rule of law versus the authority of a wise and just king; the uneasy relationship between particular laws and the general notion of justice (equity); various aspects of justice (reciprocity, proportionality) and their application in law; and the necessity of the rule of law to the goodness and success of a political order. The distinguished contributors often make explicit comparisons to modern situations and contemporary debates. This book will be valuable for those interested in classical political theory, political philosophy, and law.

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.