Aristotle Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Aristotle (384–322 BCE) was born in Stagira, in Northern Greece. His father, Nicomachus, was court physician to Amyntas III, king of Macedon, and Aristotle maintained close connections to the Macedonian regime throughout his life. At the age of seventeen, he traveled to Athens, to study in Plato’s Academy, where he stayed for twenty years, until Plato’s death in 347. After he left the Academy, Aristotle’s travels included returning to Macedon to tutor the future Alexander the Great. He returned to Athens, in 336, to open his own school, the Lyceum, where he stayed until the death of Alexander the Great in 323.

The corpus of Aristotle’s works that have come down to us are not finished products, prepared for publication, but were composed in connection with his school, most likely for use in lecturing. Aristotle also wrote dialogues, which were renowned for their literary qualities, but aside from fragments that have been recovered, these were all lost. Aristotle’s works encompass an enormous range of subjects, including logic, scientific studies of the natural world, metaphysics, ethics, and politics. His Politics has a strong claim to being the first extant work of political science.

Aristotle’s moral and political philosophy shows the strong influence of Plato, and he provides powerful, detailed answers to important questions that Plato raised. But Aristotle clearly broke with Plato in important respects, notably in rejecting the latter’s conception of forms or ideas that exist apart from their instances in the material world. In Politics, Aristotle departs from Plato most significantly in detailed examination of existing political forms, which he is willing to consider more or less on their own terms. In Book II of the work, Aristotle presents a harsh—although frequently clearly misguided—critique of Plato’s Republic and Laws, generally in regard to what he views as these works’ excessive utopianism.

In Politics, Aristotle explores the polis in its entirety, including different kinds of poleis and their distinctive features, factors that lead to the stability and instability of different forms. He also subjects the polis to moral inquiry, including what it means for human beings to live in it, and how it contributes to their well-being. In addition to the polis as it exists, Aristotle considers ideal representatives at different levels, ranging between ideal states unconstrained by actual circumstances, to remedying defects in existing states. In Book IV of the work, he presents a powerful argument for a relative ideal, a state that achieves the important end of social-political stability, based on rule by the middle class—as opposed to the political instability occasioned by rule of either the rich or the poor.

In composing Politics, Aristotle drew on studies of 158 different Greek constitutions. One of these studies, a book length analysis of the constitution of Athens, by either Aristotle or his students, is extant. Aristotle demonstrates impressive command of the history and workings of innumerable specific cases. The polis existed in myriad forms, while the Greek world was torn by constant tumult, revolution, and change.

His studies of different instances—primarily of democracies, oligarchies, and tyrannies—compared and contrasted across numerous dimensions, provide a wealth of empirical analysis perhaps unmatched until relatively recent times.

Bibliography:

The Complete Works of Aristotle:The Revised Oxford Translation, 2 vols, edited by Jonathan Barnes. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984.
Keyt, David, and Fred Miller, eds. A Companion to Aristotle’s Politics. Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell, 1991.
Kraut, Richard. Aristotle. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Mulgan, Richard. Aristotle’s Political Theory. Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon, 1977.
Newman,William L., ed. The Politics of Aristotle, 4 vols. Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon, 1887–1902.