Politics (, ) is a work of political philosophy by Aristotle, a 4th-century BC Greek philosopher.
The end of the Nicomachean Ethics declared that the inquiry into ethics necessarily follows into politics, and the two works are frequently considered to be parts of a larger treatise—or perhaps connected lectures—dealing with the "philosophy of human affairs".
The title of Politics literally means "the things concerning the ()", and is the origin of the modern English word politics.
In the ancient Greek conception of politics, "administration should be democratic and law-making the work of experts", which is in contrast to modern liberal notions in which "[w]e think… of law-making as the special right of the people and administration as necessarily confined to experts." Aristotle’s Politics is in part a course designed to train such experts to create or reform a set of laws.
The history of Greek city-states, their wars and intrigues and political churning, was well-documented. In addition to such documentation, Aristotle pursued a research project of collecting 158 constitutions of various city-states in order to examine them for their strong and weak points.
This evidence-based, descriptive approach to the study of politics was a hallmark of Aristotle’s method, and a contrast with the more idealistic from-first-principles approach of Plato, as seen for example in the Republic.
As with the Nicomachean Ethics, the Politics is not a polished work as Aristotle would have written it for publication. There are various theories about the text we have. It may have been assembled from a set of shorter works on certain political themes, combined with or interlaced with his marginal notes or with the notes taken by those who attended his Lyceum lectures.
Political context
Aristotle was Macedonian. He attended Plato’s Academy in Athens for about twenty years. He returned to Macedon for a while, in part to tutor a young Alexander the Great, and then went back to Athens to found his own school, the Lycaeum. Though he spent most of his life and career in Athens, he was never an Athenian citizen, but more of a resident alien, with few political rights (he could not own property, for instance). Indeed, throughout his life, he was never a fully-fledged citizen of any Greek .
Citizenship in Greek city-states was usually limited to a minority of adult males. It included more responsibilities than the more passive matter-of-fact citizenship that is typical today. And it usually assumed that those who were citizens shared common goals, a common outlook, and a mutual interest in the success of the . Less like the partisans angling for power of today, citizens then were more like shareholders or board members of the political corporation, with a common desire for and criterion for its success.
Greece, for geological and other reasons, had been politically organized as multiple independent city-states. These often formed alliances and sometimes centrally-governed confederations (particularly in times of war). Some developed colonies, both as ways of finding new agricultural land and as ways of giving a restive underclass something to do at some distance from the ruling class.
There is a reference in the Politics to the assassination of Philip II of Macedon, which happened in 336 BC. So we know that at least some of the work was composed after the expansion of the Macedonian empire under Philip II which resulted in its dominion over Athens and much of the rest of Greece, subordinating Greece's many city-states to a foreign empire.
As a Macedonian and tutor to Alexander (who followed Philip II as the Macedonian emperor), Aristotle was well-placed to be in the good graces of the political leadership of his time, until Athens challenged Macedonian power towards the end of Aristotle’s life, and he went into exile from Athens to avoid the possibility of being attacked by Greek patriots.
Overview
Structure
Aristotle's Politics is divided into eight books, which are each further divided into chapters. Citations of this work, as with the rest of the works of Aristotle, are often made by referring to the Bekker section numbers. Politics spans the Bekker sections 1252a to 1342b.
Book I
In the first book, Aristotle discusses the city (, ) or "political community" (, ) in comparison with other types of communities and partnerships such as the household (, ), the master/slave relationship, and the village.
