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Aristotle's Politics

Aristotle's Politics  

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The literary character of the Politics is subject to some dispute,

growing out of the textual difficulties that attended

the loss of Aristotle's works. Book III ends with a sentence that is

repeated almost verbatim at the start of Book VII, while the intervening

Books IV-VI seem to have a very different flavor from the rest; Book IV

seems to refer several times back to the discussion of the best regime

contained in Books VII-VIII.^[1] Some editors have therefore inserted Books

VII-VIII after Book III. At the same time, however, references to the

"discourses on politics" that occur in the Nicomachean Ethics suggest

that the treatise as a whole ought to conclude with the discussion of

education that occurs in Book VIII of the Politics^{[citation needed]}.

Werner Jaeger suggested that the Politics actually represents the

conflation of two, distinct treatises.^[2] The first (Books I-III, VI-VIII)

would represent a less mature work from when Aristotle had not yet fully

broken from Plato, and consequently show a greater emphasis on the best

regime. The second (Books IV-VI) would be more empirically minded, and thus

belong to a later stage of development.

Carnes Lord has argued against the sufficiency of this view, however,

noting the numerous cross-references between Jaeger's supposedly separate

works and questioning the difference in tone that Jaeger saw between them.

For example, Book IV explicitly notes the utility of examining actual

regimes (Jaeger's "empirical" focus) in determining the best regime

(Jaeger's "Platonic" focus). Instead, Lord suggests that the Politics is

indeed a finished treatise, and that Books VII and VIII do belong in betwee

n Books III and IV; he attributes their current ordering to a merely mechanical

transcription error.^[3].

A third possibility is that Aristotle intended to reorganize the

already-completed Politics, but died before he was able to do so.

The initial treatise would have had Books VII-VIII in between Books III

and IV, but that later compilers altered the ordering based on an intended

revision suggested by the Nicomachean Ethics. This theory would require that

our version of the Nicomachean Ethics be later in date than our version of the Politics.

^{[citation needed]}

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