engagement (Salkever 1986 ) absent from the poets and historians, while
others seek andWnd continuities not necessarily of form or conclusion but
of theme from Homer to Plato and Aristotle. These scholars bring diVerent
sets of questions to the materials they examine and they often oVer competing
interpretations of the texts they engage. Despite all of these important
diVerences, they have a suYciently large set of substantive and methodo-
logical commitments in common that it is possible to speak of them as
sharing a political theoretical approach. Focusing on scholarship available
in English and published in the past twenty years, this chapter provides an
overview of the commitments these scholars share and then shows them at
work in some recent scholarship on Aristotle. 3
1 Four Commitments
.........................................................................................................................................................................................
I. TheWrst commitment shared by the practitioners of this reXective and
multidisciplinary approach to the study of politics in the classical world is to
treat the authors they study not as ‘‘systematic philosophers’’ who provide
their readers with ‘‘conclusive truths established by rigorous arguments’’
(Mara 2000 , 841 ) but as educators. These practitioners, accordingly, seek in
the materials they engage not impregnable foundations for a particular
political regime or ultimate justiWcations for some set of institutions or
transcendent doctrines of morality, but rather ways of reXecting about and
expanding the horizons of stubborn and complex ethical and political ques-
tions. Moreover, for these political theorists, as for the classical authors they
study, theory and practice are not opposed. Instead, theory directly engages
and reXects the changing world of human thought, character, actions, and
institutions in which the political questions themselves arise. Theorizing, so
understood, as in the original sense of the word, from the Greektheoria,isa
practice of seeing and an active engagement with the local and observable
world of contingency and particularity.
3 There are, to be sure, instances of scholars adopting some of these commitments earlier than the
mid- 1980 s, yet it is primarily in the years since then that a group of political theorists has emerged who
more or less share all of them. This chapter explicitly focuses on those political theorists and not on
the classical philologists or ancient historians upon whose work most of those theorists liberally draw.
the political theory of classical greece 177