Athenian audiences, but depicting events in Thebes and Argos (Zeitlin 1986 ),
and Plato and Aristotle’s treatments of the manly virtues (Salkever 1991 ;
Smith 2001 ) are read as condemnations of attitudes fostered by contempor-
ary democratic Athenian culture and also as opening more tolerant and,
indeed, more democratic, practices towards ‘‘others,’’ be they foreigners or
women. In these and other ways, the classical authors are, in large part,
interpreted as ‘‘immanent critics’’ (Ober 1998 , 48 – 51 ) of democracy and as
subtle practitioners of the politics they critiqued, intent on thinking critically
about their cultures with a view to improving relations not only among
individual human beings and social groups within democratic Athens but
also between Athens and other polities, no small task given the pervasiveness
of war in the classical world.
Taken together, these commitments—to seeing an education for the
present from the past in the classical integration of theory and practice via
a multiplicity of disciplines in many genres—produce a powerful political
theoretical approach to the diverse theorists of the classical world. From
the standpoint of these commitments, Aristotle appears, at Wrst glance
at least, to be an outlier among the classical authors. His writings come to
us not as dialogues, narrative, or poetry but, like those of most Western
political philosophy, as prose, presented in his own voice. His prose,
moreover, appears to follow modern analytic conventions regarding consist-
ency and argumentation, and propositional declarations may be extracted
easily from his texts. This prose style appears to reXect a mode of theor-
izing fundamentally diVerent from that of the earlier classical authors,
to be more modern in form and to inform a set of substantive doctrines
that are more modern in eVect. Indeed, Aristotle is often treated as
the inventor of modern constitutionalism, and an authoritative source for
modern accounts of private property, distributive justice, rights, and the rule
of law.
For many of the political theorists under discussion here, Aristotle’s
accounts of the building blocks of politics, along with his contributions to
the history of political thought and to current theory and practice, must be
read through the lens of his practice of theorizing. By their lights, however,
Aristotle’s political theory is, like that of his predecessors, less formal and
systematic and more complexly engaged with the politics and authors of his
time than is often supposed. The next section explores how this is the case by
showing the ways in which the four commitments just sketched are at work in
some recent Aristotle scholarship.
the political theory of classical greece 181