2Aristotle
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Aristotle’s style may distinguish him from poets, orators, and historians but,
for many of the political theorists considered here, his work is no more
systematic than that of his predecessors. Treating his political and ethical
writings, including theNicomachean Ethics, Eudemian Ethics,Politics, and
Rhetoric, as examples of practical philosophy and concerned with individual
and collective action and change, they take Aristotle at his word when he
rejects certainty as a standard for ethics and politics, maintaining instead that
‘‘we must... be content if, in dealing with subjects and starting from
premises thus uncertain... we seek the degree of precision which belongs
to its subject matter’’ (Nicomachean Ethics 1104 a 4 , 1094 b 21 – 30 ). Aristotle’s
works, interpreted in this way, set out no blueprints for correct ethical or
political behavior, produce no transcendent prescriptions, indeed produce
few transparent prescriptions at all. Reading Aristotle in the way they read his
predecessors, the political theorists under consideration extract from his texts
no abstract or formal doctrines. Instead, they treat him as an educator in the
mode of Plato, Euripides, or Thucydides and attend to how his texts lay out in
their depth and breadth the conundra of ethical and political life.
They read him in this way, at least in part, because they take the presence
and role of an audience to be no less important to Aristotle’s practice of
theorizing than it was to the earlier classical authors. Even though he did not
write plays to be produced before an audience, Aristotle did stage dialogues
among interlocutors (lost to us), and most ancient historians believe that his
non-dialogic works are lecture notes taken by students attending his school,
the Lyceum. Thus, like tragedies, comedies, and dialogues, his practical works
are best treated as ‘‘forms of pedagogical rhetoric’’ that engage their contem-
porary readers and auditors, and everyone else who reads them, in a dialogue
about the ethics and politics these audiences practice. Aristotle thus educates
his audience by inviting them to participate in ‘‘conversations about the
advantages and limitations of individual ways of life... and speciWed
forms of common partnerships’’ (Mara 2000 , 855 – 6 ), by inviting them, in
other words, to participate in the very mode of life to which he wishes to
educate them, which is to say, a theoretical practical life. He does this by
engaging, himself, in dialectic.
Aristotle engages in dialectic in any number of ways: he converses
with earlier Greek poets, historians, and philosophers by incorporating or
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