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  • Aristotle’s Politics: Living Well and Living Together by Eugene Garver
  • Randall Bush
Aristotle’s Politics: Living Well and Living Together by Eugene Garver. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. 290 pp. Cloth $40.00.

Aristotle’s Politics: Living Well and Living Together, Eugene Garver’s third book on key texts of the Aristotelian corpus, charts the relationship between politics and philosophy through careful detailing of Aristotle’s text. In other words, Garver reads the Politics for us. This is an achievement in itself given the gravity of both Garver’s and Aristotle’s thinking. Garver’s reading elaborates the arguments of the Politics in order to establish a claim for what he calls “political philosophy.” His reading offers a methodological defense for a form of thinking that is itself not necessarily either “practical” or “political,” at least as scholars of rhetoric would tend to understand these terms. But Garver gives us a clue to his understanding of political philosophy when he describes Aristotle’s “most impressive achievement” in the following way: The Politics “shows how to construct a constitution and a way of life ethically superior to the citizens who comprise the state” (3). Garver thus reads the paradoxes of politics and philosophy as generative rather than aporetic, seeking in the Politics something more than the mere realization of the final book of the Nicomachean Ethics, where Aristotle argues that the regime (politeia) is the container in which the bare life of the individual is transformed into the life of a citizen.

Garver situates political philosophy through a logic of praxis that implicates statesman and citizen in starkly different registers. Politics is not just about the one but also the many. While this statement may be a truism of the Rhetoric, Garver takes up the Politics in order to articulate the question of the many in a way distinct from a certain rhetorical conception of politics and political practice. Garver brings to bear a political philosophical vocabulary that is guided by the statesman (politikos) rather than the citizen (politeis) or judge (kriteis). The statesman will utilize rhetoric as a practice, as [End Page 209] Garver notes, but it is far from clear that the statesman is meant to approach political philosophy from a rhetorical perspective. Garver marshals a series of distinctions highlighting Aristotle’s unique conceptualization of the polis, a structure straddling the disjunct between artificial and natural forms of being. This conceptualization figures the polis as both artificial and natural but will come to be understood by Aristotle, according to Garver, through the terms of political philosophy. Chapter 1 deals with the “natural” relationship between master and slave memorably defined in the first book of the Politics. Taking up this “most notorious feature” of the Politics, Garver argues that the concept of natural slavery is not so much a prescription but a description: it is a way to delineate the features of politics and to distinguish them from other forms of relation, such as the family (oikos). In contrast to those modern commentators who focus on Aristotle’s references to “natural” slaves, Garver argues that Aristotle’s primary concern is actually with the master (despotes), who is unique in that his capacity (dynamis) extends into two tasks rather than being confined to one: first, the administration of inferiors (slave ownership) and second, participation with equals (politics): “The same person is both master and citizen,” Garver notes, and “the principal problems of politics… come from that fact” (26). For Aristotle, Greeks are both uniquely suited for political life and uniquely susceptible to the desire for domination and tyranny (27–28; 33). The drive toward mastery characteristic of the despotes also characterizes the Greek citizen more generally.

If the Greeks, whom Aristotle celebrates as the only ethnos capable of meaningful citizenship, are also the only ‘natural despots,’ then politics calls for a structural response to this excess (pleonexia): “Slaves have the wrong nature. … Despots have the right nature, and yet still degenerate without… proper political circumstances” (33). This claim’s double-sidedness positions politics not just as a possibility but also as a deep and persistent problem that political philosophy is enlisted to solve. Both sophistical rhetoric (Rhetoric...

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