Aristotle on Politics as Art and Praxis

Polis The Journal for Ancient Greek and Roman Political Thought · 2026-04-14

Abstract Aristotle describes the activity of political rule using two different frameworks. In the first politics is an art, an application of reason to achieve the happiness of the community. In the second political activity is praxis , excellent activity choiceworthy as an end in itself. The first, followed exclusively, implies that the wisest individual should rule, while giving him little reason to wish to. The second, followed exclusively, points again towards monarchy but in an opposite way, spurring those most serious about virtue to desire sole rule for themselves. This article explores the tension between the two frameworks and their possible reconciliation, arguing that viewing politics solely as art fails to do justice to our political nature, while viewing it solely as praxis leaves political virtue without content. Reconciling them is essential for grasping Aristotle’s deepest arguments for republican self-government, while shedding new light on his preference for the theoretical life.

Aristotle on Liberty Rightly Understood

Political Theory · 2025-04-01

Aristotle calls liberty the defining feature of democracy but says that the people tend to understand liberty badly, inviting the question of how a democracy might be improved by learning to understand it better. Critiquing Isaiah Berlin’s bifurcation of liberty into separate negative and positive forms, this paper unpacks Aristotle’s complex teaching on liberty as both spirited resistance and dignified self-direction, both individual and political, in each sphere involving both qualities of character and external relations, and fulfilling humans’ natures as rational and political beings. Aristotle diagnoses not only popular misunderstandings of liberty but related misunderstandings among many of the most ambitious and many of the most refined, with failures among both of the latter to understand the distinct dignity and challenges of “rule over the free,” leading on one hand toward tyranny and on the other to an excessive scorn for what political life has to offer. He shows not only how popular misunderstandings of liberty lead to demagoguery, but how the people’s own yearnings for dignified freedom can in principle be realized with the right education, in his elaboration of the surprisingly egalitarian “regime according to prayer” with its “liberal” way of life and “liberal” education in Politics 7 and 8. These reflections come together to support his account of liberty as intelligent self-direction, especially in an activity that is or can be made endlike.

91Chapter 7 Cyrus’s Magnetism

2025-09-13

Xenophon of Athens: A Socratic on Sparta, written by Noreen Humble

Polis The Journal for Ancient Greek and Roman Political Thought · 2023-02-06

4. Justice and the Rule of Reason (NE 5)

2020-01-01

Abstract Book 5 of the Ethics explores the multiple meanings of justice. These include, first, both the complete virtue that law properly aims to instill and that consists in the full development and exercise of an individual's capacities, and the fairness that demands of each that he limit his own pursuit of the good so that others may have their share; Aristotle shows that the political regime and its laws invariably tend to focus overwhelmingly on the latter. Justice includes likewise proportional, corrective and reciprocal forms, each seeking equality in a different sense, with the corrective, involving retribution, showing a particular and characteristic tension at its core. Natural right is the common good of a community as understood by a wisdom that accurately assesses the relevance of all the standards of justice identified by Aristotle: this standard points equally but in different ways to the rule of law and to the rule of a single, flexible, insightful and responsive living ruler. Discussions of the voluntary and involuntary in justice deepen the analysis of book 3, while that of equity sheds further light on the limitations of both law and the pre-philosophic outlook of the gentleman or equitable person.

Reason and Character: The Moral Foundations of Aristotelian Political Philosophy

2020 · 2 citations

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Epistemology

5. Wisdom and Active Wisdom

2020-01-01

Abstract This chapter examines the Aristotelian virtue of phronesis or active wisdom in its relation both to theoretical wisdom and to moral virtue and praxis. Exploring the sharp lines that Aristotle purports to draw between different kinds of reasoning, between the different kinds of activities that they govern, including art, science, intellect or nous, active wisdom, and theoretical wisdom, and between the separate parts of the soul that he says engage in each of these, the chapter argues that all of these lines prove practically useful but theoretically increasingly problematic as book 6 of the Ethics proceeds. The result is, most importantly, a dual account of phronesis, one version of which is closely tied to conventional moral virtue and whose principles are rooted in opinion, and one version of which is in fact inseparable from theoretical wisdom. Aristotle's analysis of how the intellect grasps both changing and unchanging objects sheds further light on his claim in book 5 that the principles of natural right are always changing.

Epilogue

University of Chicago Press eBooks · 2020

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Aesthetics

Abstract In book 10 of the Ethics Aristotle argues that the moral-political life is in fact not an end in itself but is for the sake of meeting needs beyond that life, and that only the philosophic life meets the full criteria of happiness. He here presents the philosophic life in glowing terms, painting it as utterly un-needy and leisured, calling it divine, and calling on its devotees "as far as possible to immortalize ourselves." This picture of philosophy serves less as an accurate account of Aristotle's own activity than as a pole star, meant to inspire the moral life with a reverence it needs and that Aristotle's most sober account of virtue has hitherto not provided.

1. The Task and the Puzzle of Reason in the Nicomachean Ethics (NE 1 and 2)

2020-01-01

Abstract Aristotle opens the Ethics with a strong case for the primacy of the political art that aims at the ultimate human good. He outlines the complexity of his audience, which explains the complex dialectical method he will use in developing his teaching on the human good. He defines happiness (eudaimonia) as the "most complete" human end, an ambiguous standard that has produced a stand-off between those who defend a "dominant" and an "inclusive" view of Aristotelian happiness. This discussion is best understood not as the launching of a single teaching but as the evocation of disparate hopes and expectations that Aristotle will interrogate and educate through the Ethics. Rather than begin from natural human needs discovered through a direct investigation of human nature, Aristotle sets up the project of the Ethics with his famous function argument that man's unique function is an activity of soul in accord with reason, or, as he reframes it, in accord with virtue. Thus the task becomes investigating opinions about virtue; as it does, reason recedes in importance. The chapter concludes with discussions of whether complete happiness is available, whether the soul has parts, and how the teaching on the mean provides guidance for ethics.

2. Knowledge, Choice, and Responsibility for Character (NE 3.1–5)

2020-01-01

Abstract In his analysis of voluntary and involuntary action in 3.1-5 Aristotle shows how all actions are shaped by perceptions of good and bad. The difference between the voluntary and the involuntary turns not on the exercise of free will but on the degree to which actions reveal the priorities that define one's character. Ignorance of facts is a key factor that can render an action involuntary. Yet ignorance is also at play in the most wicked acts that Aristotle calls blameworthy—ignorance of principle. Aristotle presents choice as a technical process of finding means to ends that are not chosen but wished for, so that the differences in character evidently come down to the wishes that determine ends. Yet wishes seem determined by the good as it appears to each. In concluding this section Aristotle insists that virtue and vice are "up to us," while offering arguments that continue calling into question whether anyone ever knowingly chooses to pursue bad ends or develop a bad character. Raising the possibility that character is determined chiefly by good vision, he upholds moral responsibility in a sense while tacitly conceding serious limits of our freedom to be other than we are.