Aristotle's Politics: Critical Essays

There's a BMCR review here of a new book of essays on Aristotle's Politics, edited by Richard Kraut and Thomas Skultety. As it's common with most such edited volumes, the articles seem to be rather disparate in focus and approach. (The authors range from John Cooper to Josiah Ober, Dorothea Frede, and Malcolm Schofield, which, though generally within the mainstream of Ancient Philosophy scholarship, are quite disparate in philosophical and historical orientation). Nevertheless, all the authors try to assess the applicability of Aristotle to contemporary political thought; these are not mere antiquarian articles.

What struck me about this volume (at least judging from the review) was the extreme disparity of judgments about the applicability of Aristotle's thought to modern society, coming from experts that are broadly within the same tradition. Some thought Aristotle was a totalitarian; others, a radical democrat; yet others, that his thought served the narrow interests of a class; some stressed virtue ethics, others a kind of Aristotelian "pluralism;" some asserted that Aristotle had nothing to offer the modern age; others that September 11 makes Aristotle relevant to the dialogue of civilizations that we ought to be having. (No, seriously).

Is this a symptom of the inmense richness of Aristotle's thought, the radical indeterminacy of all interpretation that goes beyond pure textual clarification and minimal historical contextualization, or a problem with the question of "what is Aristotle's thought good for today"? Are we condemned to say that Aristotle's thought can give support to a variety of radically incompatible positions? (Of course, we could also say that some of these positions are radically wrong. My first candidate would be Schofield's vaguely marxist-inflected accusation of Aristotelian "racism" towards the barbarians). And what would be the point, I sometimes wonder, of enlisting Aristotle in one or another cause (or casting him as the enemy of one or another cause)? I do not have much of an answer to these questions, but it seems to me that they sometimes cast some doubt on the enterprise most of us are engaged in.