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Aristotle: Democracy and Political Science. Delba Winthrop. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
 
Delba Winthrop’s Aristotle: Democracy and Political Science is an outstanding piece of work. No, it is one of those pieces of scholarships that challenge future generations of scholars to follow in her footsteps and do to other thinkers and their works what she does to Aristotle's Politics III. Yet…

The problem of power is one of perennial interest and importance in human life, but at no period in history has it presented itself with greater urgency and insistence than in the days of St. Augustine. For, during his manhood, the Empire, which for so many centuries had guarded the frontiers of organized society, was tottering to its fall. Everywhere…

What does a politician “do”? Some would have it that he does not do much of anything. Others think that whatever it is that he does, he usually makes things worse. Politicians certainly talk a lot. Their speeches sometimes move our souls or save our civilization like those of Pericles, Cicero, Henry V, Lincoln, or Churchill. The talk of politicians…

The Centrality of the Regime for Political Science. Clifford Angell Bates, Jr. Warsaw, Poland: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Waszawskiego, 2016.
 
The Centrality of the Regime for Political Science examines the political community as Aristotelian regimes rather than the Machiavellian state. For Aristotle, the regime is the political community that emerges out of discrete and heterogeneous parts, like the households, while the state for…

I thank Steven McGuire for organizing this symposium and Lee Trepanier for publishing it here on Voegelinview. Away from the friendships unfriendly that dominate the internet and social media, Voegelinview is an online forum for serious discussion open to anyone who wishes to participate. I am grateful to the contributors—Carol Cooper, Rudy Hernandez, James Greenaway, and Joshua Bowman— for taking…

In The Form of Politics, John von Heyking directs his readers to the critical importance of friendship in the political thought of Aristotle and Plato. The title nicely captures the key finding of the book: true friendship between individuals was thought by Aristotle and Plato to provide an analog for the harmony that might be achieved in a political community.…

John von Heyking’s analysis of friendship in The Form of Politics centers on the Greek concept of sunaisthesis, the triangle of perception and recognition that occurs when two friends, both interiorly oriented towards the good, are simultaneously “beholding the good while beholding one another beholding the good.”[1] Von Heyking argues that sunaisthesis, which is characteristic of Aristotelian “virtue-friendship,” is both…

The Italian philosopher and statesman, Benedetto Croce, once wrote that, “politics and filth are so frequently identified in the ordinary conversation of people that the thoughtful person is rather puzzled by the situation. Why should politics, one of the fundamental activities of man, one of the perpetual forms of the human spirit, alone enjoy homage of such contemptuous language? We…

Aristotle (385-322 B.C.) writes in the Nicomachean Ethics that the end of politics is to engender “a certain character in the citizens and to make them good and disposed to perform noble actions.”1  For that reason, statesmen must have some knowledge of the human psyche.2 If Aristotle’s observation means something more than that politicians should have a good grasp of…