Ryan Alan - On Aristotle : saving politics from philosophy

On Machiavelli: The Search for Glory

On Politics: A History of Political Thought:
From Herodotus to the Present

Liberal Anxieties and Liberal Education

John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism

Bertrand Russell: A Political Life

Property

Property and Political Theory

J. S. Mill

The Philosophy of the Social Sciences

The Philosophy of John Stuart Mill

Copyright 2014, 2012 by Alan Ryan

Portions previously published in On Politics: A History of Political Thought: From
Herodotus to the Present

All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
First Edition

For information about permission to
reproduce selections from this book,
write to Permissions, Liveright Publishing Corporation,
a division of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.,
500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110

For information about special discounts for bulk
purchases, please contact W. W. Norton Special Sales at
specialsales@wwnorton.com or 800-233-4830

Book design by Ellen Cipriano
Production manager: Anna Oler

ISBN 978-0-87140-706-1
ISBN 978-0-87140-749-8 (e-book)

Liveright Publishing Corporation
500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110
www.wwnorton.com

W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.
Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT

CONTENTS

I N THE INTRODUCTION TO On Politics, I suggested that one measure of the books success would be the readers who went and read the works of the authors I discussed. Some readers suggested that I might encourage them to do so by taking chapters of On Politics and adding to them substantial extracts from the works I hoped they would read. What follows is exactly that, with a short introduction to provide some of the context that the chapters original placement in On Politics would have provided. As before, I am grateful to Bob Weil and William Menaker at Liveright, as well as to the Norton production team, for their help in making an authors life as easy as it can plausibly be made.

A RISTOTLE WROTE HIS TREATISE on political systems during the last years of Athenian democracy, or more exactly, during the last years in which Athens existed as a fully independent sovereign state. Like many other Greek cities, Athens preserved democratic arrangements for managing its local affairs long after it had fallen under the control of the kingdom of Macedon and then of the successors of Alexander the Great. Indeed, the Athenians periodically attempted to recover their autonomy even after the Greek-speaking Mediterranean had been conquered by the Romans in the second century BCE; the last of these revolts ended with the citys being sacked by the forces of the Roman dictator Sulla in 86 BCE. During the fourth century BCE the rising power in the Greek world was the kingdom of Macedon. After the Battle of Chaeronea, in 338, when a Macedonian army led by Alexander the Greats father, Philip II, defeated the combined forces of Athens and Thebes, Athens was forced to accept the authority of a Macedonian regent. The great orator Demosthenes made his name and imperiled his life by urging the Athenians to revolt against their subordination; the label Philippic has stuck to such speeches ever since. An opportunity arose when Alexander died in Babylon in 323, but when the Athenian navy encountered the Macedonian fleet at Amorgos in 322, it turned tail and fled to Athens; the rule of Alexanders regent, Antipater, was restored, Demosthenes committed suicide, and from then on Athens would be at the mercy of successive empires, first Hellenistic, then Roman, finally Ottoman. Nonetheless, Athens remained at the center of the philosophical world, and the teachers of Stoicism and Epicureanism never lacked for students; Platonism was taught in the Academy until 83 BCE, and the Academy was definitively suppressed only in 529 CE, by the emperor Justinian. For political purposes, however, Athens was a provincial city in empires whose fate was determined elsewhere. Not until the war of independence that began in 1821 was Greece liberated once more; the capital was initially established at Nauplia, and moved to Athens after 1834.