Like a Fiery Elephant

Garver’s book is a major, and wholly original, treatment of Aristotle’s treatise on the meanings and implications of the idea that human beings are political animals.  If people can only become virtuous by active participation in the political community, this poses a central dilemma for Garver:  How is the Politics at one and the same time philosophical and practical?   The answer turns on tracing the different kinds of relations between the good life and the good constitutions (and so, between ethics and politics as modes of inquiry).  Garver also deals with the question of how studying the Politics can help us understand politics more generally, in particular politics in the 21st century.