Abstract

Despite its importance both historically and within the Aristotelian corpus, and despite the outpouring of first-rate scholarship on Aristotle in the past thirty years, the Politics has received much less attention than it deserves. This situation is, however, beginning to be rectified. The magisterial four-volume nineteenth-century commentary by W. L. Newman has been joined in recent years by numerous new translations as well as commentaries by Richard Robinson with supplementary material by David Keyt on Politics III-IV, Trevor Saunders on Politics I and II, P. Simpson on the whole of the Politics, and in German by E. Schütrumpf on Politics I-VI. Richard Kraut’s new translation of and commentary on Politics VII and VIII, which provides Aristotle’s account of the ideal city, is an extremely distinguished contribution to our understanding of the Politics.