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11 results

Aristotle's Politics
  • A Critical Guide
  • Edited by Thornton Lockwood, Thanassis Samaras
  • Published online:
    05 October 2015
    Print publication:
    09 October 2015
  • Arguably the foundational text of Western political theory, Aristotle's Politics has become one of the most widely and carefully studied works in ethical and political philosophy. This volume of essays offers fresh interpretations of Aristotle's key work and opens new paths for students and scholars to explore. The contributors embrace a variety of methodological approaches that range across the disciplines of classics, political science, philosophy, and ancient history. Their essays illuminate perennial questions such as the relationship between individual and community, the nature of democratic deliberation, and how to improve political institutions. Offering groundbreaking studies that both set Aristotle within the context of his own time and draw on contemporary discussion of his writings, this collection will provide researchers with an understanding of many of the major scholarly debates surrounding this key text.

  • 9 - Family and the question of women in the Laws

  • Edited by Christopher Bobonich, Stanford University, California
  • Book:
    Plato's 'Laws'
    Published online:
    06 December 2010
    Print publication:
    11 November 2010, pp 172-196

  • Summary

    Unlike the Republic, which expresses the ideal of an aristocracy of philosophers, that is, essentially the ideal of rule by the most intellectually talented members of the upper classes, the Laws offers a more traditional paradigm of conservative agrarianism, principally founded on the time-honored model of the Greek soldier-farmer. This farmer is the citizen who serves his city economically by ensuring that his plot remains productive and militarily by serving in the army as a heavy infantryman (hoplitês). In all likelihood, some of the citizens of the Laws are leisured landlords and some self-sufficient but not excessively wealthy farmers regularly toiling on their own land. The conservatism of both groups informs much of the thinking of the Laws on social issues.

    It is in the framework of this conservatism that the family structure espoused in the Laws can be best understood. The formal prerequisite for citizenship is membership in one of the city's 5,040 households (oikoi). In making membership in the oikos the basic criterion for citizenship Plato follows a long and almost universal Greek tradition. The household was the fundamental social and (to a large extent) economic unit of the Greek world. Aristotle understandably treats it as the first social structure out of which the city (polis) eventually emerges (Politics 1252b9–10).

    The land of Magnesia is divided into 5,040 parts to be distributed by lot, one to each head of a family coming into the colony (737c).