This chapter builds on Stephen Salkever’s experience as one of the first political theorists to teach comparatively in a serious and sustained way. This work began in the 1980s with a co-taught course comparing ancient Greek and ancient Chinese texts. For Salkever, comparative teaching is a practice of what he calls liberal education, which aims to foster the habits of mind that sustain curiosity and critical self-reflection. Texts are chosen not as representative of a particular culture or tradition but as exemplars of original thinking that unsettled the self-understandings of their authors’ contemporaries as much as they might unsettle ours. In this chapter, Salkever reflects on the contributions of comparative political theory to “deparochializing” and “provincializing” Western political theory and even liberal education as such. Both ways of construing the tasks of comparative political theory see it as a form of “constructive escape” from our received opinions, which can limit our capacity for political judgment if they are left unexamined. Salkever draws out the implications of this way of understanding comparative political theory as an educational practice, highlighting the importance of juxtaposing contradictory texts within a given tradition (to resist cultural essentialism) as well as finding continuities across traditions.

This volume is a companion to Greek “political thought,” rather than “political philosophy” or “political theory” - why? One reason will be apparent from the table of contents: the chapters have a broader scope than the terms “philosophy” and “theory” would suggest, and their authors have been trained and teach in a variety of fields, including philosophy, classical literature and history, and political theory. But there is a more substantial reason behind the choice of title. There are three propositions that unite these chapters and that define a central tendency in recent interpretive work on Greek political thought:

1. Our consideration of fundamental questions about politics in the world of ancient Greece must be pursued in texts that cross the standard modern genre distinctions among philosophy, history, and literature. Taking these modern academic distinctions too seriously as a guide to inquiry is an anachronistic mistake and can result in serious distortions of the Greek texts. Treating Plato as a post-Kantian systematic and doctrinal philosopher is one important example of such a distortion; treating Thucydides as a proto-“scientific” historian is another.

2. But the purpose of studying these Greek texts and practices is not archival or antiquarian, nor is it a romantic longing to escape from modernity to a lost idyllic world; instead, the ultimate goal inspiring these studies is to bring voices embodied in these ancient texts into our contemporary discussions of political thought and action.

3. At the same time, this attempt to bring ancient Greek voices into modern discussions will itself be anachronistic unless we are very careful to place the Greek texts in the context of debate and action in which they were written.

The Nicomachean Ethics and the Politics present themselves to us as a single course of lectures, the former anticipating the latter, the latter expanding on and referring back to the former. But it is still too often the case that the two texts are taught and studied as if they were utterly separate treatises, concerned with two different subject matters. Aristotle tells us in the first book of the Ethics (1.2, 1094a-b) that his subject matter in that book as well as in the Politics can be classified as an especially comprehensive kind of political science (politikē), and yet, in spite of this clear statement of Aristotle's pedagogical intention, for many years it was a commonplace to assign the two works to separate academic departments. The NE was there to be taught and argued over by members of philosophy departments, while the Politics required the attention of political theorists. For a variety of reasons, this is now, fortunately, not always the case; while it is not quite yet the norm, one frequently finds interpretations of one text drawing on the other. But pedagogy has lagged behind scholarship on this point, and my aim here is to help correct that gap by proposing a way of reading the NE and the Politics that ties the two together in terms that are accessible to students, and readers in general, who approach the works from different backgrounds and levels of theoretical sophistication.