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According to Aristotle, nature (physis), habit or custom (ethos), and reason (logos) are the first principles of social explanation as well as the first principles of moral excellence. Just as we explain the order found in a polity as the product of natural, customary and rationally stipulated kinds of order, so we become excellent persons through our good natural potential, the development of that potential in right habits, and sound ethical reflection upon those habits. For Aristotle, nature and convention are not mutually exclusive; rather, nature, custom, and reason form a hierarchy such that custom presupposes nature, but cannot be reduced to it, while reason presupposes custom, but cannot be reduced to custom. It is argued that Aristotle's account of social order is superior both to the prior Sophistic accounts and to the account in Aquinas. Because Aristotle roots the order of deliberate human action in the order of nature and the order of custom, he focuses his ethical analysis not on the abstract freedom of choice but on the concrete freedom of the person who must act.
The best and most illuminating approach to Aristotelian political science would be an actual empirical investigation of politics oriented to a pressing normative concern-for example, a study of the effects of economic polarization on democratic participation. Such an Aristotelian political science would be at once empirical and ethical-in stark contrast to both our contemporary philosophical ethics, which generally lacks a concern for the empirical context of moral excellence, and our contemporary social sciences, which either lack a normative dimension altogether or degrade practical reason into an instrument for the satisfaction of desire ("rational choice"). Presumably an Aristotelian political science would reject both our apolitical ethics and our amoral political science; it would combine a rich empirical analysis of how the concrete circumstances of choice shape the capacities of individuals to variously realize or ruin the genuine goods of human fulfillment. Such a political science would attempt to interpret and explain individual ethical choices in their political contexts: How does our democratic regime, for example, shape our marriages and our families, our ways of teaching and worshiping? Or, more generally, how do our political and economic institutions promote or frustrate excellence of practical deliberation among our citizens?...