Content area
Full text
Fred D. Miller Jr. Nature, Justice and Rights in Aristotle's "Politics." New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Pp. xvii + 424. Cloth, $49.95
Fred Miller has been writing and thinking about Aristotle's Politics for a good many years now and it is clear from this new book just how fruitful his thinking has been. Nature, Justice and Rights is not only a model of philosophy and scholarship; it must now be acknowledged to be the best overall account of Aristotle's political thought currently available. For, first, Miller examines the several books of the Politics with much care and in considerable detail, paying great attention all the while to the exact structure of particular arguments. His presentation of many of these arguments in logically schematic form is much to be commended and will be welcomed by many readers, both scholarly and lay, as providing just the sort of help they need to get a clear and accurate grip on what it is that Aristotle is saying and why. Second, Miller is thus able to show convincingly that Aristotle's Politics is not an amalgam of ill-fitting treatises, but a carefully crafted whole that contains a unitary and coherent argument. Third, in the process of expounding the...