Abstract

Cui felicitati? Whose happiness counts and whose does not? Aristotle’s ideal polis in Book VII of the Politics is supposed to be a place where ‘anyone at all’ can live a flourishing life and yet when we examine it more closely it seems that only a rather small minority of human beings within it flourish while most are relegated to a subordinate status incompatible with the achievement of their happiness. Several interpretations of who counts as active participant in Aristotle’s ideal polis are considered and criticized before I offer an alternative, the ‘dialectical reading’, in order to make sense of Aristotle’s seemingly unjustified political exclusions in a way that does justice to the teleological framework of his political thought.