SOURCE: "Practical Man: Politics," in Aristotle, Ernest Benn Limited, 1932, pp. 157-62.

In the following excerpt, Mure surveys Aristotle's Politics, asserting that Aristotle criticizes and completes the "broad outline of Platonic theory." Mure notes Aristotle's views on the role of the state, classes, and citizenship, and comments on the similarities and differences between Aristotle's and Plato's political philosophies.

… Aristotle's Politics contains several sets of lectures, and some of them are fragmentary.¹ But no other work of his displays more clearly the vast masses of fact which he mastered and analysed in order both to criticise and to complete the broad outline of Platonic theory. In history and politics he is as acute and comprehensive an observer as he is in the animal world. We can here only sketch his political views as a part of his whole system, but scarcely a chapter of the Politics has failed directly or...