Political

«The Nicomachean Ethics - dedicated to Aristotle's son Nicomachus, says Porphyry; edited by him, say others - is the most brilliant set of lecture notes ever written; and just because they are lecture notes, with all the disadvantages of occasional compression or repetition or inaccurate cross-referencing, we can almost hear in them from time to time the tone of Aristotle's spoken voice. It is magisterial and it is unique; but it is also a voice that seeks to be more than merely Aristotle's own. "What do we say on such and such a topic?" is a question that he continuously asks, not "What do I say?" Who is this "we" in whose name he writes? Aristotles takes himself not to be inventing an account of the virtues, but to be articulating an account that is implicit in the thought, utterance and action of an educated Athenian. He seeks to be the rational voice of the best citizens of the best city-state; for he holds that the city-state is the unique political form in whitch alone the virtues of human life can be genuinely and fully exhibited. Thus a philosophical theory of the virtues is a theory whose subject-matter is that pre-philosophical theory already implicit in and presupposed by the best contemporary practice of the virtues. This of course does not entail that practice, and the pre-philosophical theory implicit in practice are normative for philosophy necessarily has a sociological, or as Aristotle would have said, political starting-point.»

Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, a study in moral theory