The Political Context of Aristotle's Categories of Justice

Abstract

A ristotle's account of justice in Book V of the Nicomachean Ethics has provided the starting point and basic categories for subsequent discussion to the present day.' In spite of the importance of Aristotle's discussion, it has remained in the background, and while at the foundation of contemporary work, it has ceased to provide a fundamental alternative as a theory of justice. One reason may be that in the contemporary use of Aristotle's categories, his argument has been abstracted from the political context in which it was advanced. The object of this paper is to attempt to recover this political dimension of Aristotle's analysis by emphasising the connection between his four main categories of justice (universal, distributive, corrective, and reciprocity) and important political themes in the Nicomachean Ethics and Politics.

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