This volume is one of the best books on Aristotle's Politics written in the last couple of decades. In my estimation, books written about the Politics have recently fallen into three broad categories: (a) chronological, book-by-book studies of textual or philosophical issues in the Politics; (b) focused and sustained arguments about a particular (and sometimes tangential) issue in political philosophy as it pertains to Aristotle; and (c) studies arguing that contemporary directions in politics and political philosophy could use a serious infusion from some of the core ideas in Aristotle's political framework. R.’s book nimbly transcends these categories, because he attempts to offer a new way of understanding the structure of Aristotle's political philosophy as a whole. This is a welcome strategy, not only because it yields a more cohesive whole and a more satisfying read, but also because, unlike many recent books on Aristotle's Politics, R. aims to give an overall interpretation of Aristotle's project in the Politics, while also situating that interpretation in the scholarly tradition. As a result, R.’s book is a must-read for anyone aiming to understand Aristotle's political thinking as a whole, and it is an excellent choice as a book to be used alongside the primary text itself in a graduate-level course on Aristotle's Politics (and ethical works more generally).

R. aims to explain how it is that Aristotle's political framework can allow for strict hierarchical arrangements of power while nevertheless maintaining a firm commitment to the core insight that all citizens should participate in governance. To do this, he sets up a tension central to Aristotle's framework of regime types, noting that, although Aristotle tells us that it is possible to have ‘correct’ and ‘deviant’ forms of monarchy (and aristocracy), it also appears as though his framework simultaneously rules out both kinds from meeting the correctness standard he lays out (if citizens are defined by ‘sharing in rule’, and correct forms of government aim to benefit all citizens, then all forms of monarchy aim to benefit only the monarch, since in monarchies only the monarchs ‘share in rule’, thus collapsing the distinction between ‘correct’ and ‘deviant’ forms of monarchy). Chapter 1 is dedicated to revealing the force of this tension, and so serves as an excellent development of the components of Aristotle's political categorisation schema. At times in the primary text, this schema can appear so straightforward as to be simple-minded, but R. does an excellent job of unpacking the complexity of the schema and the way it relates to claims Aristotle makes about citizen participation, while also orienting his understanding squarely within the entirety of the scholarly literature on this issue.

The remaining five chapters proceed to develop a solution to the tension set up in Chapter 1. Along the way, R. manages to touch on, and offers sustained, orienting commentary about, many major debates in Aristotle's Politics. Some issues he raises, such as Aristotle on friendship, are not central to the Politics as a work in its own right, but most are important for any reader of Aristotle's Politics to grapple with. R.’s book makes it particularly easy for a reader steeped in the primary text, but not in the secondary literature, to get a look at where the scholarly tradition currently stands on a wide range of philosophical issues (including the difference between household and political rule, the value of political participation in a human life, what it means to be a citizen and ‘share in rule’, what it means for the good life to be self-sufficient, and what Aristotle means by ‘political community’). For this reason, I highly recommend making R.’s book one of the first pit stops on the road to catching up on the most recent developments in scholarship on Aristotle's Politics.

At the same time, the impressiveness of R.’s grasp of the scholarly literature, while a boon to the uninitiated, can be a bit distracting at times. Parts of Chapter 2 and much of Chapter 3 especially are of questionable importance to R.’s main argument. Stated in the most flat-footed way, R. solves the tension he sets up in Chapter 1 by denying two tenants of Aristotle interpretation: that political participation has intrinsic value, and being a citizen just means being a ruler. Although the latter sits front and centre in its own chapter (5), the former comes well into an extensive and arguably unnecessary discussion of household rule in Chapter 3. I welcome R.’s meticulous denial of these two pillars of Aristotelian dogma in their own right, as his understanding breathes new life into debates that have begun to feel stale. However, the overall argument of the book would have been better served if the two denials had been more elegantly served up as solutions to the initial tension in the political categorisation schema right from the beginning. For example, in the introduction, it could hardly be said that it is clear that R.’s overall argument in the main hinges on these two key claims. While one of R.’s main strengths is to make Aristotle's Politics and its major debates easier to dive into for the graduate-level initiate, at the same time he makes it difficult for that same graduate student to see clearly and exactly what his own argument hinges on.

Ultimately, whether or not one finds R.’s overall interpretation of the Politics persuasive turns almost entirely on the arguments he makes against the intrinsic value of political participation and on his understanding of what it means to be a citizen according to Aristotle. I find both of his arguments on these two issues persuasive, but part of that is because of my prior scepticism about the intrinsic value of political participation. I am somewhat doubtful that many of R.’s opponents on this issue will change their minds due to his argument. R.’s discussion of citizenship is another matter entirely. Despite the many articles and books that explicitly aim to discuss citizenship in Aristotle's Politics, the discussion in Chapter 5 manages to feel as though it were entirely new interpretative material. R. carves out a new understanding of the politically active citizen, one where a fully-fledged citizen need not have as much authority and political power as citizens who occupy more official institutional roles in the ruling body. Oddly, R.’s interpretation of Aristotle on citizenship creates a political story of citizenship that is in many ways much closer to political structures today (i.e. representation in democracies) than many contemporary philosophical accounts of citizens and their deliberative role in governance (i.e. robust accounts of deliberative democracy). In my view, one of the distinctive contributions R.’s book makes is to establish the possibility of a gap between the politically active citizen and the ruling body of a political community. This is a gap we take for granted in the contemporary political world, but it is a space hardly noticed or commented on in discussions of Aristotle's Politics. Opening up this space for further interpretative work is one of the central contributions of the volume.