Adriel M. Trott offers a meticulous reading of Aristotle's Politics that challenges many of the prevailing interpretations. While nearly all conceptions of political community in the history of political thought derive from premises based on the “logic of exclusion,” Aristotle's political theory, rightly understood, is fundamentally inclusive (5). Modern social-contract theorists and even Aristotle's premodern counterparts describe a relationship between nature and reason which is either hierarchical or a fundamental opposition. Trott argues, by contrast, that Aristotle's dynamic account of the activity of reason “as joined to the work of reason in the human being and the polis” is unique and should be recovered as a powerful resource for contemporary political theory (6). Trott's book is both technically proficient and timely, showing how Aristotle's political theory could supplement current controversies regarding refugees, the stateless, and protest movements such as Occupy. Aristotle's Politics shows how the political community is grounded in and emerges from the human being's active participation and deliberation about the polis even when the status of the participants themselves is contested (206).

Trott constructs a holistic account of Aristotle's political theory in the first five chapters. These consider in turn Aristotle's account of phusis, the polis, the role of logos and freedom, and the place of deliberation and the constitution. She concludes her argument in chapter 6 by taking up two serious objections to an Aristotelian politics of inclusion: the status of women and treatment of slaves. She argues that although there is less evidence that women can be included in political activity within Aristotle's texts, a close reading of Aristotle's account of slavery exposes the hopelessness of defending existing slavery practices on the grounds of nature. These final claims build on and refine previous interpretive claims. Chapters 1 and 2, her most technically challenging and difficult, lay out an argument for understanding phusis as the internal source of change, which then buttresses her account of the naturalness of the polis. When Aristotle argues that the polis is natural, Trott contends that he means natural in a specific way related to his definition of nature in the Physics. In that text, nature is defined as the archē kinēseōs, or the movement within a thing toward an end (19). Among the many implications of defining nature as an internal source of movement is that natural things are “capable of not being and so must make their end an issue for themselves” (25). They must continue to be in motion in order to fulfill their telos. Analysis such as this, woven from disparate sections of Aristotle's Physics, is then directly applied to political life. For example, Trott links generation to political revolution, contending that a revolution can be considered both completed when the regime change is actualized and simultaneously ever in motion to fulfill the ends of the new regime (40).

In chapter 2, Trott applies this internal-source argument from chapter 1 to Politics 1.2, which lays out Aristotle's famous claim for the naturalness of the polis. Trott shows how the seemingly disparate and perhaps contradictory arguments in that chapter make more sense in light of an understanding of nature as that which is grounded in its own motion (81). In one such case—the telic argument—Trott contends that to say the polis is by nature is to say neither that it is given nor that it is a technical instrument of human self-fulfillment, or eudaimonia. Rather, its own activity—the activity of human logos—accomplishes its self-sufficient end (52–53). In an illustration, she distinguishes a completed house from the political community. While a house may be transferred from maker to inhabitant, “no one can do your political activity on your behalf and hand it over to you” (54). Trott's account of the political animal defends the view that our human nature is intimately bound up with our reason (logos) and deliberation (bouleusis). Reason, manifested almost entirely in political community and through discourse, is our capacity to make judgments, to give ourselves ends, to know ourselves, and to pursue living well. Trott emphasizes our choice to pursue the best life for ourselves within the political community but retains the view that theōria is indeed one of the best lives (93, 99). However, she takes issue with those who would cut off the contemplative activity from political life, or make the philosopher absurdly self-sufficient: “it will still be phronesis that determines whether [the contemplative life] should be pursued or not” (100).

Ultimately reason and its derivative, deliberation, are shown to be definitive of human nature and also the movement internal to and definitive of the nature of the polis (133). In chapter 5, “Deliberation and Constitution,” Trott puts forward a striking definition of constitution as the final cause and the form of the polis. Trott insists that the constitution should not be understood to establish a government but rather to signal the “activity of the community” which can, at times, be at odds with its apparent type (160, 164–65). Indeed, citizens actively appealing to become involved in deliberation about the ends of the polis, even when excluded from that deliberation, are indicative of Aristotle's fundamentally open construction of political community. Trott situates this account of deliberation within contemporary theories of deliberative democracy, observing that Aristotelian deliberation is concerned with both the outcome and the process without allowing “theory” to close “off the question of who is included” (159). She also distinguishes her argument from those who appropriate Aristotle as a classical liberal, those who would accuse him of totalitarian thinking, and those who would align him strictly on either side of the presumed contest between nature and reason. The extensive references pinpoint key areas of disagreement and consensus with Aristotle scholars such as David Keyt, Mary Nichols, Jill Frank, Eugene Garver, Fred Miller, and Bernard Yack.

Trott's thesis of an inclusive Aristotle challenges more conventional views of Aristotle as “aristocratic and restrictive” (202). The activity of “consider[ing] what life amounts to living well, even when we are wrong” shows us to be human, and therefore as worthy of inclusion (202–3). Surprisingly, although the argument is intensely concerned with living well, it rarely mentions that distinctively Aristotelian component of living well: the virtues. Moreover, Trott does not take up a discussion of what constitutes deliberation, as Aristotle himself does in the Nicomachean Ethics book 3, and then again in book 6 as a subset of his investigation into phronēsis. Possibly the book avoids giving substantive content to deliberation, aside from a lengthy discussion of the fraught distinction between ruling and deliberation, because to do so would be to close Aristotelian politics off again from those whom the interpretation is at pains to include. One might wish that the book would offer more careful investigation into the detailed examples of constitutions Aristotle himself presents in the Politics, or at greater length in the Aristotelian Constitution of Athens. Trott's argument downplays the roles of statesmanship, prudence, and their accompanying virtues in the work of the constitution, as well as other physical limits on the size and scope of the city. Trott's view is that constitutions ultimately preserve themselves by “becoming more like… the mixed constitution,” and by involving more citizens in ruling the polis (173). Whatever reservations one might have concerning Trott's interpretation of Aristotle's constitutionalism, this book makes an important contribution to contemporary debates surrounding equality and deliberation in contemporary democracy.