Jill Frank's book seeks to make Aristotle's political philosophy “available for democratic political practice” (p. 8). Her use of Aristotle in this regard resembles most closely that of Hannah Arendt, to whom she refers in her opening paragraph and whose treatment of work, action, and the vita activa would appear to have influenced Frank's discussion of the “work” of politics referred to in her subtitle. But in bringing out the Aristotle who “harbors democratic possibilities,” the author also draws support, as well as distinguishes herself, from scholars such as Martha Nussbaum, Stephen Salkever, Fred Miller, Arlene Saxonhouse, Mary Nichols, and Alastair MacIntyre, who have, in very different ways, sought the aid of Aristotle to inform contemporary political life. A Democracy of Distinction thus engages a student of the ancient Academy in a serious conversation with the modern Academy. As Frank rightly says in closing, “Aristotle's ethical and political lessons are no less timely for us than they were for fourth century Athens” (p. 180). By her own admission, the lessons she draws may not represent the view of the “definitive Aristotle,” but they do represent, she suggests, his effort both to reform fourth-century Athens and to lay the ground for a timeless possibility: a “democracy of distinction” that she sincerely and earnestly seeks to promote (pp. 8, 139–42).

As support for this possibility, Frank offers a reading of Aristotle, especially his Nicomachean Ethics and Politics, that begins from complex interpretations of his views of human activity (energeia), action (praxis), work (ergon), and capacity (dunamis). Her interpretations entail close textual analyses, and although she relies on translations of Aristotle's texts, she sometimes modifies these translations to be more precise, though in a crucial instance with a puzzling result (NE 1098b31–1099a3 on pp. 34–35 and again on p. 70). The general thrust of her discussion is the important claim that “prohairetic” (lit. “choosing”) activity is “characteristically human activity insofar as it discloses the character, the soul, and therefore the nature of the one who acts, specifically by revealing the degree to which, in the actions he undertakes, the actor is using the capacity for logos he possesses by virtue of being human” (p. 34).

Why is this account of human activity so important? As the book proceeds, it becomes clear that the politics Frank's Aristotle recommends presupposes that there is “nothing immutable or necessary about human nature,” and therefore that human activity is “nonessentialist and internally plural” (p. 15). Frank's first chapter is thus devoted to unpacking Aristotle's treatment of nature to show, first, that “claims about the identity of natural beings will … be claims about their activities” and, second, that these activities themselves develop out of the individual's own “self-making” and the “making” or shaping that results from social and political institutions (pp. 40, 46–52). The very mutability and plurality of the human soul, then, as well as the “self-sovereignty” characterized by prohairetic activity, are mirrored in and supported by a democratic and pluralistic politics: “A unity in difference exemplifies Aristotle's understanding of the harmonious whole that is the soul and of the harmonious whole that is the polity as well” (p. 52).

If Frank's consideration of the relation between the soul and the polity is circular at times—they both shape and are shaped by one another—it is a circularity she seeks to exploit. For ruling and being ruled is the essential activity of a citizen, and “the work of each citizen (individual prohairetic activity) and the work of citizens together (collective prohairetic activity) is to unify the polity in a way that preserves its essential plurality” (p. 52). In the relation between the individual and the political order, that is, the causal arrow “points in both directions” (p. 11).

Frank's effort to find in Aristotle's thought support for a democratic and pluralistic order leads to accounts of property (Chapter 2), justice (Chapter 3), and law (Chapter 4), about which I can raise but a few points. In general, in sketching a nonessentialist politics that nonetheless can constitute a “democracy of distinction,” Frank acknowledges that she walks a fine line between constructivism or positivism and absolutism or natural standards. But can she keep to this line? She struggles to do so at several points in her discussion, most obviously in her treatment of justice and the law. For she rejects legal positivism only then to disavow natural law. She argues that “the source of justice is not a transcendent and apolitical moral code.” Rather, justice is “the good judgment of citizens that decides which laws to follow and thereby produces and preserves the rule of law,” and this judgment is “political practice” (p. 116). Good judgment develops from “proper practice” or, in the case of property, “proper use” (pp. 69–74), and the moral and intellectual virtues on which judgment depends arise from the repeated actions of a self-sovereign individual in community with other self-sovereign individuals (pp. 49–52). Judgments and institutions are constructed, therefore, from proper practice and use, and Frank's account of justice, especially her emphasis on reciprocity as the core of both corrective and distributive justice, suggests that the standard that rightly informs practice is fundamentally democratic (see especially pp. 103–11). Her protests to the contrary, in other words, there is a natural standard for Frank, namely, the “harmonious whole” and “unity in difference” constituted by a democratic and pluralistic soul and political order (see also her discussion of the “good polity” on p. 143).

In her final chapter, “The Polity of Friendship,” Frank seeks to show that a community of individuals can cohere through “enlarged self-interest” and “mutual advantage” (pp. 147–63, 172–78). Here she offers interpretations of Aristotle's treatment of “use friendships” and the best regime that culminate in the claim that the truly best polity is a “mixed” constitution in which the prohairetic activity of each individual citizen both expresses his or her individual virtue and contributes to the common good of all. Such a constitution is democratic and pluralistic but also, it turns out, aristocratic and exclusive—only those willing to take on the responsibility of this “work” of politics are deserving of ruling and being ruled in turn (p. 178, see also pp. 174–75). Indeed, Frank's democracy of distinction seems, at times, all work and no play, and one wonders how many of us would choose its responsibilities when even voting feels like a chore.

Frank's democratic reading of Aristotle possesses many virtues, especially in combating formulaic or formalistic accounts of Aristotle, in showing his freedom from conventional Greek prejudices, and in drawing attention to the dialectical nature of his treatises. But her Aristotle also often sounds like a good member of the modern Academy, and a reader might wonder what necessity there is to return to his Ethics and Politics to support the pluralism we already love. Nevertheless, if we accept Frank's denial that she presents the definitive Aristotle—a denial that retreats to the background as the democratic Aristotle asserts himself—we should then ask if something of distinct value is not also lost or cut off by her reading. One need not say with Pascal that writing the Politics was the least serious part of Aristotle's life, or that Aristotle approached politics as if trying to bring order to a madhouse, to ask whether there is a more serious, and more radical, side to his thought than a democratic reading can uncover. In Frank's account especially, it is difficult to see how Aristotle's political philosophy could culminate, as it does, in the demotion rather than the elevation of politics and the active life; her reading thus makes it hard to understand the nature and status of the alternative that emerges as best—philosophy and the contemplative life. From her democratic Aristotle, there may be lessons to be learned, but Aristotle himself has things to say that we modern academics urgently need to hear. It is possible, however, that the use of Aristotle to defend the reigning orthodoxy, even by such well-intentioned works as this one, may render us ever more deaf not only to the answers he might teach us but even to the very questions he thought fundamental.