The extraordinary interest that our time has in Aristotle's Politics is not only an effect of the reverence due to the great books, but a mark of insight. Because behind a text which sets as its horizon a moribund reality in Aristotle's own time – the city – today's reader cannot help but detect the foundation and therefore the foundation of the way in which we think of the relationships between men, and more generally the world of “human things”. The structure and history of societies but also the sound and fury of men's passions, their wiles and their virtues, and even the shadow of the gods on earth, everything is in this inexhaustible text that we have been commenting on, sometimes without knowing it, for twenty-four centuries.