If Plato was the first Western political philosopher, Aristotle was the first political scientist in today’s sense. Plato’s Republic, for instance, envisages an unworldly political utopia. But in Politics, Aristotle investigates a comprehensive range of political forms and regimes, down to their unglamorous, operational details.
To research the book, Aristotle sent pupils at the Lyceum, his school in Athens, to many Greek city-states to record their constitutions, forming a kind of empirical data set. He also anticipated our social sciences by millennia, taking seriously issues such as the political effects of the unequal distribution of wealth.
