About this edition

This is the complete text of Aristotle’s Politics in the translation of Benjamin Jowett (1885), the version that shaped how generations of English readers have met the work. Eight books, in their traditional chapter divisions, each paragraph numbered for citation.

On the numbering

Scholars cite the Politics by Bekker number — the page, column, and line of the 1831 Greek edition (e.g. 1252a). Those line numbers are keyed to the Greek and cannot be placed precisely within any English prose translation, so this edition gives the Bekker page-range for each book and uses Book · Chapter · ¶ for exact reference within the translation — for instance, I.2.5.

Text source

The Internet Classics Archive (classics.mit.edu) — Jowett translation, public domain