Rethinking the medieval reception of Aristotle's Politics in western studies
This article provides an overview of Western scholarship on the reception of Aristotle's Politics in medieval political thought. For a long time, numerous articles, monographs, and textbooks, following the lead of W. Ullmann, have repeated that the return of the Politics to Europe marked the birth of modern political theory, as the old Augustinian paradigm gave way to political Aristotelianism, which furnished thinkers with a rich toolkit for the desacralization of politics. In the relatively recent past, the problem of the reception of the Politics became the subject of scholarly debate among Western historians. Contemporary research has begun to debunk the myth of an Aristotelian revolution in political philosophy after 1260. It can be stated that the refutation of W. Ullmann's concept has gone so far that the very notion of political Aristotelianism has become problematic. Among scholars, there are proponents of a radical solution involving a complete rejection of this concept. It must be acknowledged that on a number of specific issues concerning the nature and depth of Aristotle's influence, researchers have so far failed to reach a consensus and develop a universally accepted framework. Nevertheless, the very fact of the intensive debates and fruitful investigations undertaken by foreign medievalists in recent decades has made it possible to substantially update our understanding of how the European Middle Ages appropriated the Aristotelian legacy. It has become evident that this process was a far more complex, multifaceted, and contradictory phenomenon than was assumed within the framework of earlier, more simplified historiographical approaches. It included not only direct borrowing but also creative reworking, selection, adaptation to local intellectual and religious contexts, and sometimes unexpected syntheses with other philosophical traditions.
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