The primacy of civic virtue in Aristotle’s politics and its educational implications

The relationship between character education and civic or citizenship education continues to be marked by tensions, although both forms tend to draw historically on Aristotle’s corpus. The aim of this article is to unpack the association between the civic and the moral (characterological) in Aristotle’s writings, with a special focus on his Politics, and to draw some relevant lessons about how the tensions in question could be alleviated. The article delineates different kinds of primacy in Aristotelian virtue ethics and shows how the civic is (teleo)logically prior to the moral, while secondary in a developmental and analytical sense. A subsidiary aim is to shed light on the relationship between phronesis and the civic virtues.