The original intention of the translator, when he began work in 1940 on the suggestion, and with the encouragement, of Sir Richard Livingstone was to produce a simple and possibly shortened version of the Politics for the benefit of English readers who were not versed in the classics but were interested in the general history of social and political theory. The original intention has not been abandoned, but it has been partly modified and partly extended. It has been modified in the sense that any idea of shortening the Politics has been dropped. Aristotle is too pithy to be made still pithier. It is expansion, rather than contraction, with the text of the Politics demands. Little could profitably have been omitted: a shortened version would have been little shorter, and yet would have been incomplete; and the translator respected the original too much to sacrifice even its minor details.