Like John Miller’s Kindle single The Polygamist King, Peter L. P. Simpson’s edition of Aristotle’s Regime of the Americans can be acquired for a pittance. What you get if you spring for this slender volume purports to be the printed version of a recently recovered manuscript by the great philosopher himself — which Professor Simpson, who teaches at the CUNY Graduate Center and at the College of Staten Island, purchased from “a shadowy Hittite book dealer near ancient Scepsis in the Troad.”

To be precise, you get the original Greek and an English rendering by Professor Simpson — who has published distinguished translations of and commentaries on Aristotle’s Politics, his Eudemian Ethics, and his Magna Moralia. His commentary on The Politics is widely recognized as an especially fine piece of work.

There are, of course, spoilsports and party-poopers who claim Aristotle never wrote a treatise on the American regime and that this volume is a forgery — that it was composed by Professor Simpson or foisted on that absent-minded academic by unscrupulous persons who are now trying to pass it off to a gullible public as the genuine article. Whether some such charge is true you will have to judge for yourself. I will confess that I do find it worrisome that the depiction of Aristotle on the cover of Professor Simpson’s translation of the Magna Moralia looks an awful lot like the good professor himself. This sort of thing makes one wonder whether the old boy has finally lost it.