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This thought-provoking book will appeal to both specialists and newcomers to Aristotle. Specialists will welcome the attention to original texts that underpin many of our ideas on politics, business studies, and other social sciences, whilst newcomers will appreciate the lucid summaries and applications that make Aristotle fascinatingly accessible.

'Evidence-based policy' and 'evidence-based management' are increasingly popular ways of describing the relationship between research and practice. The majority discussing the evidence-based approach have tended to be in favour: here, 'believers'. Yet this approach has also attracted critics: 'heretics'. Understanding of such a division can be enhanced by dialectics: a process which tries to destabilize, reconcile or transcend apparent opposites. This divide is not simply a consequence of differences relating to epistemology, but also aesthetics: a set of reactions to the world seen as art. So, to analyse this divide requires a correspondingly rich model of dialectic. Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy offers this in its account of Apolline and Dionysian responses to the world. Dialectics supports a move beyond synchronous critique, and allows speculation as to the future development of the evidence-based approach.

The paper examines the control of power, using an account of the public good developed from Aristotle. It identifies three different perspectives on the relationship between governance (the control of power) and the public good: a 'cybernetic' perspective, an 'axiological' perspective, and a perspective of 'critique'. This framework offers a way to scrutinize the exercise of power, and to evaluate the linkages between a political administration and its citizenry. To evaluate an administration's legacy, this framework suggests we should study: (1) how an administration controls power over time; (2) how an administration exhibits virtue; and (3) how an administration creates conditions which enable its citizens to live the good life. Narrative theory is one basis for empirical development of this framework. This contributes to some long‐standing debates in management, public administration, economics and political science. It also enables critical examination of a fashionable, though vague, term: 'public value'.

Beginning with a brief review of the governance literature, a definition of governance in the National Health Service of England and Wales (NHS) is offered. This introduces an analysis of NHS reform, as presented in the recent policy literature. Using narrative theory, I critique this literature with reference to three key actors: the new organizational form of the 'Foundation Trust', NHS staff, and NHS patients. For each actor, a motif is identified and examined: 'freedom' for Foundation Trusts, 'clinical governance' for staff, and 'choice' for patients. Each of these motifs is instrumental in the narrative on NHS reform, whose main themes are emancipation, progress and duty. These are common to other political projects. This critique makes the rhetoric underpinning the recent policy literature more explicit, and underlines the created, contingent nature of New Labour's account of NHS reform.