 On the other hand, both The Opinions of the People of the Perfect City and The Political Regime or The Principles of Beings begin with a metaphysical part presented as a Neo-Platonic descent followed by a second part dealing with the organization of the city or state and do not treat of being and unity as the most universal notions. The hierarchical structure of the ideal state mirrors the hierarchical emanationist structure presented in the first part. Walzer edited the former with an English translation under the title The Perfect State (1985) and Fauzi M. Najjar edited the latter (1964). Charles Butterworth (2015) provided the first full English translation of The Political Regime in The Political Writings, vol. II, pp. 27–94. The question of how exactly the ontology relates to the Neo-Platonic descent or emanation has not yet been fully clarified, though The Enumeration of the Sciences addresses both aspects. Furthermore, whether the Neo-Platonic descent grounds the political philosophy or metaphysics is simply a rhetorical appeal to make al-Fârâbî’s controversial political and philosophical views palatable to religious authorities and ordinary people is a hotly debated issue. Disciples of Leo Strauss and of Muhsin Mahdi divide al-Fârâbî’s views into exoteric ones for a broad audience and esoteric ones written for an intellectual elite. The exoteric are more compatible with the religious views and speak, for instance, of an immortality of the human soul, whereas such views are deliberately muted in esoteric writings (below we will see that a lost treatise of al-Fârâbî may have denied the immortality of the soul). Among the most recent “Straussian” positions on this debate one can find two papers by Charles E. Butterworth: (1) “How to Read Alafarabi” (2013), and (2) “Alfarabi’s Goal: Political Philosophy, Not Political Theology” (2011). Recently, Philippe Vallat (2019c) attempted to clarify what al-Farabi means by “esoterism,” Some other scholars such as Dimitri Gutas, S. Menn and Th.-A. Druart take Farabian metaphysics, including the Neo-Platonic descent as at the core of al-Fârâbî’s works, even if in his Philosophy of Aristotle, al-Fârâbî treats little of metaphysics. We will say more on this controversy in presenting ethics and politics, which in the Farabian classification of sciences, follow metaphysics.