PoliticsAristotle

Aristotle's Politics asks what kind of political community allows human beings to live well. The question is not abstract. It begins from the claim in the Nicomachean Ethics that the good for a human being is best realized in common life, and it works outward from the household to the village to the city-state.

The opening books argue that the polis exists by nature, not merely by convention. Man is a political animal; the one who lives outside the city is either a beast or a god. Aristotle examines the household first (slavery, marriage, property, wealth-getting), then turns to constitutions. Books III through VI classify regimes by who rules and for whose benefit: kingship, aristocracy, and polity are the correct forms; tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy their corruptions. Each regime fails in a characteristic way, and Aristotle traces the revolutions that push one form into another.

Books VII and VIII sketch the best practicable city. Aristotle specifies its population, territory, education, and the character its citizens need. Education occupies him most. Music, gymnastics, and letters shape the young toward virtue; the legislator's real work is not writing laws but forming souls.

The Politics stands behind nearly every later debate about the purpose of government, the justification of slavery, the relation of wealth to citizenship, and whether political life is instrumental or constitutive of human flourishing.