Politics

Politics is Aristotle's treatise on the polis, the Greek city-state, and on how people should best live together in communities. He presents it as the continuation of the enquiry begun in the Nicomachean Ethics, on the ground that the study of the good life leads necessarily to the study of the community in which that life is led, and he ranks the study of communities above the study of individuals. The method is comparative and descriptive rather than deduced from first principles, and it rests on a research programme in which the constitutions of many city-states were collected so that their strengths and weaknesses could be examined. Aristotle argues that the polis exists by nature and that man is by nature a political animal, so that a person can pursue a complete and good life only as a citizen of one, and that without the city and its justice human beings are the worst of animals rather than the best. He begins from the household and its relations of master and slave, husband and wife, parent and child, and the work argues there that some people are slaves by nature. He then examines earlier proposals for the best state, asks what a citizen is, classifies constitutions into three good forms and three deviations from them, considers how regimes are preserved and how they are overthrown, and closes with the education proper to the best state.

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