Philosophy
Aristotle connects citizenship, constitutions and political institutions to competing accounts of justice and human flourishing.
A person cut off from others cannot supply everything a human life needs. In that sense the individual stands to the political community as a part stands to a whole, and the whole is prior. Humans are by nature political animals, not loners who later agree to cooperate.
A human made complete by law and justice is the best of animals. Separated from them, a human is the worst, because intelligence and skill are weapons that can serve the worst ends. Armed injustice is more dangerous than mere brute force.
Other animals can signal pleasure and pain. Humans alone have speech that marks the useful and the harmful, and therefore the just and the unjust. A household or city exists because its members share these judgments about good and bad, not merely because they live near each other.
Justice is the bond between people in a state. Judicial procedure, the public settling of what is just in particular disputes, is what regulates the political partnership. A city without a working way to decide justice loses what binds it.
Everyone has a natural drive toward political community, yet that drive does not build the community by itself. Someone still has to deliberately put it together. The polis is part nature and part craft: craft fulfils capacities that nature only supplies, which is why the first founder ranks among the greatest benefactors.
On the reading in this edition, Aristotle sits between two extremes. A city's happiness is not just the sum of each member's happiness, and it is not some separate good belonging to the whole either. It must broadly match the flourishing of its citizens.
Every community, from a household to a state, forms around some good its members are trying to get, because people always act for what they think good. The state is the partnership that takes in all the others, so it aims at the highest good. To understand any community, ask what good it is organized to pursue.
Smaller partnerships such as households and villages come together to secure survival. The city-state that grows out of them exists for the good life, not just for life. It counts as natural because it completes what the earlier partnerships were already reaching toward: self-sufficiency, which is their best end.
The book argues that authority in the household follows differences in the capacity to deliberate. It claims the slave has none, the woman has it but without authority, and the child has it in immature form. On this basis it defines the slave as living property. This is the book's own argument, and readers have long disputed it, but it shows how claims about who can reason were used to justify who rules.