The Timpson Lyceum · History of Philosophy (2024)

Aristotle's Politics – Lecture 29 (History of Philosophy)

Overview

Aristotle's Politics is the completion of the project begun in the Nicomachean Ethics: since a human being flourishes fully only within a community, the study of individual virtue passes naturally into the study of the well-ordered state. Where Plato theorized an ideal city from the top down, Aristotle proceeds empirically — he and his school collected and compared over a hundred and fifty actual constitutions to see how states are in fact organized and what tends to make them stable or unstable. This inductive, comparative method is why he is often called the father of political science.

The heart of the Politics is the claim that the polis (city-state) is a natural growth of human association, and that man is by nature a political animal — an animal fitted to live in a polis. From that foundation Aristotle builds a classification of governments: sorting them by who rules and in whose interest yields exactly six constitutional types, three "correct" and three "deviant." He argues that the most durable practical constitution is polity, a mixture that follows the same logic as the ethical doctrine of the mean, resting on a large middle class and a separation of powers.

Key Concepts

• Man is by nature a political animal (zōon politikon) — Humans naturally form cities the way ants form colonies; the capacity for reasoned speech about the just and the advantageous fits them for shared life under law. One who can live outside a polis is "either a beast or a god."
• The polis as natural end — Human association grows in stages: household (man, woman, children, and their means) → village (several households, often an extended family) → polis (several villages). The polis is the completion (telos) of this growth; "nature is an end," so the polis exists by nature.
• Life vs. the good life — "The state comes into being for the sake of life, but exists for the sake of the good life." A city arises to secure survival and self-sufficiency, but its purpose is to enable citizens to flourish, not merely to keep them alive.
• Self-sufficiency (autarkeia) — The mark of a true polis: it can, if need be, supply its own needs without dependence on any other community. Self-sufficiency and perfection together are the end at which the polis aims.
• The citizen — Not merely a resident, but one who shares in ruling and being ruled — in deliberation and office. Households (with wives, children, resident aliens, and slaves) provide the leisure that frees the citizen for political and military life.
• The two axes of classification — Governments are sorted by (1) who rules — one, few, or many — and (2) in whose interest they rule — the common good (correct constitutions) or the rulers' own interest (deviant constitutions).
• The six constitutions — Correct: monarchy (one), aristocracy (few), polity (many). Deviant: tyranny (one), oligarchy (few), democracy (many). Each deviant form is the corruption of the correct form with the same number of rulers.
• Oligarchy and democracy as class rule — In practice "the few" means the rich and "the many" means the poor; oligarchy is rule by the wealthy for the wealthy, democracy rule by the poor majority for itself, seizing and redistributing the wealth of the few. The real dividing line is economic, not merely numerical.
• Polity as the political mean — The best attainable constitution mixes oligarchic and democratic elements and rests on a strong middle class, which moderates the conflict between rich and poor. Just as virtue is a mean between extremes, the stable state is a mean between rule of the rich and rule of the poor.
• Separation of powers — Stability comes from distributing authority among different kinds of element. Aristotle praises Sparta's mix: a monarchical element (its kings), an aristocratic element (the council of elders), and a democratic element (the ephors), so that each part answers to another.
• Natural vs. conventional slavery — Aristotle distinguishes those enslaved merely by the fortunes of war (conventional, and in his view not clearly just) from those he holds to be "slaves by nature." (Ancient household slavery was typically far removed from later chattel slavery; slaves often worked alongside and were freed by their masters.)
• Empirical, corrective method — Against Plato's speculative ideal (e.g. wives and children in common producing universal fellowship), Aristotle insists on examining how arrangements actually turn out, and designs from the facts of human nature and observed constitutions.

Worked Example

Deriving the six constitutions combinatorially. Aristotle's taxonomy is the product of two independent classifying axes. Treat each as a variable and take their Cartesian product.

1. Let the first axis, who rules, take three values:

$R \in \{\,\text{one},\ \text{few},\ \text{many}\,\}, \qquad |R| = 3.$

1. Let the second axis, in whose interest rule is exercised, take two values:

$I \in \{\,\text{common good (correct)},\ \text{rulers' interest (deviant)}\,\}, \qquad |I| = 2.$

1. A constitution is an ordered pair $(R, I)$. The number of distinct types is the size of the product set:

$|R \times I| = |R| \times |I| = 3 \times 2 = 6.$

1. Enumerate the pairs. Reading each row as one value of $R$ across the two values of $I$ gives the $2\times 3$ classification:

1. Read off the correct↔deviant pairings along each row — same number of rulers, opposite aim:

$\text{monarchy} \leftrightarrow \text{tyranny}, \qquad \text{aristocracy} \leftrightarrow \text{oligarchy}, \qquad \text{polity} \leftrightarrow \text{democracy}.$

1. Locate polity as the mean. Among the correct forms, polity blends the numerical strength of the many with a restraining middle class — an intermediate between an aristocracy of the few and an unchecked democracy — mirroring the ethical mean between deficiency and excess. Thus the same two-axis logic that generates six types also singles out the one most stable in practice. $\blacksquare$

Summary

• The polis is natural and completes the sequence household → village → polis; man is by nature a political animal, made for life under shared law aimed at the good life, not just survival.
• Governments are classified by two axes — who rules (one/few/many) and in whose interest (common good vs. rulers') — whose product yields exactly six constitutions: monarchy/tyranny, aristocracy/oligarchy, polity/democracy.
• The correct forms serve the common good; their deviant counterparts serve the rulers, with oligarchy and democracy amounting in practice to rule by the rich and by the poor.
• Polity — a mixed constitution resting on a large middle class and a separation of powers (as in Sparta's kings, elders, and ephors) — is the best attainable, the political analogue of the doctrine of the mean.
• Aristotle's empirical, comparative method — studying many real constitutions rather than an ideal — makes the Politics the foundation of political science and the practical sequel to his ethics.