Politics: A Treatise on Government
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text
- Extent:
- ~100,000 words · 487 passages
Cite this work
- APAAristotle. (n.d.). Politics: A Treatise on Government. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/aristotle/politics-a-treatise-on-government
- MLAAristotle. "Politics: A Treatise on Government." SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/aristotle/politics-a-treatise-on-government.
- ChicagoAristotle. Politics: A Treatise on Government. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/aristotle/politics-a-treatise-on-government.
What it is about
Man is a political animal: the study of the polis as the natural form of human life, the kinds of constitution, why regimes fall, and how a citizen is educated.
Context and history
Like the Ethics, which it continues, these are notes from the Lyceum lectures, around 330 BC — and the method is the same: Aristotle's school had gathered the constitutions of 158 cities to study them as a naturalist studies species. Book I contains his defence of 'natural' slavery, which this corpus flags with the corresponding warning: it must be read as what it is, the voice of the fourth century BC. Rediscovered in the thirteenth century, the work supplied the vocabulary — citizen, constitution, democracy, oligarchy — with which Europe still argues about politics.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
First Issue Of This Edition 1912 Reprinted 1919, 1923, 1928 INTRODUCTION The Politics of Aristotle is the second part of a treatise of which the Ethics is the first part. It looks back to the Ethics as the Ethics looks forward to the Politics. For Aristotle did not separate, as we are inclined to do, the spheres of the statesman and the moralist. In the Ethics he has described the character necessary for the good life, but that life is for him essentially to be lived in society, and when in the last chapters of the Ethics he comes to the practical application of his inquiries, that finds expression not in moral exhortations addressed to the individual but in a description of the legislative opportunities of the statesman. It is the legislator's task to frame a society which shall make the good life possible. Politics for Aristotle is not a struggle between individuals or classes for power, nor a device for getting done such elementary tasks as the maintenance of order and security without too great encroachments on individual liberty. The state is "a community of well-being in families and aggregations of families for the sake of a perfect and self-sufficing life." The legislator is a craftsman whose material is society and whose aim is the good life. In an early dialogue of Plato's, the Protagoras, Socrates asks Protagoras why it is not as easy to find teachers of virtue as it is to find teachers of swordsmanship, riding, or any other art. Protagoras' answer is that there are no special teachers of virtue, because virtue is taught by the whole community. Plato and Aristotle both accept the view of moral education implied in this answer. In a passage of the Republic (492 b) Plato repudiates the notion that the sophists have a corrupting moral influenc