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WorkAristotle

Politics: A Treatise on Government

Aristotle's account of the city, which seems to have reached Europe by a single route: a Latin version made around 1260 because Thomas Aquinas asked for one.

by Aristotle350 passages held

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Original title
Πολιτικά
First published
330 BCE(aged 54)
Original language
Ancient Greek

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Overview

The city is taken apart into villages and households before Aristotle will discuss it as a city, and the first book therefore carries the argument that some people are slaves by nature — hedged, in his own statement of it, to anyone as different from other people as a body is from a soul — alongside the question of whether a wife's virtues and a man's are the same thing. Book II then reads Plato's Republic closely and rejects it: property held in common will breed more quarrels rather than fewer, and wives and children held in common will not spread natural affection but thin it until there is none. From there the work turns comparative, sorting constitutions by who rules and in whose interest, and studying at length why regimes fall. Almost the whole Aristotelian corpus reached medieval Europe through Arabic hands; this is the work that seems never to have made that journey, and the Latin West had no text of it at all until about 1260, when William of Moerbeke translated one at Thomas Aquinas's request. The manuscript he started from broke off in the middle of Book II, so he had to send for better copies and do the job again. Nicole Oresme put it into French for Charles V from 1372, the first version in any modern language, breaking off constantly to discuss the Estates General. Whether the eight books stand in the right order has been disputed since Werner Jaeger proposed that two separate treatises had been spliced together. The best city is described, and then the text simply stops.

Key concepts

What does Aristotle mean by wealth acquisition as a separate art?

Aristotle distinguishes household management from the art of acquiring wealth. Household management seeks the goods needed for a household’s life, while wealth acquisition seeks money without a natural limit. He treats exchange for necessities differently from trade pursued for accumulation, especially when money becomes the object rather than the instrument of economic activity. The distinction puts a moral boundary around prosperity.

Why does Aristotle give the middle class such political importance?

Aristotle gives the middle class political importance because it stands between the extremes of wealth and poverty. Those with moderate property, he argues, are less likely to dominate the poor or resent the rich, and they can govern and obey in turn. A city with a large middle class therefore has a stronger chance of avoiding faction and preserving its constitution.

What does Aristotle mean by polity as a form of government?

Polity names a constitution in which the many govern for the common advantage, usually through an arrangement that combines democratic and oligarchic elements. Aristotle treats it as a practical alternative to rule by the wealthy or by the poor alone. Its mixed structure matters because it gives competing groups a share in government without allowing either to treat the city as private property.

Why does Aristotle make leisure the end of work and war?

Aristotle makes leisure the end of work and war because political life should ultimately secure the activities that belong to a good life. Work supplies necessities, and war protects the city, but neither is the final purpose of human association. Leisure permits the cultivation of virtue, judgment, and the activities he connects with education and music. Peace therefore exists for a form of life beyond survival.

How does Aristotle distinguish equality by number from equality by merit?

Aristotle distinguishes numerical equality from proportional equality. Numerical equality gives the same share to everyone, while proportional equality gives shares according to a relevant difference, such as merit or contribution. Political factions invoke these principles selectively: democrats stress free status, oligarchs stress wealth. His analysis explains why rival claims to justice can each appear reasonable while producing incompatible constitutions.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

The City and Common Life

What turns households and villages into a city, and what does a city exist to secure? Aristotle’s answer determines whether political association serves mere survival or the good life.

Aristotle builds the city from households and villages, then gives political association a purpose beyond protection or trade: it enables human beings to live well. Against the idea that the city is merely an artificial contract, he treats shared life as a development of human capacities, while still defending hierarchies that include natural slavery and distinct virtues for wives and men. Book II tests Plato’s attempt to erase private attachments. Common ownership would multiply quarrels; common families would thin affection. Association needs particular bonds.

  • community
  • social organization
  • political legitimacy
  • governance
  • political participation
  • happiness
  • law

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Constitutions and Stability

Who should rule, and whose interest should rule serve? The answer separates legitimate constitutions from their corrupt forms and explains why even well-designed regimes fall.

Aristotle compares constitutions by two questions: how many govern and whether they govern for the common advantage or their own. Kingship, aristocracy and polity therefore stand against tyranny, oligarchy and democracy when rulers pursue private benefit; the categories let him analyse power without treating one institutional form as universally sufficient. He then studies revolutions, faction and inequality to explain political instability, asking how a regime can preserve its order rather than merely claim authority. Stability must be designed.

  • political stability
  • political theory
  • political philosophy
  • leadership
  • institutional design
  • democracy
  • political power
  • political authority
  • social cohesion
  • equality
  • rule of law
  • economics
  • oligarchy
  • tyranny
  • property

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Citizenship and Civic Formation

What must citizens learn and practise before a constitution can endure? Aristotle makes education and civic virtue political necessities, because a regime survives only when its people are formed for its laws and aims.

A constitution cannot secure its purposes through offices and laws alone; it must educate citizens into the virtues that its form of rule requires. Aristotle connects citizenship with participation in governing and being governed, while justice, merit and equality remain disputed according to the regime and the goods it distributes. The work thus places civic duty beside institutional design: leaders and citizens must cultivate habits that sustain the political order. Education is constitutional work.

  • virtue ethics
  • justice
  • education
  • civic virtue
  • meritocracy
  • citizenship
  • political institutions
  • aristocracy

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Within this work

passages held
350
distinct concepts
530
by passages held, corpus-wide
#214

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “democracy” and “oligarchy”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 21 pairings. 89 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
democracyoligarchy36
democracypolitical stability9
oligarchytyranny8
democracyrule of law7
oligarchypolitical stability6
citizenshipdemocracy5
democracyproperty5
democracytyranny4
oligarchyrule of law4
citizenshipeducation3
citizenshipoligarchy3
political stabilitytyranny3
rule of lawtyranny3
citizenshippolitical stability2
citizenshipproperty2
educationproperty2
oligarchyproperty2
citizenshiprule of law1
educationpolitical stability1
political stabilityproperty1
propertyrule of law1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. -350 The Organon, or Logical Treatises, of Aristotle (Ὄργανον)

    The medieval schools came at these six through Porphyry's Isagoge. The rest of the corpus simply uses them: the Physics, the Metaphysics and the biological works take the syllogism and the ten kinds as given.

     EN
  2. -345 Eudemian Ethics

    One of three ethical treatises transmitted under Aristotle's name, alongside the Nicomachean Ethics and the Magna Moralia — the last of the three being the one whose authenticity is disputed.

     EN
  3. -340 Metaphysics

    Form, matter and cause are argued out in the Physics, not here, and the works on animals and the soul are built on the framework it lays down; what this book asks is what it takes for anything to be at all. Alexander of Aphrodisias, Avicenna, Averroes and Aquinas each built a commentary on it.

     EN
  4. -335 The "Art" of Rhetoric

    The published title keeps the quotation marks around Art from Freese's 1926 Loeb edition. Its subject is public life — the assembly, the court, the funeral oration — but its form is the school's, like everything else of his that survives.

     EN
  5. -335 The Nicomachean Ethics (Ἠθικὰ Νικομάχεια)

    The fullest of Aristotle's ethical treatises, and the one the tradition kept: it shares three books with the Eudemian Ethics, which covers the same ground. Its last page hands the subject over to the Politics.

     EN
  6. -330 Constitution of Athens (Ἀθηναίων Πολιτεία)

    Historians use it as a source rather than as a text to interpret, which is true of nothing else under Aristotle's name. It belongs beside the Politics, as the surviving piece of the survey that fed it.

     EN
  7. -330 Politics: A Treatise on Government (Πολιτικά) you are here EN
  8. -330 The Art of Poetry (Περὶ Ποιητικῆς)

    The Rhetoric is its nearest neighbour in the corpus: nowhere else does Aristotle take an art apart from the maker's side, and nowhere else does he discuss poetry at any length.

     EN
  9. -320 Economics

    Aristotle treats the same ground himself in the household economics of Politics I. These three books keep their place in his corpus on the strength of the name alone; scholarship removed them without settling on anyone else.

     EN
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