Politics
Aristotle writes that “every community is established with a view of some good; for mankind always act in order to obtain that which they think good” at the beginning of his first book of the Politics.
Aristotle writes that there are three levels of organization in a state. The state is the top level, and is made up of villages. Villages, in turn, are comprised of households. Once we reach the household, there are three different relationships: man and wife, parents and children, and master and property, both living (slaves) and nonliving.
Slavery, which in modern times considered more of an ethical than political matter, is extensively discussed in Aristotle’s Politics. Aristotle defines a slave as a piece of property that is animate, and is therefore used principally for action instead of production. A slave is a very valuable instrument, for it is intelligent enough to “accomplish its own work, obeying or anticipating the will of others.” But if all instruments could work by themselves, Aristotle says, slavery would be wholly unnecessary.
Aristotle writes more about slavery, one instance being the existence of natural slaves. As he says, it is necessary that some people be rulers and others subjects, and that “from the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjection, others for rule.”
The three types of government Aristotle writes about are royalty, aristocracy, and constitutional government. What he calls the negative forms of these are, respectively, tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy. Tyranny is a monarchy where the focus is only on the monarch; oligarchy is government by a select group of people, but those people focus on the wealthy population; and democracy (which is not often seen as a bad thing today) supposedly focuses only on the needy. While all of these forms of government give some benefits, none of them benefit the state in its entirety, whereas the three good ones he presents do.
Aristotle writes that there are three levels of organization in a state. The state is the top level, and is made up of villages. Villages, in turn, are comprised of households. Once we reach the household, there are three different relationships: man and wife, parents and children, and master and property, both living (slaves) and nonliving.
Slavery, which in modern times considered more of an ethical than political matter, is extensively discussed in Aristotle’s Politics. Aristotle defines a slave as a piece of property that is animate, and is therefore used principally for action instead of production. A slave is a very valuable instrument, for it is intelligent enough to “accomplish its own work, obeying or anticipating the will of others.” But if all instruments could work by themselves, Aristotle says, slavery would be wholly unnecessary.
Aristotle writes more about slavery, one instance being the existence of natural slaves. As he says, it is necessary that some people be rulers and others subjects, and that “from the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjection, others for rule.”
The three types of government Aristotle writes about are royalty, aristocracy, and constitutional government. What he calls the negative forms of these are, respectively, tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy. Tyranny is a monarchy where the focus is only on the monarch; oligarchy is government by a select group of people, but those people focus on the wealthy population; and democracy (which is not often seen as a bad thing today) supposedly focuses only on the needy. While all of these forms of government give some benefits, none of them benefit the state in its entirety, whereas the three good ones he presents do.