Book I: types of communities: the city, the household; household management

Book II: critical survey of proposed and actual constitutions: Plato (Republic, Laws), Hippodamus, Sparta, Crete, Carthage, various legislators "First, then, let us try to review any sound remarks our predecessors have made on particular topics."

Book III.1-13: city and citizen: definitions, good man vs. good citizen, classification of constitutions, conceptions of political justice

Books III.14- IV: types of constitutions: kingship, aristocracy, democracy, oligarchy, constitutional governme

Second argument: (1) The city differs from other kinds of community in having the full degree of every sort of self-sufficiency: it comes to be for the sake of living, but continues for the sake of living well. (2) Self-sufficiency is the end. (3) The end, that for the sake of which, is the best. (4) Therefore, the city exists by nature. [COMMENTS: (1) By a self-sufficient life, as he points out in the Nicomachean Ethics (I.7.1097b8-17, X.7.1177a28-b2), Aristotle does not mean a solitary life, but a life which is choiceworthy and lacking nothing. This was identified in the Nicomachean Ethics with the exercise of the specifically human virtues of thought and character. (2) The second premiss seems to be true by definition. (3) So does the third. (4) It is not immediately obvious how the conclusion is supposed to follow. An assumption which would license the inference without making any of the premisses redundant, and which appears to fit Aristotle's biologism, is the following: A community of a biological species which exists for the sake of that which is best for them exists by nature. Thus, to cities of human beings, Aristotle would compare schools of fish, flocks of geese, hives of bees, anthills, and so forth.]

First argument: (1) The communities from which the city came into being (household, village) are natural. (2) The city is the completion of these communities. (3) Something's nature is the character it has when its coming to be is complete. Therefore, (4) every city is natural. [COMMENTS: (1) By calling the household and the village natural, Aristotle seems to mean that they are formed as the result of natural impulses for reproduction (1252a27-31), for self-preservation (1252a31-32), and for long-term advantage (1252b17). He thus effectively undermines the conception of a human being as a self-sufficient individual, for whom subordination to any form of government is alien. (2) In calling a city a complete community (teleios koinônia) and the completion or end (telos) of the other communities, Aristotle does not mean only that the formation of a city comes chronologically after the formation of couples, households, and clans. He means that the capacities of the city subsume and extend the capacities of its predecessors, just in the way that a mature plant or animal has capacities which subsume and extend those of its earlier

Some topics in this essay:
Constitution Athens, Nicomachean Ethics, Ethics V1, III14- IV, Physics II8, III9 Aristotle, COMMENT Aristotle's, Ethics X9, X91181b17 Aristotle, Epicurus Hobbes, nicomachean ethics, political system, human nature, household village, exists nature, system laws, political systems, human nature political, aristotle mean, comments 1, virtues character, city exists nature, nature political animal, conditions grasp, human nicomachean ethics,