Aristotle’s Politics, Book 1

Published

07 October 2025

The Politics was a sequel to the Nicomanchean Ethics; or rather, they were all one treatise. The Ethics concerned itself with how an individual could achieve eudaimonia, the Politics was which institutions could even allow an individual to achieve eudaimonia. One can therefore see the Ethics as a sort of applied politics, whereas we moderns see Politics as applied Ethics.

Continuing on the theme of reading the Politics in relation to the entire extant Corpus of Aristotle—it’s important to keep in mind that Aristotle was a naturalist (for example he wrote a lot about fish). The Politics/Ethics is to be taken as an extension of this attitude: the argumentation has a ‘let’s look at these examples’ quality. There is no poetry, and nobody becomes Aristotle’s patsy at the end of a dialogue. Because he was so interested in nature Aristotle led a peripatetic life. Yet he always returned to Athens. The ideal Polis of the Politics is Athens. As such the book serves as a simultaneous description and legitimation of Athens.

Intersubjectivity through language is what makes us rational. Aristotle makes some off-hand comments connecting rationality and speech—this is the faculty which allows us to know good from bad. It’s clear he sees intersubjectivity through language as a defining feature of humanity. The Politics lays out arguments for who can be rational in Aristotle’s sense (it’s clear slaves will never be).

The book is about communal life, but without a modern state. There is no Leviathan in Aristotle’s world-picture. The state is something else entirely. The implication for us is that the citizens of the Polis are still in the state of nature, and as such any political benefits they have they have naturally. There are two things I want to say about naturalness so far as described in the Politics. The first is that in the Physics Aristotle introduces “the idea that the natural is that which occurs always or for the most part. The main Physics discussion, which revolves around the idea of an internal source of changing or being changed, does not discuss this, but it emerges slightly later. Something is natural or by nature if, starting from some internal principle, it develops continuously ‘always something going towards the same thing, if nothing interferes.[^1] Thus the natural is the usual.” In chapters 8-11 however Aristotle uses a separate conception of the natural: the conclusion of Chapter 8 argument on wealth building is that the only form of natural money-making is in obtaining and managing the store of necessary and useful goods (from farming, hunting, herding, etc.) needed for self-sufficiency and the good life, which has an inherent limit determined by the needs of household management. Here Aristotle is using a concept of the natural not as ‘the usual’ but as ‘the ideal.’ I feel that throughout this book (especially on the section on slavery) he equivocates between the two conceptions.

In Nature, Justice, and Rights in Aristotle’s Politics Fred D. Miller, J ‘distinguishes two senses of a natural right:

  1. natural right is based on natural justice
  2. a natural right is possessed in a state of nature, i.e., in a pre-political state (his emphases).

He points out that someone may possess natural political rights (1) without possessing any natural right (2). How Aristotle’s conception of natural rights differs from those of Hobbes and Locke. Locke endorses natural rights in both senses, Hobbes in the second sense only, and Aristotle only in the first sense. That is to say, Locke argues that under the law of nature, we possess natural rights in the state of nature, and that the law of nature also serves as a moral foundation for a political contract (119-20). Hobbes argues that in the state of nature, we possess an unrestricted natural right of liberty, and that by the laws of nature we accept restrictions on his right with a political contract (117-19). But Aristotle offers a concept of natural rights which is not “pre-political.” His conception of natural justice presupposes a political constitution; it “is understood as inherently political” (122-23). It is hardly surprising that natural rights are political for Aristotle, as he ass human beings are political animals.’ I can see how the natural rights crowd falls in love with Aristotle: when you have never left the state of nature, then everything is natural. Philosophers are provided with a natural grounding or justification for whatever they want.

I see Aristotle as making four arguments in Book 1:

  1. An argument for the Naturalness of the Polis.
  2. An argument around Slavery and different types of rule.
  3. An argument about wealth and household management.
  4. An argument about virtue.

Basically I read it as (1.) providing a framework for (2.). (2.) establishes the following proposition (which is never all that clearly stated):

And this proposition justifies the following:

These propositions are then applied to (3.) and (4.) to justify a kind of constitutional pluralism (which is the project of one of the other books).

There are two very puzzling arguments which didn’t seem, on the first reading, to me to support the constitutional pluralism thesis. I didn’t understand why he spent so much time on slavery and household management. In fact, (2.) and (3.) make up the bulk of Book I (chapters 3-7 are on slavery and 8-11 are on household management).

Further Book 1 is divided into two broad discussions: 1-2 followed by 3-11, and the puzzle is how they are connected [^2]. In chapters 1-2 Aristode asserts:

  1. A plurality of types of rule at 1.1 1252a9-17
  2. That the parts (in some sense) of the polis are households at 1.2 1253bl,
  3. That the city, and the households that make up a city, and the relationships that make up the households are natural (in some sense) at 1.2 1252b30-2.

Are these discussions connected, or are they separate? And if they are separate, why include a discussion (3-11) which doesn’t casually support the argument?

It seems to me that one way of seeing it is that these were lecture notes between a teacher and his students, not something which had been prepared for publication. So the two discussions might actually be separate discussions, say as part of a long digression in a question and answer format. We can never really rule it out, as on a textual level the extant works of Aristotle seem very loose and full of gaps. I will comment on another one below.

We could say that the household management discussion is there because, even though it’s a subject distinct from politics, we have to discuss households simply because the polis is composed of households (from Aristotle’s imaginary natural history of the Polis) and so we need to account for how households can be run. But that just begs another question: why do we need to account for the parts to account for the whole? Simply because how the parts are governed will tell us something about how the whole is governed (because since the households are for the Polis, teleologically speaking, analysing them will tell us about the Polis). Another way of seeing it is that discussion of household management is there because Aristotle wants to establish something—namely that there are different types of political rule. That is the ‘project’ of Book I as I see it, and parts of the rest of the book will mirror Aristotle’s arguments elsewhere about means between deficiencies and extremes.

The discussion in chapters 3-7 and 8-11 are still quite mysterious. They don’t casually support what Aristotle seems to me to be setting out to achieve. Naively (I am no Aristotle!) it seems to me to be easier to directly assert that there are different kinds of people and this would require different types of rule. I suppose here he is responding to some intercooler (Plato? Xenophon?) who he doesn’t explicitly name. The two arguments have a parallel structure: both seem to reject what might be called a technocratic view (in slavery that ruling is a science which is the same in all contexts, and all that differs is the number of subjects; in wealth management that wealth is unlimited and money is the end and accumulation the goal) in favour of a more holistic view point (from slavery we find that ruling requires character and it is different in kind when the nature of the ruled differs; from wealth management that wealth has some limit and that the good life is the end to which accumulation is only the means). Both arguments follow a pattern of rejecting a reduction, affirming plurality, and grounding the practical life in teleology.

The argument for Constitutional pluralism comes from the slavery and virtue discussions (Chapters 3-7, 12-13), not the wealth chapters. Chapter 5-7 establish three natural relations:

And Chapters 12-13 establish different deliberative capacities:

The section on household and wealth management seems to added for a kind of thematic coherence:

Topic 1: Types of Rule

Topic 2: Slavery

Topic 3: Wealth

The common thread is that natural teleology grounds proper limits and appropriate diversity. Aristotle seems to be trying to thread a needle where he establishes a (pretty loose) framework where diversity (in peoples and constitutions) exist and this diversity has normative implications, which means that we need to reject technical and univocal solutions.

However, this whole discussion hinges on the naturalness of slavery. Unlike wealth management, which was a thematic addition, slavery is part of the direct chain from naturalness to constitutional plurality. The argument for slavery seems to me to go through four phases: definition and controversy (Ch. 3-4), a defense through natural hierarchy (Ch. 5), addressing objections (Ch. 6), and then distinguishing types of rule (Ch. 7).

In stage 1 Aristotle introduces two views, the first is that mastership is a science, and the second that slavery is unnatural. He ends by concluding that natural slaves exists, and defines them as animate tools. The second stage justifies natural slavery through types of rule: firstly, the ruler/ruled relationship is natural and beneficial; secondly the soul rules the body, whilst reason rules emotion; thirdly those who differ as body/soul or beast/human are natural slaves; fourthly nature tends (but often fails) to make bodies match. Aristotle then answers some objections: that nature often fails, but natural slavery still exists in some cases; and that natural slavery involves mutual benefit; legal slavery doesn’t. Finally in the fourth stage 4 Aristotle concludes that the Master is the Master by character, and that there are different ways (mastership, statesmanship, household management, and kingship) of ruling.

Honestly, I don’t think this is a persuasive argument. It seems to bake its conclusions into its premises. Every major claim in Book 1 is asserted, not argued: the master/slave relation is natural, non-Greeks are naturally slavish, men naturally superior to women (no argument), different people have different deliberative capacities. It seems to me that you will end up at natural slavery if that’s where you start. I’ll lay my ideological cards out on the table here: I’m a Quaker and I don’t think that slavery is just. There’s apparently been a lot of back and forth in the literature about whether Aristotle could have meant something coherent, not whether what he actually wrote is valid.

There are a few objections however.

  1. Across the Ethics and the Politics Aristotle makes conflicting remarks[^3] about slavery. In the Ethics VIII 10-11, Aristotle characterizes the master-slave relationship as tyrannical since it serves the master’s advantage rather than the slave’s. In a tyrannical relationship there is little justice and no friendship. Here in the Politics Aristotle is arguing that some people are natural slaves by nature and that slavery is both just and beneficial for them. Natural slavery is the centrist middle ground between those who justified all ancient institutions of slavery and those who opposed slavery entirely as contrary to nature. Since Aristotle intended the two lecture series to be co-terminus, it’s difficult to know what to make of this.

  2. The conditions of natural slavery seem incredibly high to meet[^4]: the slave must differ from the master “as much as soul from body and man from beast” and he slave must be human enough to be useful but bestial enough to deserve despotic rule.

  3. Similarly the definition is illogical[^5]: what justifies enslavement (being beast-like) is eliminated by enslavement (receiving reason).

It seems to me that we don’t have to think too hard about this argument: it’s clear that the purpose of Book I was to go from different types of people, through different types of rule, all the way to constitutional pluralism. Aristotle would have been primarily responding to Plato, especially his ethical and political monism. We could say something like, it would have been simply unimaginable for Aristotle to conceive of an economy without slaves, but it seems that other Greeks disagreed. Alcidamas (a pupil of Gorgias) said in the Messeniakos “God has set all men free; nature has made no man a slave.” Slavery was obviously controversial: Aristotle spends chapters 3-7 on slavery and explicitly introduces objections up front in chapter 3, and he goes further he defends slavery. Either straightforwardly, or as a stepping stone to some larger and more sophisticated point.

I guess my broader point here goes something like: why is Aristotle still on the syllabus? I have never felt that the Greeks were the spring from which I originate intellectually. They have always seemed a remote and alien people, and the Romans hardly better. There is little glory to be regained squabbling over rocks or dusty papers.

[^1] Annas, Julia. “Aristotle’s” Politics”: A Symposium: Aristotle on Human Nature and Political Virtue.” The Review of Metaphysics (1996): 731-753.

[^2] Deslauriers, Marguerite. “The Argument of Aristotle’s” Politics” 1.” Phoenix (2006): 48-69.

[^3] Ross, Donald L. “Aristotle’s Ambivalence on Slavery.” Hermathena 184 (2008): 53-67.

[^4] Ambler, Wayne. “Aristotle on nature and politics: The case of slavery.” Political Theory 15.3 (1987): 390-410

[^5] Smith, Nicholas D. “Aristotle’s theory of natural slavery.” Phoenix 37.2 (1983): 109-122.