Politics

Politics is a treatise by Aristotle on life in community. Its Greek title, Πολιτικά, means literally "the things concerning the polis", and the modern word "politics" derives from it. The work is often presented as a continuation of the Nicomachean Ethics: at the end of that work Aristotle argues that the study of individual conduct leads into the study of public life, so that both form part of a single inquiry into human affairs. For him, the political community is the highest and most natural one, since human beings are by nature political animals.

The text is not a polished work prepared for publication. It is thought to combine materials from courses and notes from his lectures at the Lyceum, perhaps arranged later by his students. It contains a reference to the assassination of Philip II of Macedon in 336 BC, which suggests that much of it was written after the Macedonian expansion over Greece. Aristotle knew Plato's Academy well and later the Macedonian court, where he tutored Alexander; yet he was never a full citizen of Athens.

The work is divided into eight books. The first analyses the relationship between the city, the household, slavery and the acquisition of goods. The second examines earlier proposals, notably Plato's in the Republic and the Laws, which Aristotle faults for a unity so extreme that it would destroy family bonds and property, as well as proposals by Phaleas of Chalcedon and Hippodamus of Miletus and actual constitutions such as those of Sparta, Crete and Carthage. The third asks what a citizen and a state are, and classifies regimes according to whether they serve the common good or the interest of their rulers. The following books treat the best constitution, the middle class as a basis of stability, education, and the causes that bring about change in regimes.

Its influence has been immense. For centuries it served as the model for thinking about political order, and it remains a reference in debates on citizenship, distributive justice and good government.