Politics

Aristotle's study of the city-state (polis), in eight books, probably assembled from lecture material. Book I argues that the city exists by nature and that the human being is by nature a political animal, able to share speech about what is just and unjust; it also contains his defence of natural slavery, which almost all readers now reject, and an analysis of household management and of money-making without limit. Book II criticises earlier proposals, including the shared property and families of Plato's Republic. The middle books ask what a citizen is, classify constitutions by whether one, few or many rule and whether they rule for the common good or their own, and examine democracy and oligarchy in detail, praising a constitution weighted toward the middle class. The last books sketch the best city and the education its citizens need, including music.

It is the first systematic comparison of political regimes, and its questions about citizenship, the middle class and who should rule are still the questions political science asks.