Aristotle’s purposes in this chapter are (a) to assert that the ‘state’, by which he means specifically the Greek polis or ‘city-state’, is an association distinct in kind from other associations, and (b) to discourage facile parallels between a ‘statesman’ (politikos, i.e. a citizen, politēs, of a polis in his capacity as ruler or office-bearer) and the ‘rulers’ of, for example, a household or a monarchy. His reasons for combating such parallels are not stated here, but emerge subsequently (e.g. in I vii); the crucial point is that the statesman rules over ‘equals’, i.e. persons of the same status as himself. Aristotle is quite uninformative – curt, indeed – in his dismissal of his unnamed targets. If he is thinking of anyone in particular, it is probably Plato and perhaps Socrates too (see e.g. Plato, Politicus 258e ff. and Xenophon, Memoirs of Socrates III, iv 12); but obviously the views he attacks could be held by any unreflective or non-philosophic person who had not carried out the necessary analysis of the polis and its parts. For Aristotle’s method, as he himself states and as becomes clear in later chapters, is essentially analytical: he believes that the peculiar character and purpose of the state as an association can be discovered only by examining the character and purpose of its ‘parts’ (households, social classes, etc.). The inspiration of this method is twofold: (a) the fundamental teleological assumption, revealed in his first sentence, that the state does have a particular function or aim; (b) the methodological assumption that the mode of analysis he employs in several other works – conspicuously in his biological writings, in which he examines the functions of an animal’s parts as contributing to the functions of the animal as a whole – is a guide, when applied analogously, to discovering the function and aim of the state; in short, he sees some sort of functional parallel between a living thing and a polis (see I ii and IV iv, second section). Both assumptions are large and disputable; but to Aristotle’s synoptic mind they are irresistibly attractive.
1252a1 Observation tells us that every state is an association, and that every association is formed with a view to some good purpose. I say ‘good’, because in all their actions all men do in fact aim at what they think good. Clearly then, as all associations aim at some good, that association which is the most sovereign among them all and embraces all others will aim highest, i.e. at the most sovereign of all goods. This is the association which we call the state, the association which is ‘political’.1
1252a7 It is an error to suppose, as some do, that the roles of a statesman,2 of a king, of a household-manager and of a master of slaves are the same, on the ground that they differ not in kind but only in point of numbers of persons – that a master of slaves, for example, has to do with a few people, a household-manager with more, and a statesman or king with more still, as if there were no differences between a large household and a small state. They also reckon that when one person is in personal control over the rest he has the role of a king, whereas when he takes his turn at ruling and at being ruled according to the principles of the science concerned, he is a statesman.3 But these assertions are false.
1252a17 This will be quite evident if we examine the matter according to our established method.4 We have to analyse other composite things till they can be subdivided no further, because we have reached the smallest parts of the wholes; so let us in the same way examine the component parts of the state and we shall see better how these too differ from each other, and whether we can acquire any systematic5 knowledge about the several roles mentioned.6