Politics

Main ideas

• The city understood as a natural community ordered toward living well.
• Constitutions compared by who rules and for whose benefit.
• Citizenship, household, slavery and education examined as political foundations.

Important themes

Reading context

Lecture material that collects and compares actual constitutions rather than designing an ideal city, and follows directly from the Ethics: the good life is the aim, and the city is the setting in which it is possible.

How to approach it

Books 1, 3 and 4 give the argument about citizenship and constitutions. His defence of natural slavery in Book 1 is indefensible and should be read as the failure it is, not skipped.