Politics, the legislator, and the structure of the Politics

Aristotle’s Politics does not itself articulate any consolidated account of how the nature and scope of inquiry into politics are to be conceived. For that we need to turn to statements elsewhere in his writings, and particularly at the beginning and end of the Nicomachean Ethics. Adoption of this expository strategy is just one index of the fact that for Aristotle ethics and politics are not two distinct even if connected disciplines, but one and the same subject. The name for this subject is ‘polities’; and the systematic, drily analytical treatises which have come down to us under the titles of Ethics and Politics deal with different aspects of it. Politics so understood is a pursuit or a form of knowledge which has as its aim the achievement of the good for human beings – both individually and collectively, in their cities or peoples.

According to Aristotle that good consists in happiness or human fulfilment, which is analysed as ‘activity of soul in accordance with excellence’, i.e. a life exemplifying the moral and intellectual virtues. Roughly speaking, ethics – as its name indicates – is the subdivision of politics concerned with understanding the habits of character which constitute the moral virtues necessary for human fulfilment. The other subdivision studies politeiai or constitutions, construed as different ways of organizing government in a city or nation; it is presumably viewed as the more obviously or directly political part of politics. Under these rather bare and brute descriptions ethics and politics (in this narrower sense) might seem to have little to do with each other.