In fourteenth-century terms there existed another language to describe the this-worldly and down-to-earth dimension of man's life in ordered and governed communities – the overtly political form of discourse deriving ultimately from Aristotelian conceptions made current from the mid-thirteenth century. Baldus dips into the broad stream of contemporary scientia politica, and uses the concept of natural man who becomes political in community. This in itself might appear thoroughly unremarkable if considered in isolation, because the idea that man is by nature a political animal was, of course, the common-coin of political theory; but Baldus' introduction of this concept into jurisprudence is revealed as a highly creative innovation when it is seen in the context of his whole de facto argument, and in comparison with the use which previous and contemporary jurists made of the term, ‘political’.

Baldus introduces this concept of natural, political man in a passage of great importance. He has been discussing the definition of the populus, and continues,

You are to say, incidentally, that man can be considered in three ways. Firstly, insofar as he is in himself an individual naturally composed of soul and body, as in [D.21.2.56, 2]. Secondly, he can be considered insofar as he is an economic body, that is, the head of a family, as in [D.50.16.195, 1], like a paterfamilias and the abbot of a monastery.