aristotle

Aristotle’s ideas of the city-state as a partnership begin with the sense of community. He deduces that every community is established in the aim of creating good, and these communities are composed of mankind, which always acts in order to obtain which they feel is good. He decides to break down the community of state into villages and households, to see the origin of the issue.
In the beginning he sees the union of male and female as the root of community and state, for their “good” is to continue the species via reproduction, and this forms a union or household. Groups of households become villages, and when “several villages are united in a single complete community, large enough to be nearly or quite self-sufficing, the state comes into existence”. These smaller groups band together for a greater good, and Aristotle sees this as self-sufficiency, whether it’s through trade or organized labor, it’s just seen as a natural thing because man is said to be a “political animal”. He proves his point by concluding that the individual, when isolated, cannot be self-sufficing, because he was meant to be a part of a whole.
I agree with everything Aristotle discussed in these passages, because I was previously aware that humans are social creatures, and that we need each other to thrive. Not to say that a man is useless alone, but it just further proves that the creation of villages, cities, and societies are part of a natural order of things, the same way that bees have hives and social ranks to serve the community, or how a pack of wolves operates. I found this reading interesting in that he was able to make such profound statements about the world even before any scientific or anthropological evidence was around to support it.