Book 1 — The Household and Its Parts

Book 1 opens with a claim that organizes the entire work: every community aims at some good, and the city, which is the highest community, aims at the highest good. Aristotle immediately distinguishes this from his opponents' view — that statesman, king, household manager, and master are all just variations on the same role, differing only in the number of people they rule. This is wrong, he says. Governments differ in kind, and the city differs in kind from the household. To see this clearly, we must resolve the compound into its simplest elements.

The simplest elements are two pairs: male and female (for reproduction) and master and slave (for preservation). These combine into the household. Households combine into villages; villages into the city, which is the first community self-sufficient for the good life. Since the city is the completion of a natural process, it exists by nature. Man, the creature who alone possesses logos — speech capable of arguing about the just and the unjust — is by nature a political animal. The person who has no need of the city is not fully human. The person who has no capacity for it is not human at all.

The bulk of Book 1 deals with two sub-arguments. The first is the defense of natural slavery: some human beings are by nature instruments of action rather than agents, and the master-slave relation is therefore natural and just — though Aristotle concedes that convention often enslaves those who are not natural slaves, which is unjust. The second is the critique of wealth-acquisition: household management has a natural limit (providing for the family), but the art of making money has no limit, and those who confuse wealth with the good life are pursuing something empty. Book 1 ends with the management of the household as the foundation from which political science must begin.