To know man fully is to know first what politics is. Aristotle’s arguments for the importance and primacy of politics still maintain their vitality today. They go as follows.

For Aristotle, “nature … makes nothing in vain” (Politics, 1.2, 1253a8–9). Everything that arises from nature has an end, a telos. Man’s telos is determined by Aristotle by the possession of faculties of speech that go beyond expressions of “pleasure and pain” (1253a12). The Epicureans would like to reduce most things to pleasure and pain, but Aristotle does not: he restricts them to the domain of animals, not humans. Humans use their speech to express more complex ideas; for example, “man alone possesses a perception of good and evil” (1253a16). Man’s ability to converse has an end, and it cannot be realised in solitary existence.

There is one other attribute that is worthy of note. Because man is capable of thinking about the nature of good and evil, justice and injustice, his end is that of a zōon politikon, the polis-animal (1253a7). This is not to say that all thoughts about the nature of good and evil, justice and injustice, are necessarily right or valid, but only that if this is key to what separates man, his highest goal is in excelling and actualising his potential. But conversations of a moral nature can never happen within some solitary state. Men are forced, first into families, then a collection of families — a tribe — and then into villages, and ultimately the polis, by their natural needs (1242b17–26). It is only in the polis which is “self-sufficient” (1252b28). It solves, for the first time, man’s basic needs, and allows him to think beyond his immediate, physical concerns, and shift his attention from the material to the non-material world. This is why Aristotle says that “while it comes into existence for the sake of mere life, it exists for the sake of a good life” (1252b29–30). The polis is where man can actualise his potential for moral knowledge and judgement.

But this does not solve the problem of the importance of the polis. Why is the polis important — more so than other forms of association? This is why we must return to the opening lines of the Politics:

“Observation shows us, first, that every polis is a species of association, and secondly, that all associations come into being for the sake of some good — for all men do all their acts with a view to achieving something which is, in their view, a good. It is clear therefore that all associations aim at some good, and that the particular association which is the most sovereign of all, and includes the rest, will pursue this aim most, and will thus be directed to the most sovereign of all goods. This most sovereign and inclusive association is the polis, as it is called, or the political association.” (1.1, 1252a1–6).

Novels have famous openings, poems astounding introductions. But few works of political philosophy can strike such a wondrous note, fully seized of the importance of the subject it seeks to investigate. In these words — well-trodden, overused, but vital — there is an expression of the importance of the polis, and a summary dismissal of those who think that the role of the polis is only limited to the guarantor of property and the upholding of contracts. There is nothing so vicious a myth such as a de minimis polis. All associations have a purpose, Aristotle avers, and that association always has its end, its telos, some good. Because the polis is the highest sovereign form of association, it also aims at the “most sovereign of all goods,” it is necessarily oriented toward the summum bonum, the good of all, the common good. The polis is not some small part or the inconsequential gathering of a few men out of fear, who continue to live in a modified state of fear, as a certain Thomas Hobbes would have you believe, or the product of a general ‘state of nature.’

The polis is where all non-material life can take place. For the actualisation of man, there can be no other avenue. Only two sorts of people do not have a share in a polis: those who are godlike, “a being higher than man,” or a man so fallen that his is fatally attraction to the “passion of war”: chaos and disharmony (1253a3–6). Those who claim to be outside of politics, of the polis, are necessarily outside of society: they are not human, much like the gods, or they are inhuman.