With this position much that Aristotle has to say about government is
in agreement. He assumes the characteristic Platonic view that all men
seek the good, and go wrong through ignorance, not through evil will,
and so he naturally regards the state as a community which exists for
the sake of the good life. It is in the state that that common seeking
after the good which is the profoundest truth about men and nature
becomes explicit and knows itself. The state is for Aristotle prior to
the family and the village, although it succeeds them in time, for
only when the state with its conscious organisation is reached can man
understand the secret of his past struggles after something he knew
not what. If primitive society is understood in the light of the
state, the state is understood in the light of its most perfect form,
when the good after which all societies are seeking is realised in its
perfection. Hence for Aristotle as for Plato, the natural state or the
state as such is the ideal state, and the ideal state is the
starting-point of political inquiry.
In accordance with the same line of thought, imperfect states,
although called perversions, are regarded by Aristotle as the result
rather of misconception and ignorance than of perverse will. They all
represent, he says, some kind of justice. Oligarchs and democrats go
wrong in their conception of the good. They have come short of the
perfect state through misunderstanding of the end or through ignorance
of the proper means to the end.
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