Comment: “The state is a creation of nature and man is by nature a political animal.” (Aristotle) (2011)
The sentence closes the genetic argument of Politics Book I, chapter 2, and opens with Hence it is evident. It is a conclusion, not an axiom, aimed at the sophist Lycophron‘s view that law is a mere convention, a surety to one another of justice. Aristotle answers that political life completes human nature: the state fulfils man rather than restrains him.
Nature as Telos
- For Aristotle physis means a thing’s completed state, not its starting point: the nature of an acorn is the oak.
- The household meets daily needs and the village more than daily needs; the polis is the first self-sufficient association. As the end of a natural growth, it is as natural as the family it grows from.
- Origin and purpose differ: the state comes into existence, originating in the bare needs of life, and continuing in existence for the sake of a good life. A mere alliance for security would not be a polis.
Political, Not Merely Gregarious
- Bees and herds are gregarious, yet man is more of a political animal than they are, because he alone has logos, reasoned speech. It sets out the expedient and inexpedient, and therefore likewise the just and the unjust.
- “Social animal” therefore understates him. Politics means deliberating about justice with equals, ruling and being ruled in turn and sharing in judgment and office.
- Outside the polis a man is incomplete: whoever is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god.
- The association is moral, not merely protective: political society exists for the sake of noble actions, and not of mere companionship (Book III).
Its Enduring Force
- Thomas Aquinas carried the thesis into medieval thought as man’s being a “social and political animal”. Karl Marx‘s Grundrisse (1857–58) made it literal: man is an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society.
- Michael Sandel and Charles Taylor turn it against the atomistic self of liberalism. Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen restate it as human functioning that needs a shared public life.
Critiques
- Contractarian. Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan, 1651, ch. 17) grants that bees and ants agree by nature but men only by covenant, so the commonwealth is artificial. John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau likewise make political society a product of consent.
- Logical. Moving from what men do to what they ought to do risks the naturalistic fallacy. His “natural” slides between the usual, the complete and the best.
- Exclusionary. The same teleology denies full political life to slaves, women and labourers, so the political animal turns out to be a propertied Greek male.
- Arendtian. Hannah Arendt (The Human Condition, 1958) argues that the Latin rendering animal socialis blurred his distinction between the political realm of free action and the realm of necessity.
- Historical. The Macedon that employed him was already extinguishing the polis.
The Indian Resonance
Where Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi prized village republics, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar called the village a sink of localism (4 November 1948), echoing Aristotle’s verdict that the village is an incomplete association. The 73rd Amendment (1992) later made the gram sabha (Article 243A) a site of shared deliberation, grafting participation onto the constitutional state.
Conclusion
As a claim that human capacities for speech, justice and self-government need a political community, the thesis stands and outlives its biology. As a claim that any particular state is nature’s work, it fails: modern states are made and amended. The defensible reading is that political life is natural in its purpose, artificial in its form.