Comment: “The polis exists by nature and that it is prior to the individual.” (2002)
The two claims come from Politics Book I, chapter 2, where Aristotle concludes that the state is a creation of nature, and that man is by nature a political animal. The polis is natural because it completes a natural growth, and prior to the individual by nature, not in time, because the whole is prior to its part. The thesis holds as an account of how persons are formed, not as a licence to subordinate them.
The Polis Exists by Nature
- Growth. Household, then village, then polis: the first self-sufficient community. It comes into being in the bare needs of life and continues for the sake of a good life.
- Teleology. A thing’s nature is its end (telos). As the end of earlier associations, the polis is as natural as they are.
- Speech. Only man has logos, speech that declares the just and the unjust; sharing it makes a state.
- Against convention. The claim targets the Sophists. Lycophron called law a mere surety of mutual justice (III.9), making the state an alliance, not a partnership in the good life.
Prior to the Individual
- Whole and part. Destroy the body and a hand remains a hand only in an equivocal sense, as we might speak of a stone hand.
- Insufficiency. The isolated individual is not self-sufficing. Whoever needs no polis must be either a beast or a god.
- Consequence. Virtue and justice are realised only in the polis. Man, when perfected, is the best of animals, but, when separated from law and justice, he is the worst of all. So education is public, and no citizen belongs to himself (VIII.1).
Critique
- Contract theory. Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan, 1651) made the commonwealth an artificial man built by covenant. John Locke (Two Treatises, 1689) made government a trust to secure pre-political rights. The individual comes first; the state is an instrument.
- Liberal. The whole’s priority leaves the individual no standing against the community, as Socrates claimed against Athens, and slides from is to ought.
- Marxist. Friedrich Engels (The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, 1884) treated the state as a product of class division, neither natural nor permanent.
- Gandhian. Mohandas K. Gandhi told Nirmal Kumar Bose (1934) that the individual has a soul, but the state is a soulless machine.
Revival and the Indian Anchor
Communitarians revived the thesis. Charles Taylor (“Atomism”, 1979) argued that rights presuppose a society that cultivates the capacities they protect. Alasdair MacIntyre (After Virtue, 1981) and Michael Sandel (Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, 1982) attacked the liberal picture of an unencumbered self. The Indian Constitution balances the two: Part III and K. S. Puttaswamy (2017) put individual dignity first, while the Directive Principles and the fundamental duties of Article 51A bind the citizen to the common good.
Conclusion
Aristotle is right that the polis is prior in the formation of persons: language, virtue and rights exist only within a political community. He is wrong if priority means the individual may be sacrificed to the whole. The defensible position: community makes persons, and persons still hold claims of dignity against it.