Some Remarks on the First Book of Aristotle’s Politics

Abstract

This article is devoted to a sequential analysis of the first book of Aristotle’s Politics. It suggests an interpretation of the classical problem of natural hierarchy of men as it described in the first book of the treatise. In this book, Aristotle examines seven commonly held definitions of a slave – four “natural” and three “conventional” ones – and then offers his own eighth definition, placed right in the middle between nature and convention. The article exclusively deals with the first book of Politics and avoids invoking other books of the treatise as well as other works of Aristotle because in classical political philosophy every statement is highly contextualized and could not be simply quoted in order to prove or disprove any point of view without preceding deep examination.