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ARISTOTLE'S MORALS AND POLITICS 89
of draughts. As a matter of fact, Aristotle proceeds, man
has always lived in some sort of community, whether
family, village community, or City State. The motives
which lead to the extension of the human community
from family to City State are the need for security from
violence, and the attraction of the more adequate provision
for material wants which a civic community holds
out to its citizens. Even the most primitive form of community,
the family, contains, Aristotle points out, at
least three persons: a man, his wife and his servant. It thus
involves not only a certain specialization of function, but
some exercise in the art of social relationships which we
must therefore consider to be natural to man. The teleo-
logical argument which we have already examined 1
then invoked to show that human nature can develop
only in a community or State and, Aristotle adds, still
following Plato, it can only develop its fullest potentialities
in the best State. It is only in the best State, in other
words, that the good for man can be realized. Postponing
for the moment the question what "the good for man"
is, I propose, first, to consider what form of State Aristotle
regards
as the best.
Aristotle's Ideal Community. More clearly perhaps
than Plato who, as we have seen, is apt to subordinate the
good of individuals, with the exception of the minority
who belong to the highest class, to that of the State,
Aristotle insists that the specific good of the State is to
be sought in something beyond the State, namely, in that
of the individuals who compose the State. "Political
societies," he says, "exist for the sake of noble actions
and not merely of a common life." The end of government,
in other words, is not the furthering of life as such,
but die promotion of the life. good Now the forms of
government which existed in Greece and have, with
modifications, persisted ever since, are not, in Aristotle's
view, adapted to this end. Democracy which is in theory,
1 Sec Chapter I, pp. 36-38.
is