And Aristotle argues that natural masters – those with the capacity to choose well – should use these natural slaves as tools for their own economic and social benefit.

Arguing that 'natural slaves' are those who lack the sufficient capacity for deliberation to make choices for themselves, Aristotle presents such subordinate humans as a key element of human societies. And the enormous chronological and cultural separation from our own modern worldview is perhaps nowhere more apparent and jarring than in his discussion of slavery. This quasi-empirical approach leads Aristotle to incorporate into his work elements of his own historical era. Pericles speaks before the Athenian Assembly in a 19th century painting by Philipp Foltz (Wikimedia Commons) No mere intellectual exercise, Aristotle's theory of a city-state is one that he explicitly draws from the people and societies around him. In place of a thought experiment, which Socrates proposes as a means to discover the nature of justice, Aristotle's city-state is something rather more 'real world.' He underscores that several families – each family itself embodying the natural unit of human social organization – come together to form a small village, and such small villages in turn combine in order to form a city-state. Readers of Plato's Republic will find this concern with politics familiar, but over the course of eight books, Aristotle provides the blueprint for something quite different from Plato's kallipolis. Pivoting from the last chapter of the Nicomachean Ethics, where Aristotle explicitly links individual and civic ethical concerns by tasking the city-state with cultivating virtuous citizens, the Politics details the hierarchies and methods by which a state might achieve these goals.

Aristotle republic