A Treatise on Government | Page 3

a new constitution for Cyrene. So again the Milesians, Herodotus
tells us, were long troubled by civil discord, till they asked help from Paros, and the
Parians sent ten commissioners who gave Miletus a new constitution. So the Athenians,
when they were founding their model new colony at Thurii, employed Hippodamus of
Miletus, whom Aristotle mentions in Book II, as the best expert in town-planning, to plan
the streets of the city, and Protagoras as the best expert in law-making, to give the city its
laws. In the Laws Plato represents one of the persons of the dialogue as having been
asked by the people of Gortyna to draw up laws for a colony which they were founding.
The situation described must have occurred frequently in actual life. The Greeks thought
administration should be democratic and law-making the work of experts. We think more
naturally of law-making as the special right of the people and administration as
necessarily confined to experts.
Aristotle's Politics, then, is a handbook for the legislator, the expert who is to be called in
when a state wants help. We have called him a state doctor. It is one of the most marked
characteristics of Greek political theory that Plato and Aristotle think of the statesman as
one who has knowledge of what ought to be done, and can help those who call him in to
prescribe for them, rather than one who has power to control the forces of society. The
desire of society for the statesman's advice is taken for granted, Plato in the Republic says
that a good constitution is only possible when the ruler does not want to rule; where men
contend for power, where they have not learnt to distinguish between the art of getting
hold of the helm of state and the art of steering, which alone is statesmanship, true
politics is impossible.
With this position much that Aristotle has to say about government is in agreement. He
assumes the characteristic Platonic view that all men seek the good, and go wrong
through ignorance, not through evil will, and so he naturally regards the state as a
community which exists for the sake of the good life. It is in the state that that common
seeking after the good which is the profoundest truth about men and nature becomes
explicit and knows itself. The state is for Aristotle prior to the family and the village,
although it succeeds them in time, for only when the state with its conscious organisation
is reached can man understand the secret of his past struggles after something he knew
not what. If primitive society is understood in the light of the state, the state is understood
in the light of its most perfect form, when the good after which all societies are seeking is
realised in its perfection. Hence for Aristotle as for Plato, the natural state or the state as
such is the ideal state, and the ideal state is the starting-point of political inquiry.
In accordance with the same line of thought, imperfect states, although called perversions,
are regarded by Aristotle as the result rather of misconception and ignorance than of
perverse will. They all represent, he says, some kind of justice. Oligarchs and democrats
go wrong in their conception of the good. They have come short of the perfect state
through misunderstanding of the end or through ignorance of the proper means to the end.
But if they are states at all, they embody some common conception of the good, some
common aspirations of all their members.
The Greek doctrine that the essence of the state consists in community of purpose is the
counterpart of the notion often held in modern times that the essence of the state is force.

The existence of force is for Plato and Aristotle a sign not of the state but of the state's
failure. It comes from the struggle between conflicting misconceptions of the good. In so
far as men conceive the good rightly they are united. The state represents their common
agreement, force their failure to make that agreement complete. The cure, therefore, of
political ills is knowledge of the good life, and the statesman is he who has such
knowledge, for that alone can give men what they are always seeking.
If the state is the organisation of men seeking a common good, power and political
position must be given to those who can forward this end. This is the principle expressed
in Aristotle's account of political justice, the principle of "tools to those who can use
them." As the aim of the state is differently conceived, the qualifications for government
will vary. In the ideal state power will be given to the man with most knowledge of the
good; in other states to