“[T]he state,” wrote Aristotle in his Politics, “is by nature clearly prior to the family and to the individual, since the whole is of necessity prior to the part; for example, if the whole body be destroyed, there will be no foot or hand, except in an equivocal sense, as we might speak of a stone hand…”[1]

In Aristotle’s “whole body” metaphor, the state, like the individual person, is a whole composed of various parts – the group of people who reside in it, the polis. If, as Aristotle maintains, “man is by nature a political animal,” a person must therefore belong to a political framework of some kind: “[H]e who by nature and not by mere accident is without a state, is either a bad man or above humanity…”[2]









תגיות: israel