From this stems the obvious conclusion that the State is a fact of nature, that man is by nature a social being, and that he who remains savage by nature, and not by chance, is certainly either a degraded being or a being superior to the human species. It is indeed to such a man that Homer's reproach could be addressed: "Without family, without laws, without hearth..." A man who was by nature like the poet's would breathe only war; for he would then be incapable of any union, like birds of prey.
If man is infinitely more sociable than bees and all other animals that live in groups, it is obviously, as I have often said, because nature does nothing in vain. Now, it grants speech exclusively to man. The voice can certainly express joy and sorrow; other animals do not lack it, because their constitution extends to feeling these two emotions and communicating them to one another. But speech is made to express good and evil, and consequently also justice and injustice; and man has this unique characteristic among all animals: he alone conceives of good and evil, justice and injustice, and all sentiments of the same kind, which, by combining, constitute precisely the family and the state.
There can be no doubt that the State is naturally above the family and each individual; for the whole necessarily prevails over the part, since, once the whole is destroyed, there are no longer any parts, no feet, no hands, except by a mere analogy of words, as one speaks of a hand of stone; for the hand, separated from the body, is just as little a real hand. Things are generally defined by the acts they perform and those they can perform; as soon as their previous capacity ceases, one can no longer say that they are the same; they are merely encompassed by the same name.
What clearly proves the natural necessity of the State and its superiority over the individual is that, if it is not accepted, the individual can then be self-sufficient in isolation from the whole, as well as from the rest of its parts; but he who cannot live in society, and whose independence has no needs, can never be a member of the State. He is either a brute or a god.
Nature, therefore, instinctively drives all men toward political association. The first person to establish it rendered an immense service; for if man, having reached his full perfection, is the foremost of animals, he is also the least when he lives without laws and without justice. Indeed, there is nothing more monstrous than armed injustice. But man has received from nature the weapons of wisdom and virtue, which he must above all employ against his evil passions. Without virtue, he is the most perverse and ferocious of beings; he possesses only the brutal outbursts of love and hunger. Justice is a social necessity; for law is the rule of political association, and the decision of the just is what constitutes law.
Aristotle, Politics . I.9-13
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