Editing Polis (section)

===The polis as community===
The first sentence of ''Politics'' asserts that a polis is a community ([[koinonia]]). This is Aristotle's first definition of polis (for the second, see above). The community is compared to a game of chess. The man without community is like an isolated piece (I.9). Other animals form communities, but those of men are more advantageous because men have the power of speech as well as a sense of right and wrong, and can communicate judgements of good or bad to the community (I.10). A second metaphor compares a community to a human body: no part can function without the whole functioning (I.11). Men belong to communities because they have an instinct to do so (I.12).

The polis is a hierarchy of community. At the most subordinate level is the family ([[Economics|oikia]]), which has priority of loyalty over the individual. Families are bound by three relationships: husband to wife, owner to slave,{{refn|group=lower-alpha|There is no denying  that Aristotle was an ardent exponent of slavery. He wrote (I.5), "from the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjection, others for rule." The slaves nevertheless had some rights as members. At least at Athens they could not legally be murdered arbitrarily. Some slaves, such as the Scythian police, were given some power. Others were worked to death in the silver mines or forced into prostitution. Probably the great majority were allowed to earn their freedom to become trusted free retainers. In any case the assertion that slaves and women were not part of the polis is untrue.}} and father to children. Thus slaves and women are members of the polis.{{refn|group=lower-alpha|I.3. The philosopher further distinguishes between slave (douloi) and free (eleutheroi), a distinction that plays a part in determining government: "a complete household consists of slaves and freemen."}} The proper function of a family is the acquisition and management of [[wealth]]. The oikia is the primary land-holder.{{refn|group=lower-alpha|Aristotle shows (I.3, I.4) that the oikia as a fixed settlement requires subsistence farming. He rejects hunting-gathering and any type of nomadism as the economic basis for a polis. Trade is rejected as well, but an existing polis may engage in it as a supplement.}}

The koinonia, then, applied to property, including people. As such it is just as impossible as the collection of citizens mentioned previously, which cannot be both all the citizens and simultaneously a collection of some of the citizens. Similarly property shared by all cannot be shared by men who do not own it. These fictions led to endless conflict between and within poleis as the participants fought for citizenship they did not have and shares they did not own.

A village (kome) is a community of several families (I.2). Aristotle suggests that they came from the splitting (apoikia, "colonization") of families; that is, one village contains one or more [[Extended family|extended families]], or [[clan]]s. A polis is a community of villages, but there must be enough of them to achieve or nearly achieve self-sufficiency. At this point of his theorization, Aristotle turns the "common" noun stem (koino-)  into a verb, koinonizein, "to share" or "to own in common". He says: "A single city occupies a single site, and the single city belongs to its citizens in common."

Aristotle's description fits the [[landscape archaeology]] of the poleis in the Copenhagen Study well.<ref>{{harvnb|Hansen|2004|p=75}}</ref> The study defines [[Human settlement|settlement patterns]] of first-, second-, and third-order. The third, [[Dispersed settlement|dispersed]], is individual oikiai distributed more or less evenly throughout the countryside. The other two orders are nucleated, or clustered.<ref>{{cite web| title=settlement patterns |url=https://gpres.weebly.com/settlement-patterns.html#:~:text=There%20are%20three%20main%20settlement,river%20crossing%20or%20road%20junction}}</ref> 2nd-order settlements are the komai, while the 1st order is the poleis. Approaching the polis from the outside of an aerial photograph one would pass successivle orders 3, 2, and 1.

By the end of Book I of ''Politics'' Aristotle (or one of the other unknown authors) finishes defining the polis according to one scheme and spends the next two books trying to tie up loose ends. It is generally agreed that the work is an accumulation of surviving treatises written at different times, and that the main logical break is the end of Book III. Books I, II, and III, dubbed "Theory of the State" by Rackham in the [[Loeb Classical Library|Loeb Edition]],<ref>{{cite book | author=H. Rackham | title=Aristotle Politics with an English Translation | location=London | publisher=Heinemann | year=1959 | page=xv}}</ref> each represents an incomplete trial of the "Old Plan". Books !V, V, and VI, "Practical Politics", are the "New Plan". Books VII and VIII, "Ideal Politics", contains Aristotle's replacement of Plato's ideology, openly called "communist" by modern translators and theoreticians, of which Aristotle is highly critical.{{refn|group=lower-alpha|Aristotle had been a professor at the Academy, Plato's School, but disagreeing with the school he left it to found his own school in Macedonia with the backing of Phillip, who asked him to tutor his son, Alexander, not for long, as Alexander had to succeed Phillip. Aristotle opened a highly successful branch in Athens. His methods and resources (funded by the Macedonians) amounted to a university. Alexander sought his advice but the two disagreed on the treatment of conquered peoples. Aristotle advised to treat them as conquered peoples but Alexander was trying to fashion a new cross-cultural world state, cut short by his death. Without Macedonian backing Aristotle fell into disrepute and left Athens to die.}}

The Theory of the State is not so much political by today's definition. The politics are covered by the New Plan. The topic of the Old Plan is rather [[society]], and is generally presented today in [[sociology]] and [[cultural anthropology]]. At the end of Book III, however, Aristotle encounters certain problems of definition that he cannot reconcile through theorization and has to abandon the sociology in favor of the New Plan, conclusions resulting from research on real constitutions.

The difficulties with the Old Plan begin with the meaning of koinonizein, "to hold in common". Typically the authors of the Old Plan use the verb in such expressions as "those holding in common", "A holding in common", "the partnership", and the like, without specifying who is holding what or what the holding relationship implies.

In Book II Aristotle begins to face the problem. The "polis men", ''politai'', translated as 'citizens', must logically hold everything there is to hold, nothing, or some things but not others (II.I.2). In this sociological context ''politai'' can only be all the householders sharing in the polis, free or slave, male or female, child or adult. The sum total of all the specific holdings mentioned in the treatise amount to the anthropological sense of [[property]]: land, animals, houses, wives, children, anything to which the right of access or disposition is reserved to the owner. This also happens to be Plato's concept of property, not an accident, as Aristotle was a renegade Platonist. The polis, then, is communal property. The theory of its tenancy is where Aristotle and [[Plato]] differ sharply.{{refn|group=lower-alpha|Aristotle always refers to [[Socrates]], informal founder of the [[Platonic Academy|Academy]], rather than Plato, the first legal master.}}

Plato had argued that the relinquishing of property to form the polis is advantageous, and the maximum advantage is maximum possession of common property by a polis. The principle of advantage is unity. The more united, the more advantageous (compare the action of a lever, which concentrates advantage). The ideal commun-ity would be commun-ism, the possession of all property by the community. Personal property, such as wives and children, are included (II.1).{{refn|group=lower-alpha|Many of the arguments advanced by Plato and Aristotle surface again in the epic modern struggles to establish or destroy what is most generally termed [[Marxism]]. Its founding father, [[Karl Marx]], was much educated in philosophy, including classical, writing a doctor's thesis on a classical topic and at one point translating Latin classics for a living. The historical dialogue between Plato and Aristotle over the ideal polis will sound familiar to many moderns.}}

Aristotle argues that this [[eminent domain]] of all property is actually a lessening of unity and would destroy the state. The individual is actually most united and effective; the polis the least. To take away the property and therefore the powers of the individual diminishes the state to nothing, as it is composed of citizens, and those citizens have been rendered null and void by the removal of their effectiveness. As an example Aristotle gives a plot of land, which owned by one man is carefully tended, but owned by the whole community belongs to no one and is untended.

The ideal state therefore is impossible, a mere logical construct accounting for some of the factors, but failing of others, which Aristotle's examples suffice to demonstrate. For example, in some hypothetical place of no polis, a buyer would apply to an individual builder for a house. In an ideal polis, he would apply to the state, which would send other members of the united polis to do the work. They would also be sent for any other task: plumbing, farming, herding, etc., as any task could be performed by any member. This view is contrary, as Aristotle points out, to the  principle of [[division of labor]]. The output of one professional building crew far exceeds the efforts any number of amateur ideal statists, rendering the ideal state incapable of sustaining itself.

Aristotle says, "A collection of persons all alike does not constitute a state." He means that such a collection is not self-sufficient (II.1.4). He alleges the opposite: "components which are to make up a unity must differ in kind .... Hence reciprocal equality is the preservative of states, as has been said before in ''(Nichomachean) Ethics'' (1132b, 1133a)." In summary the argument there is "For it is by proportionate requital that the city holds together .... and if they cannot do so there is no exchange, but it is by exchange that they hold together."

In short Aristotle had stated two systems of property, one in which the polis holds everything, distributing it equally, and one in which some property is held in common but the rest is privately owned. As the former only leads to a bankrupt state, the latter must be the one that prevails. For survival the citizens of each city build a privately owned pool of diverse resources, which they can exchange for mutual ("reciprocal") benefit. The theory of equal reciprocity is nothing more than a statement that owners of diverse assets must make profitable deals with each other.<ref>{{cite book | first=Jill | last=Frank | title=A Democracy of Distinction: Aristotle and the Work of Politics | year=2005 | location=Chicago | publisher=University of Chicago Press}}</ref>

In Book III Aristotle begins presentation of the New Plan. The Old Plans had concerned themselves with the sociology of the community, concluding that the family, or house, was the smallest unit of the state, and using the term ''citizen'' to mean any family members, slave or free, of any age. The discovery of reciprocal equality brought the realization that in the supposedly synoecized polis a large amount of unsynoecized property was a sine qua non of sufficiency and therefore of the polis. The Old Plan was abandoned and the state was defined again in the New Plan.

The presence of private property in the polis meant that it might be owned by foreigners (xenoi), raising questions of whether a single state existed there at all, or if it did, whose was it (III.I.12). Anyone might own the property of the city.{{refn|group=lower-alpha|"Suppose a set of men inhabit the same place, in what circumstances are we to consider their city to be a single city?"}} The whole purpose of synoecism was to create a single city for the benefit of the owners. These were the tribesmen of the villages. The need exists therefore to distinguish between citizens and others. The citizens can own common property, but the non-citizens, only private.