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I. INTRODUCTION
SINCE THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, MANY COMMENTATORS have Understood Book 1 of Aristotle's Politics as an argument to the conclusion that the polis is natural.1 Aristotle does make claims about the naturalness of certain relations between people, and the naturalness of political community as such. But I take Aristotle's primary concern in Book 1 to be to establish that there are different kinds of rule because there are different kinds of people.2 That political community is natural because certain political relations between different kinds of people are natural is a premise of this argument, rather than the main conclusion of Book 1. To make this case, I want to emphasize the central importance of the argument concerning virtue in 1.13: that argument demonstrates that there are different kinds of virtue, which is sufficient to establish that there are different kinds of people, some of whom are natural subjects.
I will begin by sketching my interpretation of the argument of Book 1. In section n below I analyze the argument of 1.13 and then in section IH contrast Aristotle's claim that there are different kinds of human virtue, and the political aim of that claim, with the views expressed by Xenophon and Plato, to whom Aristotle is clearly responding. The argument of 1.13 is, I suggest, introduced in 1.3 where Aristotle raises two questions that prove to be connected. In section iv I discuss those two questions and their relation to the argument of 1.13, in order to establish that Book 1 is concerned with the question of different kinds of people and different kinds of rule. Finally, in section v I return to the issue of naturalness, and set out the connection on my interpretation between the claims about nature and the claims about different kinds of people and rule in Book 1.
Most commentators seem to agree that Politics 1 divides into the discussion of 1-2 followed by that of 3-13. It is clear that in chapters 1-2 Aristotle claims (1) that there are different kinds of rule at 1.1 1252a9-17, (2) that the parts (in some sense) of the polis are households at 1.2 1253bl, and (3) that the city, and...