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 co