1 Aristotle: the state and its forms

Aristotle treats the state as a partnership of citizens in a constitution, not as territory or as a ruler's household. He classifies constitutions by two questions: who rules, and for whose benefit. Rule by one, by the few, and by the many — each in a good form (monarchy, aristocracy, polity) and in a corrupted form (tyranny, oligarchy, democracy in his pejorative sense of rule by the poor for the poor). His test is not the number of rulers but whether the government aims at the common advantage. Citizenship, for him, is active: the citizen is one who shares in deliberative and judicial office. That definition excludes workers and slaves — a limit worth naming, because it shows how a theory of participation can be built on an unexamined economy of exclusion.