The Household as the Foundation of Aristotle's Polis

Extract

The Household as the Foundation of Aristotle's Polis, D. Brendan Nagle, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006, xii, 352.

This work examines the demographics of Greek households and cities as Aristotle would have known them with a view to showing that there was a distinctively close relation between them in Aristotle's thought. For Nagle, the household was both the economic foundation of the city and also, “in some way, its moral basis” (155). This has important implications, in Nagle's view, for the understanding of citizen education, slavery and the place of women in Aristotle's political theory.