溫故知新 Old wisdom, today’s insight — ONGO
Can the State Be Built on Nothing Other Than the Household, Its Smallest Community?
Can even a voice raised for a better world hold any root, if the household one actually belongs to — the smallest community — is unsound?
The community formed for the needs of daily life is, by nature, the household.
Aristotle's picture of the household as the state's natural root passed to Rome's Cicero, who called the family the "seed" of the state. But in modern times, Hobbes overturned this whole picture. The primal human he pictured was not a being naturally grown from a household, but a stranger amid a war of all against all. The state, on this view, is nothing but an artificial contract that such individuals make out of mutual fear, purely for survival. Locke was not as dark as Hobbes, but he too grounded the state not in the natural extension of the household but in individual "consent," standing at a starting point directly opposite Aristotle's. Is the state a tree grown from a household, or a contract drawn up among strangers? This question remains the distant root of today's debates over family policy and individual rights.
Even as family forms diversify today, this insight — that the start of a good society lies in the soundness of its smallest community — still carries real weight.
Aristotle pictured the state not as some organization that suddenly appeared, but as a continuum growing naturally from household to village to city.
📝I, Too, Stand Before It
Aristotle pictured the state not as some organization that suddenly appeared, but as a continuum growing naturally from household to village to city. The household is the smallest community, but also the first. I learn from this that before solving great problems, one must first tend the small place. Wishing for a good society while neglecting the relationships within one's own household leaves that wish swaying without roots. I too look again, first, at the smallest community I belong to.
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