reasonings; they could not, in his view, realise the best life, and might do permanent harm to States in which that best life flourished.
There is also another kind of State which Aristotle does not take into account; this is the federation or union of States with each other on equal terms under a common central government.[1] In a true federation this common central government has some definite controlling influence over the governments of the several States composing the union; each of these therefore will have given up some part of its own independence in order to obtain the benefits of union, confessing, as it were, that it is not strong enough to stand and flourish by itself.[2] Now it will be at once obvious that a union of this kind, sufficiently centralised to be called a State in itself as distinct from its component units, like the United States of America, or the present Swiss federation, must have been wholly out of harmony with the instincts of the free and self-sufficing City-State; and in fact it is not probable that such a federation ever existed in Greece until the best days of Greek life were over. In Greece the City-State seems to have had a peculiar repugnance to this form of union. The Greeks felt instinctively that by entering into such federations each πόλις would lose its own peculiar tone and character, its
- ↑ The only passage which can be construed into an allusion to such a federation is in Politics, iv. (vii.) 7, 3, 1327 B; and here it is only spoken of as a necessary condition of Hellenic rule over barbarians, not as desirable for Hellas itself.
- ↑ See the most recent discussion of this question in Sidgwick's Elements of Politics, ch. xxvi.
