Aristotle
Q: What is the polis (city)?
A: The city is the complete community, arising from households and villages, ordered not merely to life, but to the good life.
Q: What is the first obligation of man?
A: The first obligation of man is to seek truth, for truth alone guides action and makes justice possible.
Q: What is a timocracy?
A: A timocracy is the rule of the spirited and honor-loving, where victory and reputation are prized above wisdom and truth.
Q: What is law according to St. Thomas?
A: Law is an ordinance of reason, ordered to the common good, and promulgated by one who has care of the community.
Q: Why does man require community for flourishing?
A: Because man is a political animal, finding his perfection not in isolation but in the bonds of household, village, and city, where justice and virtue may be lived in common.
Q: What is the end of the city?
A: The end of the city is human flourishing, the life of virtue and justice lived in common.
Q: What is the foundation of justice?
A: The foundation of justice is that no man harm another, and that each give to every man what is his own.
Q: What is an oligarchy?
A: An oligarchy is the rule of the wealthy, where honor yields to profit and the city is divided between the rich and the poor.
Q: Why must law be an ordinance of reason?
A: Because law directs human acts, and only reason can rightly order human actions toward their proper end.
A. Because freedom without virtue leads to soul's enslavement by the passions.
Q: What is the household?
A: The household is the most basic community, consisting of husband and wife, parents and children, master and servant.
Q: What is the greatest vice against justice?
Q: What is the greatest vice against justice?
A: The greatest vice against justice is greed, which seizes what belongs to others and corrupts fellowship.
Q: What is democracy?
A: Democracy is the rule of the many, marked by freedom, equality of lifestyles, and the loosening of all social restraint.
Q: Why must law be ordered to the common good?
A: Because a ruler stands over the whole community, and what he commands must serve the perfection and unity of the whole.
Q: Why must law be rooted in reason and ordered to the common good?
A: Because law directs human acts, and only reason can guide them to their proper end; and since a ruler stands over the whole community, what he commands must perfect the unity and virtue of all.
Q: What is community?
A: Community is fellowship, the bond by which men unite in family, village, and city for common ends.
Q: What is munificence?
A: Munificence is generous giving, by which a man shares his goods for the good of others without waste or vanity.
Q: What is the lesson of the four declining regimes?
A: That the city mirrors the soul, and that disorder in the rulers’ character becomes disorder in the regime.
Q: How does law make men good?
A: Law makes men good “by habituating them to acts of virtue,” disposing them rightly toward their proper end.
Q: Why must a free nation cultivate virtue more than prosperity?
A: Because prosperity without virtue breeds the greed, license, and disorder that dissolve fellowship; but virtue orders men to the common good, without which neither liberty nor the city itself can endure.
Q: What does it mean that man is a political animal?
A: It means that man is by nature made for life in community, finding his fulfillment in fellowship and not in isolation.
Q: What is the whole duty of man?
A: The whole duty of man is to live according to nature and virtue, joining wisdom, justice, courage, and temperance in service of God, neighbor, and the commonwealth
Q: What is the central inquiry of Book VIII?
A: Book VIII examines how regimes decline from the just city, and how each corrupted form gives rise to the next.
Q: Why is law coercive?
A: Because law can “restrain the unruly,” compelling obedience when virtue is not yet formed.
Q: How does forgetting the source of law lead to political corruption?
A: When a people forget that law begins in the eternal and natural law, they cease to measure desire by reason; human law becomes an instrument of power rather than of justice, and the regime decays as the soul decays.