What Was the Political Animal?

The ‘primal scene’ of Western political theory, Aristotle's famous definition of ‘man’ as a politikon zōon, a ‘political animal’, set the coordinates of the frame that would determine and organise Western politics and subjectivity for two and a half millennia. It already displayed all the problems that would plague this frame from the very beginning and that would come to a head in late modernity, when its too fragile pillars would collapse, opening the gates to other possible forms of politics and subjectivity. A revisiting of this primal scene, even if brief and cursory, therefore seems to be a good starting point to lay out the terms and stakes of the question about politics and animality.

In book I of his Politics, Aristotle purports to demonstrate that the polis is a ‘natural’ institution, and he begins by tracing its origins in other ‘natural’ forms of community such as the household and the village. Aristotle scholars have pointed out, however, that the ‘naturality’ of the political is not limited to human beings, and in fact the definition ‘political animal’ occurs already in book I of The History of Animals (though many translations render here politikon as ‘social’ rather than properly ‘political’), probably the first of Aristotle's zoological works, where it designates a sub-group of the gregarious animals that includes ‘man, the bee, the wasp, the ant, and the crane’ (I.1, 488a, 8–13). The defining char¬acteristic of this group is cooperation in some common enterprise (ergon).