e individual alone is
real, the State unreal, because it is only a collection of
individuals. These views forget that the State is an organism, and
they forget all that this implies. Aristotle would have condemned, on
these grounds, the social contract theory so popular in the eighteenth
century, and likewise the view of modern individualism that the State
exists solely to ensure that the liberty of the individual is
curtailed only by the right of other individuals to the same liberty.
The opposite kind of false view is illustrated by the ideal State of
Plato. As the views we have just discussed deny the reality of the
whole, Plato's view, on the contrary, denies the reality of the parts.
For him the individual is nothing, the State everything. The
individual is absolutely sacrificed to the State. He exists only _for_
the State, and thus Plato makes the mistake of setting up the State as
sole end and denying that the {324} individual is an end in himself.
Plato imagined that the State is a homogeneous unity, in which its
parts totally disappear. But the true view is that the State, as an
organism, is a unity which contains heterogeneity. It is coherent, yet
heterogeneous. And Plato makes the same mistake in his view of the
family as in his view of the individual. The family, Aristotle thinks,
is, like the individual, a real part of the social whole. It is an
organism within an organism. As such, it is an end in itself, has
absolute rights, and cannot be obliterated. But Plato expressly
proposed to abolish the family in favour of the State, and by
suggesting community of wives and the education of children in State
nurseries from the year of their birth, struck a deadly blow at an
essential part of the State organization. Aristotle thus supports the
institution of family, not on sentimental, but upon philosophic
grounds.

Aristotle gives no exhaustive classification of different kinds of
State, because forms of government may be as various as the
circumstances which give rise to them. His classification is intended
to include only outstanding types. He finds that there are six such
types, of which three are good. The other three are bad, because they
are corruptions of the good types. These are (1) Monarchy, the rule of
one man by virtue of his being so superior in wisdom to all his
fellows that he naturally rules them. The corruption of Monarchy is
(2) Tyranny, the rule of one man founded not on wisdom and capacity,
b