When Aristotle wrote that man is a “political animal,” he meant something very simple and very profound. A human being alone is incomplete. Unlike a beast, we cannot survive on instinct; unlike a god, we cannot stand apart in self-sufficiency. We need others to become ourselves. It is in community that we speak, reason, and discover justice. The polis — the small, human city — was for Aristotle the natural home of man, the place where life could be not only lived but fully realized.
To be a political animal, then, is not primarily about voting or institutions. It is about belonging to a shared order of meaning, where duties and rights balance, where traditions guide, and where ideals can be pursued together. It is about roots, continuity, and proportion.
Our time is desperate precisely because the polis has vanished. What surrounds us are nation-states too vast to feel human, systems too abstract to touch, and a culture of mass where the individual floats rootless. Traditions no longer carry weight; authority inspires suspicion rather than trust; ideals have been flattened into slogans. We are left with spectacle instead of dialogue, consumption instead of common life.
The political animal without a polis becomes restless, anxious, and disoriented. Cut off from roots, we chase identities. Without tradition, we improvise fleeting values. Without ideals, we cling to entertainment or ideology. We are built for community and order, yet we live in societies where both have dissolved into fragments.
But this absence is not an excuse. The fact that we do not live in the ancient world does not absolve us from the task of living well. If there is no polis to give us roots, then each individual must root themselves — in discipline, in friendship, in the search for truth. If there is no common order to hand down ideals, then it is up to you to choose and embody them. The minefield of distraction is everywhere — entertainment, ideology, empty noise — but to live awake is still possible.
Aristotle was right: we are political animals. But in our age, the real politics begins with the individual who refuses drift, who shapes meaning for themselves, and who becomes a point of order in a disordered world.