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Updated: July 29, 2025
Unification of the whole of mankind is the hall-mark of the stage which human society is now approaching. Unity of family, of tribe, of city-state, and nation have been successively attempted and fully established. World unity is the goal towards which a harassed humanity is striving. Nation-building has come to an end. The anarchy inherent in state sovereignty is moving towards a climax.
But an ideal so remote that its realisation is despaired of, is as good as none. And the conception of the Stoics, if it was more comprehensive than that of Aristotle, was also less practical and real. By virtue, nevertheless, of this comprehensiveness, the Stoic ideal is more akin to modern tendencies than that of the soldier-citizen in the city-state.
He has often been criticized for his failure to see that the days of the city-state were numbered, and for the way in which he ignores the rise of an imperial monarchy in the person of his own pupil Alexander the Great. That, however, is not quite fair. Aristotle had a healthy dislike of princes and courts, and the city-state still appealed to him as the normal form of political organization.
When it yielded that, its empire dwindled to a mere city fortress whose doom was assured long before it fell. CAMBRIDGE MEDIEVAL HISTORY, Vol. THE BYZANTINE EMPIRE, E. A. Foord, 1911. The city-state of Venice owed its origin to the very same barbarian invasions that wrecked the old established cities of the Italian peninsula.
Plato, even, in constructing his imaginary republic, does not build in the void, evoking from his own consciousness a Cloud-Cuckoo-city for the Birds; on the contrary, he bases his structure upon the actual, following the general plan of the institutions of Sparta and Crete; and neither to him nor to Aristotle does it ever occur that there is, or could be, any form of state worth considering, except the city-state with which they were familiar.
The city-state was important as the first example of a free, self-governing community in which the individual realized his powers by living and dying with and for his fellows. This new type of human community was of the highest moment in the sequel. In many points it was a model to the Romans, and thus became a fulcrum for the upward movement of the Western world.
Aristotle is, of course, the most systematic thinker of the three: and it is just for that very reason that the two elements already noted in Greek political thought, the local and ephemeral and the universal, are most closely interwoven and most baffling to disentangle. Tutor of Alexander though he was, his mind is incapable of stepping outside the city-state framework.
This will indeed be the fitting climax of that process of integration which, starting with the family, the smallest unit in the scale of human organization, must, after having called successively into being the tribe, the city-state, and the nation, continue to operate until it culminates in the unification of the whole world, the final object and the crowning glory of human evolution on this planet.
The geographical configuration and the history of Greece, a country made up in part of small plains ringed in by hills and sea, in part of islands, had brought about this limitation of political communities, and had made patriotism mean to the Greek devotion to his city-state.
Although the Peking administration was still nominally the Central Government of China, it was amply clear to observers on the spot that by a process of successive collapses all that was left of government was simply that pertaining to a city-state of the antique Greek type a mal-administration dominated by the enigmatic personality of Liang Shih-yi.
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