ABSTRACT
It is crucial, Aristotle adds, if a republic is to be straight rather than deviant (orthos rather than parekbasis, 1279a28-31) that when exercising authority, those who govern do so in the interest of the whole of the citizen body rather than of themselves or of some other proper part of the whole. Those who exercise rule in their own interests over others are not citizens but masters (despotai). Aristotle also distinguishes the rule of citizen over citizen from that of husbands and fathers over wives and children. The latter is rule over inferiors even if exercised in the interests of those inferiors; citizens by contrast take it in turn to rule over equals. Aristotle would clearly not have recognized as 'political5 (that is, republican) in his sense a society governed, as Confucians desired, on the model of a family, nor for that matter a feudal society, one structured on the relations of loyalty owed by inferiors to those stationed above them in a stable hierarchy.3
