Science & Tech Quote by Aristotle

Aristotle doesn’t pitch politics as a blood sport or a tech problem; he frames it as applied ethics with real stakes. “Therefore” matters here: it signals a conclusion drawn from a larger argument in the Nicomachean Ethics and the Politics, where every craft aims at some good, and the “master” craft is the one that orders all the others. Politics isn’t just another social activity alongside farming or trade; it’s the coordinating science that decides what counts as education, virtue, law, and public honor. If you set its aim wrong, everything downstream gets distorted.

The phrase “the good of man” carries subtext that modern ears can miss. Aristotle isn’t primarily talking about private happiness or subjective preference. He means eudaimonia: flourishing through the exercise of virtue over a whole life, in a community capable of supporting it. That makes his claim both elevated and demanding. Politics can’t be justified by stability alone, or wealth alone, or winning alone. Its legitimacy rests on whether it cultivates citizens, not merely subjects or consumers.

Calling politics a “science” is also a power move. Aristotle is arguing against rule by whim, demagoguery, or brute force: political judgment should be systematic, attentive to causes, and oriented toward human ends. But it’s a science of the variable, not the mathematical; it deals in probabilities and character, which is why the laws and institutions matter so much. In context, the line reads like a warning: if politics stops aiming at human flourishing, it becomes administration, empire, or theatre - efficient, maybe, but not just.