The sustainability of society in the Aristotle’s socio-philosophical doctrine

Abstract

The article is devoted to the analysis of Aristotelian ideas about the society’s sustainability. The work showed that Aristotle was one of the first who touched the problem of the society’s sustainability and he is a pioneer in the use of the term “sustainability” in relation to social reality. From the described by Aristotle phenomena we outlined those phenomena, which ensure the sustainability of the polis as a whole and, thus, have a general social scale. Those phenomena are: 1) reliance on the law, 2) a certain combination of two types of people’s equality – the equality in quantity and the equality in dignity, they also are “equalizing” and “distributive” justice, arithmetic and geometric equalities. The analysis and search showed that Aristotle considered: the main source of in-stability of the society, ancient in particular, is the conflict of rich and poor free people, without taking into account the slave mass. According to Stagirite, the guarantor of the society’s sustainability and the social subjects, which conditioned it, are free citizens of average wealth. The ancient philosopher classified the six kinds of state systems; from them a polity has the greatest stsustainability. The article also fixed that Stagirite marked the link between the society’s sustainability and an autarky. On this foundation there is established that Aristotle presents precisely the social components of the society’s sustainability as key, defining. The environmental com-ponent (by the “society-nature” line) in the ancient era was on the periphery of attention, because it did not mature in that historical period. The article substantiates the conclusion that the principles of proportionality, balance and mediety are fundamental for the society’s sustainability, according to Aristotle’s doctrine. The Aristotle’s achievements on the society’s sustainability are historically crosscutting and socially fundamental. So, UN materials pay close attention to the confrontation between the rich and the poor people and widely use such indicator as the ratio of the incomes of the richest to the incomes of the poorest, which is also known as an index of socio-economic disharmony. Provisions from the 2016 UN re-port “Human Development for Everyone” confirm the importance for combining of two types of equality / justice for the modern society’s sustainability.