 The Politics begins by setting the stage for the first kind of understanding of constitutions identified above, by offering an analysis of the teleological ends of life and the human capacity for speech which together support its two most famous contentions: that “it is evident that the state is a creation of nature, and that man is by nature a political animal” (I.2, 1253a2–3). While for some modern readers this sentence asserts that political participation is necessary for virtuous human flourishing (as for Irwin 1990), others contend that “the argument that man is a political animal does not imply that man must participate in politics to become virtuous, only that he must literally be a part of a polis and live under its laws.” (Mulgan 1990:  205)[10]  In either case, as Hannah Arendt (1958) emphasizes, Aristotle’s understanding of civic unity insists on respect for human plurality as the condition of political action; in Book II, he criticizes Plato’s Kallipolis for interpreting the requirement of civic unity in so extreme a fashion as to have obliterated the properly political domain altogether (Nussbaum 1980). Nevertheless, civic unity is still an aim of Aristotle’s ideal virtuous regime, and a limited Platonic spirit survives in the common meals that this regime would offer to all citizens: VII.10.