 “All modern discussions of citizenship as a noninstrumental good-in-itself are indebted, if only indirectly, to him [sc. Aristotle]” (Ober 1998: 290). The Politics emphasizes that “a state is not a mere society, having a common place, established for the prevention of mutual crime and for the sake of exchange” but is rather “a community of families and aggregations of families [sc. united] in well-being, for the sake of a perfect and self-sufficing life” (III.9, 1280b30–34, with square brackets added). It has been suggested in this article that the final clause of that sentence is important: Aristotelian citizenship counts as a noninstrumental good-in-itself only so long as it does indeed aim at the telos of a perfect life. That is, while Aristotle indeed valued the possibility of political participation in officeholding and the control of officeholding as part of the best constitution, he saw it as an intrinsic good only insofar as it was an expression of virtue, as it would be in that best constitution (whether governed by a collectivity of virtuous citizens as in the regime described in Books VII and VIII, or in the rare and perhaps purely hypothetical case of a superlatively virtuous monarch). Without virtue, political participation in officeholding and the control of officeholding was rather to be valued on the basis of expedience, though even then, membership in the political community of the polis remains essential to full human flourishing.