This papers intends to show that Aristotle's theory on the political nature of man implies a specific difference in relation to other animals and that this does not arise from his understanding of human beings as naturally vulnerable animals that would seek in political life an artifice to redress their insufficiency or individual vulnerability to live. The qualitative difference of human beings in relation to other animals - including political species, such as bees or ants - drives them to an (...) equally specific type of life, whose foundation obeys values that ca be universalized. The political application of these values does not correspond to what is done in the domestic sphere, nor does it correspond to the mere transposition to a quantitatively superior community, because the universality of political values is extracted from what is understood by human beings as necessary for the realization of man as man, not man as an element of nature. (shrink)

The article intends to show that MacIntyre’s notion of friendship (which, according to him, would be a reappropriation of Aristotle’s notion of philia), while ignoring the political aspect explicitly emphasized by Aristotle, reduces the notion of friendship to its social or civic aspect, thereby weakening the political nature of man.