Aristotle
The middle-mass survivability theorem and the leisure-capability floor; adopt the telos, decline the epistemology; naturalised hierarchy rejected.
Edition read. Politics, Books I-VIII, sliced and close-read book by book (Jowett/Bekker translation).
What we took
The doctrine's chief methodological ancestor. The middle-mass theorem, floors from below and a ceiling from above manufacture the large middle whose properties are stability, and the Book V survivability payload: index the ceiling to a moving aggregate, weight the ceiling above the floor, watch for Potemkin legitimacy and the undeterrable actor bred by contempt. The common-good-over-number criterion guards against a majority ruling as a class; the user-judges-the-effect warrant grounds measured-effects-over-technocracy.
What we adapted
The good-life telos is inherited but re-keyed: the dividend is a capitalising floor, not a leaky dole, and the post-work meaning floor must teach the use of leisure, a bare transfer plus idleness yields anomie. Chrematistics/usury, money-is-convention, and "property is no part of the state" ground the demotion of money.
Where we diverge, and how we answer
Aristotle knows the Good from nature and would form souls toward it; the doctrine adopts his telos but declines his epistemology, vote-and-measure replaces the virtue-audit. Natural slavery, the exclusion of labourers, and the climate-ranking of peoples are rejected outright, their sound kernel re-keyed from person to frame.
The net position
The tradition's oldest and most complete survivability manual, absorbed and inverted precisely where it naturalises hierarchy; no founding principle overturned.
Every position is read at the source. See the whole register on Lineage & Critique · The System.