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, or the doctrine itself in The System.