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I woke up this morning, 9/13/2025, with the urge to keep studying the Constitution of the United States. As I started opening the content (The U.S. Constitution, A Reader, edited by the Hillsdale College Politics Faculty) from the course The Meaning and History of the Constitution, one place my eye stopped was Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics, where he addresses the question, “What is the best life for man?” He wrote on purpose, action, and intention, and this is what this text is about. But I’m going to start at the end, where the synthesis comes, which is politics. That is the master art that synthesizes all the other arts and pursuits in a society. This is what we condense and how we create collaborations that are meaningful and non-violent.

But in order for me to explain this, let’s go to the beginning. Every art, every inquiry, every action and choice ends at some good. This is where Aristotle’s opening to the Nicomachean Ethics, sets up his entire philosophy of human purpose. Some ends are activities, others are products beyond the activity itself.One person of many who was very influenced by this was Ludwig von Mises, and he created Human Action by reducing the Aristotelian structure into Praxeology, the science of purposeful behavior. His axiom, “man acts,” mirrors Aristotle’s “every action and choice ends at some good.” Mises was one of the founders of Austrian economics for those who don’t know it yet.Aristotle speaks of εὐδαιμονία eudaimonia, the flourishing of citizens in the polis, life lived in accordance with virtue and purpose. Mises begins with the axiom that man acts, that every individual decision is purposeful. Where Aristotle sees the good life emerging through civic collaboration, Mises shows how social order arises through the aggregation of individual actions. Both point to the same truth: purpose is never abstract, it becomes visible in the choices we make and in the structures we inhabit.Even in the etymology, the Greek terms reveal the depth of Aristotle’s system. τέλος Telos is the end, the aim, the purpose. πρᾶξις Praxis is the action in which humans make decisions. And προαίρεσις prohairesis is literally choosing beforehand, from pro- “forward, in advance,” and hairein “to take, to choose.” It marks the inner act of deliberate choice that makes action truly human.And the pursuit of happiness. So to see politics as the result of collaboration is to recover that synthesis. Individual purpose and intention converge, and their collective enactment shapes political life. This is why the Founders read Aristotle alongside Cicero and Locke. Politics was not opposed to happiness, but was the framework that secured the conditions for its pursuit.Politics is the master art that synthesizes all other arts and pursuits. Medicine, shipbuilding, and strategy are subordinated to politics because politics asks, what is the good life for human beings living together? In Aristotle’s sense, happiness, eudaimonia, is not private but civic: the flourishing of citizens through virtue within a shared order.Modern life, however, has often severed politics from happiness. Politics is treated as power or bureaucracy these days, which makes no sense to me, while happiness is privatized into consumption or psychology. This has broken the Aristotelian synthesis where politics was originally the shape and the space where individual intentions and purposes became enacted in common.So let’s go back to Aristotle. From the foundation emerges the insight that every act has both an inner and outer dimension: purpose, telos, the end towards which an act tends; and intention, prohairesis, the inner orientation, the deliberate choice of means towards the end. Aristotle makes it clear that purpose and intention are inseparable. The act is human when guided by rational intention, not just by its external result. Intention, therefo