From perfect human to virtuous city

Human beings are compelled to live together, and the cities they establish have long raised a central question for philosophers: how can communal life serve the well-being of all its inhabitants?

A wide intellectual tradition has addressed that question, from Aristotle and Plato to al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, al-Ghazali, Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, Ibn Bajjah and Ibn Khaldun. In Islamic thought, much of the discussion developed around the ideas of the “perfect human” and the “virtuous city,” with al-Farabi providing a foundational framework.

The book Justice in Islamic Thought, edited by Turkish scholars Ömer Türker and Yunus Kaplan, approaches the subject through the principle of justice. It treats justice not only as the basis of political order, but as a principle that begins with human existence and extends across the social order.

From this perspective, the perfect human and the virtuous city are not separate ideals. The perfect human embodies justice as a personal virtue and a way of being, while the virtuous city gives justice an institutional and social form. A city can become virtuous through the flourishing of just individuals, while people can more readily achieve perfection in a city founded on justice.

The article presents this concept of justice as broader than the mainly legal or political understanding common in the modern era. In the classical tradition, justice is an ontological principle expressing the order of being. The human soul, the family, the city and the cosmos are understood as different levels at which the same principle operates.

Within this framework, ethics, politics and metaphysics are not separate disciplines. They are expressions of one unified order of truth. Beginning with Plato, the pursuit of happiness was linked to three faculties of the soul: reason, the outward-directed spirited faculty, and the inward-directed appetitive faculty of desire and pleasure. Each reaches its proper state through moderation, the mean between excess and deficiency. From that balance arise wisdom, courage and temperance.