Aristotle on business

Classical Quarterly

Volumn 46, Issue 1, 1996, Pages 138-151

  Meikle, Scott ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61949182561     PISSN: 00098388     EISSN: 14716844     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/cq/46.1.138     Document Type: Article

References (30)

1. W. D. Ross, Aristotle (London, 1949), p. 243
2. R. G. Mulgan, Aristotle's Political Theory (Oxford, 1977), p. 49
3. Sir Erich Roll writes of 1257a6-13 that 'in these words, Aristotle laid the foundation of the distinction between use-value and exchange-value, which has remained a part of economic thought to the present day', A History of Economic Thought (London, 1961), pp. 34-5. Roll also considered that Aristotle 'laid the foundations of science and was the first to pose the economic problems with which' all later thinkers were concerned', ibid., p. 33
4. Aristotle's clear distinction between wealth as use value and wealth as exchange value is in marked contrast to the definitions of wealth found in some late-modern economic writing (those that are favourable to market economy) where it is usual to integrate or conflate, them. In the period of what is usually called Classical Political Economy, Smith, Ricardo and Marx had taken the Aristotelian view that use value and exchange value were conceptually distinct. After that, the position begins to get blurred, and Mill, for example, confusedly defines wealth as 'all useful or agreeable things, which possess exchangeable value', Principles of Political Economy (New York, 1969), p. 9
5. Alfred Marshall simply jettisons use value, suggesting that it is a useless concept, Principles of Economics (4 edn., London, 1898), p. 8
6. Jevons, Goosens, Walras and Menger, the founders of the current orthodoxy, marginal utility theory, careless of the category distinction involved, sought to show (in Schumpeter's words) 'what A. Smith, Ricardo and Marx had believed to be impossible, namely, that exchange value can be explained in terms of use value', History of Economic Analysis (Oxford, 1954), pp. 911-12
7. A fuller account of his analysis is given in my article 'Aristotle and Exchange Value', in David Keyt and Fred. D. Miller Jr (eds.), A Companion to Aristotle's Politics (Blackwell, Oxford, 1991)
8. reprinted in Mark Blaug (ed.), Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) (Aldershot, and Brookfield, Vermont, 1991)
9. Finley notes that 'beginning with the Sophists, philosophers were faced with the problem of creating a vocabulary for systematic analysis out of everyday words. One increasingly common device was to employ the suffix -ikos. There are some seven hundred such words in Aristotle, many first employed by him'; see 'Aristotle and Economic Analysis', in M. I. Finley (ed.), Studies in Ancient Society (London, 1974), p. 41 n. 52
10. where he refers to P. Chantraine, La formation des noms en grec ancien (Paris, 1933), ch. 36
11. Rackham at times even translates chrêmatistikê as 'business', so that 1257b35 Aristotle's distinction between the two arts of wealth-getting becomes an opaque distinction between 'the two arts of business', and Carnes Lord, in his translation Aristotle: The Politics (Chicago, 1984), makes it even more misleadingly a distinction between the two 'forms of expertise in business'. Both translations invite confusion of just those ends which Aristotle is at pains to distinguish systematically in the chapter
12. Finley agrees that 'Polanyi ...was right to insist that failure to distinguish between the two meanings of chrêmatistikê is fatal to an understanding of this section of the Politics', 'Aristotle and Economic Analysis', p. 41 n. 52
13. The Delphian knife seems to have been a crude tool that could serve as a knife, a file and a hammer, and its virtue was that it was cheap, or cheaper than the three tools separately. See Susemihl - Hicks, who cite Aquinas and Oresme, The Politics of Aristotle (New York, 1976), pp. 141-2
14. See G. E. M. de Ste. Croix, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World (London, 1981), pp. 71, 73, 78, 79
15. See also the discussion of Ste. Croix in T. H. Irwin, 'Moral Science and Political Theory in Aristotle', in P. Cartledge and F. D. Harvey (eds.), Crux (Exeter, 1985)
16. Ross, Aristotle, p. 243
17. Barker, The Political Thought of Plato and Aristotle (London, 1906), p. 390 n. 1
18. P. Garnsey and R. Sailer, The Roman Empire (London, 1990), p. 48
19. Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis, pp. 64-5
20. On 'productive lending' in the ancient world, see Paul Millett, Lending and Borrowing in Ancient Athens (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 73-4, 96, 195
21. On the use of money in ship's bottomry see G. E. M. de Ste. Croix, 'Ancient Greek and Roman Maritime Loans', in Harold Edey and B. S. Yamey (eds.), Debits, Credits, Finance and Profits (London, 1974), pp. 41-59
22. On the absence of modern notions of asset values, profitability, investment, returns, accounting, etc., and on the nature of ancient accounts as no more than inventories and checks on embezzlement, see de Ste. Croix, 'Greek and Roman Accounting', in A. C. Littleton and B. S. Yamey (eds.), Studies in the History of Accounting (1956), pp. 14-74
23. Barker makes the comparable but slightly different point that Aristotle has a Physiocratic view of'productive labour'. He suggests that, like Aristotle, the Physiocrats 'too "confined the epithet 'productivity' to agricultural labour, and denied it to every other class of labour". They too felt that it is agriculture, and similar extractive occupations, "that furnish the materials for all wealth; and that all other labour is merely engaged in the working of these materials " (Gide, Political Economy, E.T., p. 113)', Barker, ibid., p. 390 n. 1
24. The likeness between Aristotle and the Physiocrats is unconvincing since Aristotle did not have a notion of labour and productivity any more than any other Greek author; see Finley, The Ancient Economy (2nd edn., London, 1985), p. 21
25. J. Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis (Oxford, 1954), p. 60
26. R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (London, 1926), ch. 1
27. and the accounts given of them in J. Y. Calvez and J. Perrin, The Church and Social Justice (London, 1961)
28. J. M. Keynes, Essays in Persuasion (London, 1931), p. 369
29. J. Soudek, 'Aristotle's Theory of Exchange', Proc. Amer. Philos. Soc. 96 (1952), pp. 71-2; reprinted in Mark Blaug (n. 5)
30. M. I. Finley, 'Aristotle and Economic Analysis', p. 43 n. 60; also reprinted in Mark Blaug (n. 5)