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Aristotle on Business
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 February 2009
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Aristotle's treatment of trade in the Politics book one is usually regarded as especially hostile, and this is put down to snobbery and political prejudice on his part. The Greeks often regarded trade as a degrading thing for a free man to engage in, and it would be surprising if Aristotle's view of trade were entirely unconnected with this Greek sensibility. But there should be something more definite than a loose general affinity if a charge of prejudice is to be taken seriously. A balance of hostile judgements over argued cases to back them up would be some sort of evidence for prejudice, and prima facie evidence against would be anything like a theory from which the hostile judgements followed as conclusions. Theories can be concocted to give the required conclusions, of course, and then we must try to decide how serious the theory is. It comes to this: is there so little in the reasons Aristotle gives for his condemnation of trade that they may be convincingly explained away and belittled as no more than expressions of attitudes?
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References
1 Ross, W. D, Aristotle (London, 1949), p. 2Google Scholar
2 Mulgan, R. G, Aristotle's Political Theory (Oxford, 1977), p. 49.Google Scholar
3 Sir Roll, Erich 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’,Google Scholar 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.Google ScholarMarshall, Alfred simply jettisons use value, suggesting that it is a useless concept, Principles of Economics (4 edn., London, 1898), p. 8; his definition of wealth is based on exchange value alone,Google Scholar ibid., p. 125. Jevons, J., Goosens, G., Walras, W. 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.Google Scholar
5 A fuller account of his analysis is given in my article ‘Aristotle and Exchange Value’, in David, Keyt and Miller, Fred. D. Jr (eds.), A Companion to Aristotle's Politics (Blackwell, Oxford, 1991); reprinted in Mark Blaug (ed.), Aristotle (384–322 B.C.) (Aldershot, and Brookfield, Vermont, 1991).Google Scholar
6 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 Finley, M. I. (ed.), Studies in Ancient Society (London, 1974), p. 41 n. 52,Google Scholar where he refers to Chantraine, P, La formation des noms en grec ancien (Paris, 1933), ch. 36.Google Scholar
7 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 Lord, Carnes, 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. 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 Polities’, ‘Aristotle and Fxonomic Analysis’, p. 41 n. 52.Google Scholar
8 Where we might think of production in an abstract sense free of any particular institutional implication, Aristotle thinks of it as connected with the oikos. This is a confusion but it does not affect his argument.
9 Roll saw the importance of this and observed that ‘Men may exchange without being engaged in the unnatural form of supply, the art of money-making. They would in that case exchange only until they had enough’, op. cit. [n. 3], p. 35.
10 Plato's main objection to trade had been that it made it possible for the pursuit of wealth to be unlimited, see Laws 736e, 741e, 847d and 918d.
11 Roll notes that ‘the natural purpose of exchange, the more abundant satisfaction of wants, is lost sight of; the accumulation of money becomes an end in itself’, op. cit. (n. 3), p. 35.
12 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. Aristotle also complains about ‘the coppersmith who for cheapness makes a spit and a lampholder in one’, De Part. An. IV, 683a22ff.Google Scholar
13 Respectively, Xenophon, Memorabilia 3.7.2–7, and Plato, Rep. 4: 295e.
14 See Croix, G. E. M. de Ste, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World (London, 1981), pp. 71, 73, 78, 79. Ste. Croix argues that Aristotle ‘takes it for granted that men will act, politically or otherwise, above all according to their economic position’, p. 79.Google Scholar See also the discussion of Croix, Ste in Irwin, T. H, ‘Moral Science and Political Theory in Aristotle’, in P. Cartledge and F. D. Harvey (eds.), Crux (Exeter, 1985).Google Scholar
15 Ross, Aristotle, p. 243.
16 Ross, Aristotle, p. 243; Barker, , The Political Thought of Plato and Aristotle (London, 1906), p. 390 n. 1.Google Scholar
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18 Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis, pp. 64–5.
19 Barker (n. 16), pp. 374–7.
20 He may have had his suspicions confirmed by acquaintance with the work of R. von Pöhlmann whom he cites on p. 385 n. 2, though without giving the title of Pöhlmann's work. It may well have been Geschichte des Antiken Sozialismus und Kommunismus, a work of the Marxist tradition which appeared in two volumes in 1893 and 1901. It went to a second edition in 1912, and a third in 1925 under the title Geschichte der Sozialen Frage und des Sozialismus in der Antiken Welt.
21 Barker (n. 16), p. 390 n. 1.
22 On ‘productive lending’ in the ancient world, see Millett, Paul, Lending and Borrowing in Ancient Athens (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 73–4, 96, 195.CrossRefGoogle Scholar On the use of money in ship's bottomry see Ste. Croix, G. E. M. de, ‘Ancient Greek and Roman Maritime Loans’, in Harold, Edey and B. S. Yamey (eds.), Debits, Credits, Finance and Profits (London, 1974), pp. 41–59.Google Scholar 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.Google Scholar
23 Ross, Aristotle, p. 243.
24 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,Google Scholar ibid., p. 390 n. 1. 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.Google Scholar
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26 Schumpeter, J, History of Economic Analysis (Oxford, 1954), p. 60.Google Scholar
27 Tawney, R. H, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (London, 1926), ch. 1.Google Scholar
28 See the encyclicals Rerum Novarum (1891), and Quadragesima Anno (1931), and the accounts given of them in Calvez, J. Y and Perrin, J, The Church and Social Justice (London, 1961). In Veritatis Splendor (1993), many economic evils including ‘degrading conditions of work which treat labourers as mere instruments of profit’ are condemned as ‘intrinsically evil’ and ‘a disgrace’ (Catholic Truth Society, 1993), p. 123, though these have usually received less attention than other things more offensive to liberal sentiment, as indeed they do in the encyclical itself.Google Scholar
29 Keynes, J. M, Essays in Persuasion (London, 1931), p. 369.Google Scholar
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31 Finley, M. I, ‘Aristotle and Economic Analysis’, p. 43 n. 60; also reprinted in Blaug, Mark (n. 5)Google Scholar
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