Does the economy answer to its own standards, or to some larger societal goal, or perhaps to no standards at all? The dominance of neoclassical economics over the last century has enthroned the so-called “subjective theory of value” in public discourse. Whereas both Adam Smith and Karl Marx sought the true value of goods in the human labor underlying them, the dominant view today is that prices and movements of goods are determined entirely by the changeable opinions driving supply and demand. What matters is identifying and satisfying the innumerable subjective preferences at play. Big normative standards, and any other claims to objectivity, are beside the point. Yet despite economists’ technical prowess, there is something troublingly incomplete about a human science that refuses to ask the most basic evaluative questions about its own subject matter. Surely a mature economic theory would not require us to bracket the larger questions of politics and ethics. But to whom could we look for such a theory? John Antonio Pascarella is not the first to suppose the answer to be Aristotle, who can be plausibly seen as the original founder of economics as a discipline. But the recurrent revivals of interest in Aristotle’s economic thought over the past three generations have not elucidated the systematic links with his larger philosophical project. This is the lacuna that Pascarella aims to fill in Economics and the Public Good: The End of Desire in Aristotle’s Politics and Ethics. He seeks in particular to strengthen the foundations of a philosophically grounded economic theory, which many people (or this reviewer, at any rate) would rejoice to see.
Pascarella characterizes his book as “first and foremost a close and careful commentary” of the parts of the Nicomachean Ethics and Politics relevant to economics (4). This self-characterization is only half right. A commentary would expound the text in its traditional order, whereas Pascarella strings together disparate passages to suit his own order of march. For instance, the book reiterates that “personal desire for the good and the choice of how to pursue and acquire it” is the keystone of Aristotle’s economics (297). Yet Pascarella freely acknowledges that neither “the good” nor “choice” figure in the central economic texts in Politics book 1, so their alleged centrality is for the careful reader to discern (93). It is legitimate, of course, to draw on remote passages (in this case, Ethics books 1 and 6) to illuminate opaque stretches of text, but it is more than an act of commentary. What Pascarella has actually fashioned is “a more imaginative interpretation” that pulls on and rearranges various corners of Aristotle’s ēthikē politikē in pursuit of a synoptic account (6).
The wider Aristotelian vision that emerges from Pascarella’s philologically rich study boils down to the importance, for a healthy human economy, of individuals desiring and pursuing what is truly good rather than what is merely pleasant. Any attempt to cordon off “economic activity” or “the economy” from the largest questions of “the good,” that is, of how to live well, is bound to fail. In this light, when Aristotle criticizes the art of business for pursuing wealth without limit, he is not identifying a failure to pursue any vision of the good life at all. Such business does imply a philosophy of the good life. Aristotle is critiquing the businessman’s mistaken vision of what is good, which underrates friendship and contemplation. If there is no way to separate out Aristotle’s economic analysis, then we cannot comprehend his doctrine aright without situating it within his ethics and moral psychology, and ultimately his practical philosophy as a whole. Pascarella considers various limited frameworks, within which one might theorize about politics and economics—need we ask after anything beyond individual preferences, or the self-sufficiency of the city, or justice? All intermediate frameworks finally give way to ultimate questions of friendship, contemplation, and the good, so Pascarella’s Aristotle promises at least an outline of the sort of morally integrated economic theory that is so signally lacking in today’s dominant discourse.
Unfortunately, the book is richer in conception than in execution. Pascarella’s guiding method is to pay scrupulous attention to the very words of Aristotle’s Greek, to illuminate the “natural inseparability” among politics, philosophy, and economics within “the limit of the good” (317). But the author fails effectively to bring the reader out of the cave, as the book’s argument and rhetoric are unnecessarily hard to follow. Consider this representative snippet: “careful readers should note the act admitting to hold otherwise does not discount the idea of a first-principle that does not admit to hold otherwise informing the act” (114). Note first its opacity and, second, its appeal to the “careful” or the “attentive” reader. Third, Pascarella seems allergic to the useful word “that,” which here one would expect after “note.” Finally, the book is bizarrely partial to the verb “to hold,” which constantly appears where least expected: “holding toward the truth,” “holding-concern-around,” “holding their work.” This last feature, I believe, reflects the author’s avowed preference for literal but “awkward” translations of Aristotle (in this case, the Greek root echō) (6). But unlike other Strauss-influenced translators such as Allan Bloom, Pascarella adopts the same non-idiomatic phrases in his own voice, with the result that neither Aristotle nor the commentary manage to come across as fluent, intelligible English.
Despite its copious attention to Attic Greek, the book at points manages to be insufficiently philological. For instance, when Pascarella stresses that the Politics treats justice “as ‘a’—not the—‘political good’” (82), he doesn’t mention that this construal of the Greek is contested. He follows the Oxford Greek text edited by Ross, whereas the standard Loeb edition following Susemihl has a definite article, and every major English translation I consulted has some variant of “the political good” in this passage about justice. More broadly, over 300-plus pages discussing two of the most studied texts in the Western canon, Pascarella cites only twenty-four secondary works written since 1970. I am all for engaging primary sources, but I cannot avoid supposing that the book’s contribution to the scholarly conversation would have been greater had it availed itself more of the vast (though still far from exhaustive) shared work of reading and receiving these texts.
Pascarella has done well to thrust Aristotle once more into a crucial breach in our normal economic worldview, at the vital but poorly understand nexus of explanatory analysis and normative theory. If Economics and the Public Good does not persuasively set forth the wealth of potential insights in Aristotle’s unsurpassed combination of clear-eyed realism and soaring aspiration about human affairs, the book shows at least that this ancient motherlode still hides rich veins of insight for scholars to mine in years to come.
