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Recent Literature on Ancient Greek Economic Thought Author(s): S. Todd Lowry Reviewed work(s): Source: Journal of Economic Literature, Vol. 17, No. 1 (Mar., 1979), pp. 65-86 Published by: American Economic Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2723641 . Accessed: 15/09/2012 08:11
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Recent
Literature Economic
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Ancient Thought
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ECONOMISTS
attributed to Keynes that "practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist." We delude ourselves if we do not recognize a similar bondage to the ancient Greeks. Theodor Gomperz wrote: "Even those who have no acquaintance with the doctrines and writings of the great masters of antiquity, and who have not even heard the names of Plato and Aristotle, are, nevertheless under the spell of their authority. It is not only that their influence is often transmitted to us by their followers, ancient and modern: our whole mode of thinking, the categories in which our ideas move, the forms of language in which we express them, and which therefore govern our ideas,-all these are to no small extent the products of art, in large measure the art of the great thinkers of antiquity." "A thorough comprehension of these origins," he warned, "is indispensable if we are to escape from the overpowering despotism of their influence" [49, Gomperz, 1896, pp. 528-29]. Although it is frequently contended that the science of economics began with
* An earlier draftof this paper was read at a session of the History of Economics Society, affiliatedwith the Allied SocialSciences Associationmeetings, New York, New York,29 December 1977.
Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations or, at the earliest, with the writings of the French Physiocratsduring the eighteenth century, we should not forget the remarkable fact that the name for the discipline of economics is derived from the Greek word oikonomia [108, Kurt Singer, 1958].1 The Greeks used the word for a formal discipline that dealt with an abstract subject matter (estate management and public administration), a usage that maintained some continuity for more than two thousand years before the discipline became known as political economy.2 In PlaI Cassiodorus listed economics among Aristotle's classification of the sciences. It was also listed in Boethius' basic Aristotelian classification.(See Marshall Clagett [14, 1955].) 2 Andreas Andreades traced the term political loeeconomyto Antoine de Montchretien's TraitMde conomie politique published in 1615 [88]. He wrote: "A study of this work has convinced me first that the writer knew Greek thoroughly and that apart from other writerswhom he cites (e.g. Thales,Archytas of Tarentum) he had carefully read Xenophon and in particular Aristotle, from whom he quotes no less than six definitions;second, that he used the term political economy not in ignorance of its real meaning but because as a mercantilist he expected everything of the state, even matters in the domain of economics. The misconception is due then to later writers, who, though not sharing the views of Montchrestien as to the necessity of the continual intervention of the state in matters of social economy, nevertheless applied to this the title which he had given it" [2, Andreades, 1933, pp. 81-82]. For biographical information on de Montchretien (as well as Xenophon and Aristotle), see Jacques Wolf [122, 1973]. No one seems to have noticed the fact that what Protagoras,the leading teacher of the Periclean age,
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to's dialogue, the Statesman, the point is made that the administration of either a small-sized city or a large household requires the same science. It is immaterial, it was said, whether the science is called "royalscience, political science, or science of household management" [94, Plato, 1961]. It is not possible here to review in detail the well-known influence of the classical heritage on Western thought. Its persistent vitality is in large part a result of the role played by classical Greek literature in European education from the time of Thomas Aquinas with little interruption to the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.3 We have had both
claimed to teach sounds very much like political economy: "If Hippocratescomes to me," Protagoras is quoted as saying, "he will not experience the sort of drudgery with which other Sophists are in the habit of insulting their pupils;who, when they have just escaped from the arts,are taken and driven back into them by these teachers,and made to learn calculation, and astronomy,and geometry, and music . . . but if he comes to me, he will learn that which he comes to learn. And this is prudence in affairsprivate as well as public;he will learn to order his own house in the best manner, and he will be best able to speak and act in the affairs of the state" (Protagoras 318d-e) [92, Plato (Benjamin Jowett's translation), 1871]. Other translations of this passagedo not differ significantlyfrom Jowett's. W. K. C. Guthrie'stranslation has Protagorasteaching "the proper care of . . . personal affairs, so that he may best manage his own household,and also of the state's affairs. . " [91, Plato (edited by Edith Hamiltonand Huntington Cairns), 1961]. The most recent translation,that of C. C. W. Taylor [93, 1976], reads: "What I teach is the proper management of one's own affairs, how best to run one's household, and the management of public affairs...." For a discussionof the relationship between politics and economics, which includes an analysis of the managerial perspective in Plato, see William Campbell [11, 1976-77]. See also Joseph J. Spengler [115, 1969; 113, 1955]. For a discussion of public policy in support of the arts, see William Baumol [4, 1971]. 3 As an illustrationof the importance of Greek economic writingsin the middle ages,Josef Soudek [112, 1969] notes that no fewer than 219 fifteenth-century hand-written copies and 15 printed editions of Bruni's translation of the (pseudo-) Aristotelian Economics still survive. He states that it was nearly as popular as Sir John Mandeville's travelogue written in 1356 and Ovid's Metamorphoses.
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a dispenser of "pompous common sense" [104, 1954, p. 57].5 Particularly in his approach to politics, he believed Aristotle demonstrated a comprehensive grasp of a social process, which he realized could be systematically studied by the collection and explanation of comparative data. Schumpeter suggested that the first five chapters of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations are essentially a recapitulation of Aristotle's contributions, beginning with primitive barter, exchange, and the division of labor [104, 1954, p. 60]. He found no theory of distribution,interest, or price in Aristotle and, in observing that primitive institutions are usually more complex than modern specialized structures, decried Aristotle's habitual resort to historical explanation of the development of economic relationships when the analytical aspects require attention to logical origins. Along with his distinction between economic analysis and descriptions of given economic systems, Schumpeter made some acute observations on the role played by ideology in orienting rnental perspectives, within the confines of which analysisfunctions. He also suggested a role for what he called "visions"or conceptual perspectives, which operate at a broader level of generality than analysis.Although this idea was not fully developed, it provided a somewhat more comprehensive orientation from which to appraise the intellectual contributions of the ancients, i.e., in terms of those organizing ideas which are analytic in a broader sense rather than in a narrower technical sense. I would classify my own paper [79, 1974] on the archaeology of the circulation concept in economic theory as the appraisal of a "vision" or a system of imagery with analytic content.
5 RichardPorter [100, 1965] applies Schumpeter's definition of analysis to Aristotle's distinction between use value, exchange value, and money value and suggests that these categories can be used in tracing the development of economic thought to the present.
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Schumpeter took definite positions on two topics to which some subsequent attention has been given. On the question of interest or usury, he flatly denied any analytic contribution on Aristotle's part.6 On the more controversialissue of money, Schumpeter took a strong position that Aristotle was a metallist, interpreting his statement that money is subject to legal norms as meaning merely that the specific commodity selected as the monetary medium is the subject of arbitrarylegislative decision. Despite the widespread acceptance of subjective relativism in the fourth century B.C., he contended that Aristotle held a commodity theory of money. This view has been effectively challenged by Barry Gordon [50, 1961]. It is strange that Schumpeter should have taken such a dogmatic view of Aristotle's monetary ideas, considering his recognition of Plato's "cartal" theory of money. Moreover, the (pseudo-) Aristotelian Oeconomicus contains various anecdotal references to fiat money systems and, whether or not this work was legitimately Aristotle's, it was a significantpart of the European intellectual corpus, studied as relevant to current problems by rulers as well as by ordinary men of affairs.7 A Recent TextbookAppraisal of the Greeks Of recent general textbooks in the history of economic thought, Henry Spiegel's [116, 1971] presents the most comprehensive discussion of ancient Greek ideas. He
6 It could be argued that Aristotle's position on usury was an integral part of his broader view, discussed below, of an economic system in which all "surplus" shouldbe earmarkedfor populationexpansion. This idea was developed more fully in Lowry [80, 1974]. 7 See Soudek [112, 1969, pp. 66 ff] for a discussion of the circulation of Bruni's translationamong professionalmen, the clergy, and scholarsat universities. He noted that copies were in the libraries of two popes as well as those of King Charles V and King Henry IV of France.
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1961] unfortunately has not been translated into English. Tozzi divides his lengthy study between the Greeks and the Roman jurisconsults, the two primary sources of much of our conceptual orientation in the Western European tradition. He gives more systematic attention to Xenophon than have most historiansof ideas, and he thoroughly covers Plato's contribution, emphasizing the limited character of his theory of the division of labor, namely that it is essentially a concept of the efficient use of individual capacities in an organized state through specialization of roles. He shows a clear grasp of the Greek concept of efficient administration in his treatment of Aristotle and makes the most careful distinction in the current literature between oikonomia and chrematistike in his analysis of Aristotle's Politics. He introduces the concept of the natural limit in this discussion (section 26), but fails to carry it into an interpretation of Aristotle's systematic distinction between natural and unnatural chrematistike. In his treatment of Book V of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, he follows the text carefully, developing the concept of mutual subjective utility as the basis of exchange, free from the concerns with status and the labor theory of value promoted by some economic anthropologists and economists.'0 He fails, however, to take note of the significance of the harmonic proportion with its possible zone of moot indeterminancy and its analytic importance in the analysis of exchange, which
'OSchumpeter interpreted the passage on exchange in Aristotle'sEthics (V, 1133) as follows: "As the farmer's labor compares with the shoemaker's labor, so the product of the farmer compares with the product of the shoemaker."He then added, with what seems to be a bit of annoyance: "At least, I cannot get any other sense out of this passage. If I am right, then Aristotle was groping for some labor-cost theory of price which he was unable to state explicitly" [104, Schumpeter, 1954, pp. 60-61, n. 1].
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other writers [78, Lowry, 1969] have found relevant. Tozzi's work is of importance on two scores, in addition to his thorough coverage of the textual material in terms of a slightly different academic tradition from that with which English-speaking economists are primarily familiar. First, he cites a great deal of French and Italian literature on Greek economic ideas, which has never been included in the English tradition, much of it from the nineteenth century. Second, he raises the question of the logical validity of an abstract empiricist view of justice, i.e., can justice be built as a social concept from the subjective selfinterest of the individual participants in the political structure? This problem was posed by Plato several times and has recently been revived by classical scholars. Its significance for social theory is that the arguments, though in a legal frame of reference, formulate many of the issues implicit in the rationalizationof the competitive market and the fallacy of composition. The second current work that pays significant attention to ancient thought is Barry Gordon'sEconomic Analysis before Adam Smith [53, 1975], of which about one-fourth, some 65 pages, is devoted to the ancient Greeks. His treatment of Hesiod, drawn from an earlier article [51, Gordon, 1963], calls attention to the basic economic perspective of Hesiod's scarcityoriented agrarian outlook. He notes Hesiod's comment on the beneficial role of competition within crafts in generating improvements in skills and pride in workmanship, a remark that would no doubt have been of interest to Jacob Viner in his study of the history of laissez faire [119,
1960].11
credits with supporting the conception of laissez faire doctrines are Aristotle's defense of private property, his "rule of law rather than of men" doctrine, and the idea of harmony of interests between individual and polis.
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tributive, corrective, and reciprocal justice. He does, however, abandon his earlier argument [52, 1964] for a labor theory of value interpretation of this material. In fact, he does not even cite his earlier work that dealt with the exchange passage. Gordon has recently supplemented his work with an extensive unpublished bibliography [54, 1977], which is being privately circulated. M. L Finley, Classicist and Ancient Historian One of the most prolific writers on the economic history of the ancient Greek world is the classicist and ancient historian, Moses I. Finley.'4 Apparently wary of cavalier theoretical generalizations from his Columbia days when he participated in the research project of the Karl Polanyi group and from the experience of the McCarthy era, which contributed to his leaving the United States, Finley has single-mindedly focused his attention upon meticulous, detailed research into the nature of ancient economic life with, at least until recently, little apparent interest in broader social or economic theory. One reviewer remarked that his "suspicions about modernist dogma" have "a faintly nihilistic tone" [47, M. W. Frederiksen, 1975, p. 170]. Two of Finley's most significant works dealing with the economy of the ancient Greeks are his article, "Aristotle and Economic Analysis" [38, 1970] and his book, TheAncient Economy, an amplification of his 1972 Sather Lectures at the University of California.He begins the preface of The Ancient Economy with the statement, "The title of this volume is precise." The next sentence then continues: "It is not a book one would call an 'economic history' " [40, Finley, 1973, p. 9]. If it is not economic history, it is not entirely clear
14 Among Finley's works that may be of interest to the historian of economic thought, see REFERENCES 30 through 43.
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what it is, for neither can it be classified as dealing primarily with economic thought. As a description of an economic system, it has little theoretical content. In any case, his earlier article has much more for the historianof economic thought than the book, and it will receive major attention here. In his article, Finley takes note of the conflicting interpretations by classicists of the famous passage in Book V of Aristotle's Ethics on the exchange of a house for shoes.'5 He admits that he himself "[does] not understand what the ratios between the producers can mean" [38, Finley, 1970, p. 13]. He follows Schumpeter's interpretation in the main, but, unlike Schumpeter, does not concede even the contribution of any analytic framework to Aristotle. He bluntly asserts: "Of economic analysis there is not a trace" [38, Finley, 1970, p. 18]. Although Finley originally held himself somewhat apart from the Polanyi school, it has been pointed out that he "has been even more insistent than Polanyi on the non-market features of the Greek economy" [61, S. C. Humphreys, 1969, p. 179]. Even so, his conception of economic analysis as being limited to elucidating the functioning of the self-regulating market system and his emphasis on status are very close to Polanyi's. Nor is Finley's negative position tempered by his own definition of the type of economy that existed in ancient Greece. Not even in The Ancient Economy does he describe the distinctive economic process in terms of which we might appraise the cogency of Aristotle's descriptions, or reflections, or analyseswhatever he might consider them to be.
15H. H. Joachim, he noted, found the meaning of the ratiosbetween the producers"in the end unintelligible." R. A. Gauthier and J. Y. Jolif interpreted the passage to indicate some concept of personal equality. Salomonrejected the mathematics as mere "interpolation." W. F. R. Hardie, a more recent commentator, does not find the mathematics relevant. KarlMarx,however, conceded that Aristotlewas the first to "identify the central problem of exchange value" [38, Finley, 1970, pp. 9-11].
the elaboration of any concept of the ancient economy as a determinate economic structure" [58,' 1975, p. 688]. Finley's brusque rejection of any analytic content in Book V of the Ethics, a passage to which economists and legal scholars have given so much attention throughout European history, is based partly on his narrow interpretation of its mathematical content. In this, he follows F. D. Harvey [55, 1965], who found only arithmetic and geometric proportionality represented in the Ethics. Although Harvey did take note of the harmonic proportion in his general remarks, he failed to recognize the subtleties implicit in it and did not correlate it with the reciprocal proportion alluded to in Book V of the Ethics. If Finley had considered the possibility that Aristotle was developing an analytical framework for achieving justice in the administrative determination of price, he might have seen that the harmonic proportion provides a model for the concept of subjective mutuality on which Aristotle relied. As I have argued [78, 1969], Aristotle's aim was not to determine natural price or market price, but to explain the criteria for arriving at fair price through public decision.'6 From this perspective, Finley misses the point when he concludes that "none of [the] interpretations of what Aristotle 'really meant' answers the question, How are prices, just or otherwise, established in the market?" [38, 1970, p. 11]. It is a useless definitional quibble to ar16 It is unfortunatethat this article, although dated 1969, did not actuallyappear until 1970 so that there was no way Finley could have commented on my analysisof Aristotle'stheory of exchange in his 1970 article. A critical appraisal of my argument by a scholar of Finley's standing would have joined the issue more sharply.
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with his illustration of the productivity of the pin factory, raised the discussion of specialization to the realm of economic analysis.'7Xenophon's comments, it is alleged, are merely commonplace observations. This assessment of Xenophon rests upon a distinction between qualitative and quantitative productivity and the insistence upon the latter, with its correlation with market commerce, as the sine qua non of economic analysis. Although Xenophon's discussion of the improved quality resulting from specialization was in the context of skill achieved by the king's cooks, he carries the idea into an analysis of the relation between population concentration (the extent of the market) and the development of skills through specialization. Moreover, he uses the example of a carpenter in a way that would suggest his later influence on Adam Smith's proposition that the extent of the market limits the division of labor:
For just as all other arts are developed to superior excellence in large cities, in that same way the food at the king's palace is also elaborately prepared with superiorexcellence. For in small towns the same workman make chairs and doors and plows and tables, and often this same artisanbuildshouses, and even so he is thankful if he can only find employment enough to support him. And it is, of course, impossible for a man of many trades to be proficient in all of them. In large cities, on the other hand, inas17 The issue of whether Smith drew on the ancient Greeks for his ideas on the division of labor is discussed in the recent literature by VernardFoley [44, 1974; 45, 1975] and Paul McNulty [83, 1975]. McNulty correctly emphasizes that Plato's theory of the division of labor, upon which Foley focused attention, was based on the concept of natural talents or skills, rather than skill acquired by specialization and organization. For further background see Rodolfo Mondolfo [87, 1954] and Alison Burford [8, 1972]. Stanley Diamond [25, 1964, p. 175] has noted that in the Republic ". . . Plato not only sensed the congruence of the elaborate division of labor with state organization,but carried it to its furthest reach and then gave it the name ofjustice." See also Foley's The Social Physics of Adam Smith [46, 1976], which marshalsargumentsfor a direct classicalGreek influence upon Adam Smith's overview of the social process, with primary attention to the ideas of Empedocles.
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much as many people have demands to make upon each branch of industry,one trade alone, and very often even less than a whole trade, is enough to support a man: one man, for instance, makes shoes for men, and another for women; and there are places even where one man earns a living by only stitching shoes, another by cutting them out, another by sewing the uppers together, while there is anotherwho performs none of these operations but only assembles the parts. It follows, therefore, as a matter of course, that he who devotes himself to a very highly specialized line of work is bound to do it in the best possible manner. [123, Xenophon, 1914, Vol. 2, Book VIII.ii.5.]
labour is occasioned immediately by the market one has for his commodities, by which he is enabled to exchange one thing for every thing, so is this division greater or less according to the market.
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first occasioned the division of labour, and the greatness of it is what puts it in one's power to divide it much. A wright in the country is a cart-wright, a house-carpenter, a squarewright [door maker?], or cabinet-maker, and a carver in wood, each of which in a town makes a separate business. [84, Meek and Skinner, 1973, p. 1110.]
Although the significance of Smith'scorrelation of the division of labor with increased productivity, which Finley emphasizes, is widely accepted, the recent discovery of a detailed set of dated notes on Smith's 1762-63 lectures on jurisprudence has focused attention on the more fundamental premise, which Ronald Meek and Andrew Skinner refer to as "the crucial principle that the division of labour is limited by the extent of the market" [84, 1973, p. 1100]. They believe that the fresh evidence presented by the new set of notes has allowed them to pinpoint the precise week in which Smith made the analytical breakthrough that has been called "the methodological bridge between the first concept of labor's division and the larger scheme of [the Wealth of Nations]" [121, Garry Wills, 1978, p. 41]. Meek and Skinner note that the new material on the extent of the market introduced on 5 April, 1763, six days after his last lecture, was out of the normal context of exposition-we may assume as the result of some novel insight. No one knows the source of Smith's sudden linking of the extent of the market with specialization and the division of labor, but an interesting suggestion may be implicit in the comparison of the passage quoted above from Xenophon's Cyropaedia and a passage from the new notes on Smith's lecture:
Although this correlation may not be specifically supported by the circumstantial presence of Xenophon's works in Smith's library at the time of his death 30 years later, the general credibility of the suggestion is supported by Charles Fay's judgment that both the Theory of Moral Sentiments and the Wealth of Nations "issued from the womb of the classics" [29, 1956, p. 1]. William Scott's work [105, 1940] also supports this thesis. It is difficultto understand how the shoe manufacturing process found in large urban centers using standard parts and assembly-line techniques that Xenophon described could be considered by Finley as merely a system for improving craftsmanship. Even if the purpose of the process as carried on by the ancients was only to produce shoes of superior quality, could the Greeks have been oblivious to the quantitative efficiency that necessarily resulted? If there were no other discussions in ancient literature that took cognizance of increased productivity through improved craftsmanship or administrative expertise, Finley's point would have been more persuasive. But, as I have pointed out [77, 1965], the whole tenor of Xenophon's Oeconomicus is to the effect that organization of activity in terms of spatial distributions and improved human interaction and leadership results in greate success and output, whether from the land or from a crew of oarsmen or in aesthetic terms from a chorus (all Xenophon's illus-
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tence that expresses an economic principle or offers any economic analysis, nothing on efficiency of production, 'rational' choice, the marketing of crops" [40, 1973, p. 19]. Only if one insists that production theory has no economic meaning unless integrated with a concept of a modern free market system can Finley's pronouncement be found consistent with the evidence. Drawing on Xenophon's Ways and Means, Finley presses his conclusion that the Greeks had no theoretical grasp of the market process (therefore economics) as shown by their reliance on and encouragement of metics for their necessary trade and manufactures. He takes John Hicks [57, 1969, p. 48] to task for questioning their toleration of metics in the development of their economy.'9 "Hicks,"he asserts, "seems to . . . have placed the ac-
administering economic activity, particularly those functions of the Athenian state which had made it a distribution center for eastern Mediterranean trade, collecting both import and export taxes on all goods transshipped in its port.20 On the further question of whether the ancients had an idea of progress, we can agree with Finley [38, 1970, pp. 19-21; 35, 1965] that there was not a well developed concept of material progress in terms of production and technology, but this is primarily to say that they preceded the industrial revolution.2' It is important to note that they did have an individualistic concept of progress as evidenced by their obsession with personal improvement (through gymnastics, music, and intellectual and moral training). Moreover, Aristotle had an analytic framework for comprehending the total disposition of the fruits of the economy in terms of which the obligation of the individual is
20 Heiman Knorringa reviews the ancient discussions on the importance of administrative control over imports and exports [69, 1926]. See especially pages 72-128 on the regulation of the corn trade. The supply of timber was controlled by some city states through a system of import and export licenses. See also Donald Hughes [60, 1975]. 21 H. W. Pleket explains the indifference of the ancients to technology as being the result of the plentiful supply of labor and the attitude of the upper classes [95, 1967]. He notes, however, that military technology was an exception to this pattern. John Bury found no concept of progress in Greek thought [10, 1932, p. 7], while Ludwig Edelstein was convinced that the Greeks had developed most of the ideas later associated with the modern concept of progress [27, 1967, p. xxxiii]. Eric Dodds, who presents the best summary of the literature on the subject, concludes that there was a widely accepted concept of progress in the fifth century B.C., which persisted mainly in ancient scientific thought [26, 1973, pp. 1-25]. The theory of Forms, according to Dodds, was a "fundamental limitation on the idea of progress" [26, 1973, p. 14]. We may note that the notion of a perfectible ideal that is approached in the course of change carries with it the presumption of a slowing down in the rate of such change. However, the concept of an ideal, closed system is the necessary frame of reference for rational analysis, and the Greeks can perhaps be forgiven for emphasizing rationality at the expense of indeterminate novation.
cent exactly in the wrong place when he writes of the metics, 'what is remarkable is that there should have been a phase in which their competition is tolerated, or even welcomed, by those already established"' [38, Finley, 1970, p. 24, n. 88]. Xenophon's proposals in the Ways and Means for increasing the number of metics (better housing accommodations, quicker settlement of disputes in the courts, and public recognition of prominent merchants and innovators) represents a clear grasp of the importance of
18 On Athenian policies for increasing agricultural production, see James Buchanan [6, 1962]. '9 Hicks argues that the Mediterranean city-state was the basis for the development of the European market system.
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self-improvement so that the surplus produced by the economy can be allocated to the support of an enlarged population. I have argued [80, 1974] that Aristotle's conclusions in Book I of the Politics are that natural pressures of diminishing utility for consumer goods (goods of the body and external goods) direct surplus human energy toward moral self-improvement and that the increases resulting from the surpluses inherent in mutually beneficial trade should not be appropriated by middlemen who handle these surpluses in their monetized stage, but rather belong to the offspring. Aristotle thus articulates a concept in which the proper objectives of an economy are toward the support of the expansion of population. In his view, activities of traders should be restricted so as not to interfere with that end. This may differ from modern value judgements, which do not equate progress with population growth, but it does constitute a comprehensive analytic framework with a growth concept. Plato and a Theory of Administered Production It is difficultfor us to attribute economic ideas to ancient Greek thinkers whose observations concerned a society with market and production facets that appear to be either inconspicuous or culturally embedded because our approach is from a perspective in which the market and production facets of modern capitalist economies are presumed to be interdependent parts of a separate system capable of being isolated for purposes of economic analysis. Finley found "no economic analysis rather than poor or inadequate economic analysis"[38, 1970, p. 15] in Aristotle's attempt to analyze isolated exchange because he found Aristotle's efforts irrelevant to the theory of the self-regulating market. By focusing on the production rather
the class war that divides each city in two. . . . In this and in other respects, it is wrong to regard the Republic as a Utopia. The state arises because men come together to satisfy their mutual needs. Production, not distribution, is the issue" [120, 1948, p. 108]. In the Laws, a work of Plato's later years, Welles found a carefully structured plan for the stability of an authoritarianstate or, in modern terms, a "steady state economy."22 The goal of Plato's state was to be self-sufficient;it was to have a carefully structured and fixed population, balanced trade with fiat money, specialization of labor decreed by the state, and equal division of produce among slaves, citizens, and metics. It seems that no one has noticed the implicit confrontation between Xenophon's growth and development-oriented Ways and Means mentioned earlier, with its program for expanding the labor supply in the mines for optimum production and its policy of expanding commercial activity in the port for maximum tax revenues, and the static, conservative response in Plato's Laws, which seeks the stability of the rationally planned, administered state in balance with its defined purpose and chosen resource base. The overview Welles presents suggests that formal thought of the time clearly encompassed both the production and redistributive phases of what has been called the redistributive state and that the economy was "embedded" only to the extent that, where economic activity is administratively controlled, it is, by definition,
22 See Glenn Morrow for a modern translation by a scholar with economic interests [89, 1960].
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ganization of man's life. In effect, he posed, in all its breadth, the question of the place occupied by the economy in society" [99, 1957, p. 66]. But Polanyi's conclusions were somewhat ambivalent. In the end, he could not separate economic analysis from price analysis and concluded: ". . . we agree that economic the-
ory cannot expect to benefit from Book I of Politics and Book V of the Nichomachian Ethics. Economic analysis, in the last resort, aims at elucidating the functions of the market mechanism, an institution that was still unknown to Aristotle" [99, 1957, p. 66]. In later years, however, Polanyi [97, 1971] drew on Karl Menger's Grundsatzefor a broader definition of economic analysis which comprehends the "substantive" or "embedded" aspects of the economy, a perspective that goes beyond Lionel Robbins's definition based on scarcity. Polanyi explained the famous passage from Book V of the Ethics analyzing barter between a shoemaker and a house builder, not as an expression of a labor theory of value or of subjective mutuality, but rather in terms of a precontract economy in which justice in exchange is still socially embedded and arrived at in terms of the status of the participants. This view had some influence in the subsequent literature.24However, it seems somewhat incongruous for Polanyi to have attributed a dominant role to status in an economic system that had unquestionably gone beyond the primitive level of "reciprocity" and did not coincide with the "redistributive," in both of which status is classically emphasized. His hierarchy of economic systems included the two aforementioned, with partially disembedded trade evolving only in the redistributive system as palace trade (trade organized among chieftains) or international commerce through "ports of trade." In one of his
24 For an excellent assessment school see Humphreys [61, 1969].
of the Polanyi
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later works [96, 1968] he added a third pre-market economic pattern, household or manorial economy which, however, he considered a primitive form of the redistributive. His hierarchy therefore included reciprocity, household management, and redistribution as the three economic systems preceding the emergence of the self-regulating market. In general, Polanyi's dramatic picture of Aristotle with his conception of the market in embryo standing at the threshhold between one of the earlier systems and the modern market, which eventually emerged some 2,000 years later, cannot stand very close scrutiny. The pre-market categories adopted from anthropology may also appear somewhat strained to the historian of ideas, since reciprocity shows strong affinity to the "natural"social contract of Book II of Plato's Republic and the redistributive economy has parallels with the Marxian "Asiatic mode of production. "25
The Substantivist-Formalist Controversy In search of generalizable principles of economics, which transcend the limits of modern industrial society, economic anthropologists have given considerable attention to ancient societies to supplement the limited data on the economic life of unadulterated contemporary primitive economies. Such studies have given rise to a methodological dispute labelled the substantivist-formalist (orprimitivist-modernist) controversy of interest to historians of economic thought. Although contemporary work in economic anthropology is in a state of ferment, a brief summary of the issues in this controversy may shed some light on its potential contribution to work in the history of ancient Greek ideas
25 Howard Becker refers to man as Homo reciprocus [5, 1956]. See also Lawrence Krader [71, 1975], Barry Hindess and Paul Hirst [59, 1975] and Emmanuel Terray [117, 1972].
The impasse between these two perspectives is probably clarified somewhat by Maurice Godelier's [48, 1972] distinction between "abstract empiricism" and "functional empiricism."28 Abstract empiricists hold that a theory of economic behavior can be drawn from the aggrega26 The literature on the controversy is extensive. See References for citations to Robbins Burling [9, 1962], Percy Cohen [15,1967], Scott Cook [17,1966], George Dalton [21, 1961], David Kaplan [65, 1968], Edward LeClair [74, 1962], Marshall Sahlins [101, 1972], Harold Schneider and Harrie van der Pas [103, 1975]. 27 An older controversy generally ignored in discussions by economic anthropologists is the one between economic historians, beginning with Karl Bucher's work in the 1890's, over the primitiveness or modernity of ancient economy. For a summary of this older literature as well as recent contributions to the debate, see Humphreys [62, 1970]. 28 Scott Cook [17, 1966] labels the adherents of these two methodological perspectives the "formalists" and "romanticists." On the role of exchange and the more general transaction in anthropological and sociological thought, see Bruce Kapferer [64, 1976] and Marcel Mauss [82, 1925].
79
that human society is made up of human beings and that changes in social and economic activity must rest upon individual actions.30 Referring specifically to Mesopotamia, he argues that individually motivated trade probably had an underestimated share in the economic life of the ancient world, since private activity did not produce the public records, which document administrative trade for such periods. What is particularly interesting to the intellectual historian, however, is Adams's argument that individual ideas are the motivating power for changes in the prevailing pattern of human behavior. One is put in mind of Shackle'sobservation that "In natural science, what is thought is built upon what is seen; but in economics, what is seen is built upon what is thought" [106, 1972, p. 66]. The problem is complicated, of course, by the existence of subjective ideas about individual pursuits and about the nature of society, as well as the interplay between a society's intellectual heritage and the "socialization" of the individual. What is particularly important for the intellectual historian in dealing with economic and social theory is the parallelism between the individualist and functionalist view of social behavior and similar types of abstractions applied to theory. The contrast is between theory as the result of individual rationality, observation, or intuition, on the one hand, and theory as the product of ideology, vision, or social indoctrination on the other. Singer took note of a nascent form of these perspectives in ancient literature when he wrote, "Both the art of the ruler and of the oikonomikos in the narrower sense can be exercised with better or worse results and there are rules and
30 For a wide-ranging and facile presentation of ancient economic life with an emphasis on intellectual patterns, see Thomas Carney [12, 1973; 13, 1975].
911].
80
standards for their guidance, derived from, or justified by, reasoning. Oikonomia thus appears under two aspects: as the description of a pattern of action, and as the norm by which those actions have to be judged. Such a duality of meaning appears to be characteristicallyGreek: reality is conceived as a well-ordered whole which finds in its idea the criterion of its own goodness" [108, 1958, p. 32]. Conclusion The eighteenth century discovery of the apparently rationalresource-allocatingcapacities of the self-regulating market system obscured the older administrative approach of the ancient Greek science of oikonomia from which the discipline of economics derives. That oikonomia was not based on a concept of a self-regulating market is not is dispute. Whether the administrative theory of oikonomia may be useful for modern economists, especially those concerned with market externalities and welfare premises and those in fields, both in government and in the private sector, where management science has become increasingly important and increasingly removed from market analysis, is another question. The fact that the two approaches have been assumed to be fundamentally different even though they both have been employed in the efficient allocation of resources should draw attention to the basically ideological nature of scholarly perspective. The administrative orientation of oikonomia forces us to face the fact that, ultimately, it is human beings who are the decision-makers who must make choices with goal and value implications, a responsibility easier to avoid if decision-making is viewed simply as better or worse adjustments to some inexorable process controlled by the market. The separationof the discipline of economics from its humanistic origins in oikonomia made it more similar to mechanistic disciplines like engineering and empirical science. It
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