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This is a response to Kepa Ormazabal: 
 
Aristotle describes (Politics 1256aff.) four different forms of exchange 
which Marx formalizes in his "Kapital" as W-W', W-G-W', G-W-G' and G-G'. 
According to the end of the specific form of exchange Aristotle 
distinguishes between 'natural' exchange (W-W' and W-G-W') and 'unnatural' 
exchange (G-W-G' and G-G'). I agree with you that he is concerned with the 
unnatural use of money since money - although being a necessary condition - 
is not a sufficient condition for 'unnatural' exchange. Now regarding 
G-W-G' (and probably G-G') you suggest that Aristotle is concerned with 
capital or capital accumulation which maybe could be described as a process 
like G-W-G'-W-G''-..... and seems to be Marx's concern. I interpret 
Aristotle's focus on the end of exchange as something that comes very close 
to what Sombart and Weber called the 'spirit of capitalism' 
(kapitalistischer Geist) which indeed is not unrelated with the 
accumulation of capital but at the same seems to be more than that. See 
especially Max Weber, "Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des 
Kapitalismus", Part I, ch.2, where Weber defines the 'Leitmotiv' of 
capitalism as a mind that takes acquisition as an end itself instead of as 
a mean to satisfy one's material needs. This sounds to me very 
Aristotelian. It is interesting to see that in the same passage Max Weber 
too describes the later (acquisition as a mean to satisfy one's material 
needs; W-G-W') as 'natural'. Karl Marx talks about something similar just a 
little bit after the passage you quoted, where he quotes MacCulloch in 
footnote 9 (that the 'auri sacra fames' determines the capitalistic man). 
 
In a modern language I would call Aristotle's concern as 'producing for the 
market' or 'commercialization'. See for example Aristotle's remark of 
making a shoe for the purpose of being exchanged (Pol. 1257a10) or his 
comment about the development of exchange as an art or method by which the 
greatest profit could be made (Pol.1257b1). The same is true for his 
example that the end of a professional art like medicine passes into the 
end of 'unnatural exchange' when pursued of the sake of money (Pol. 
1258a10ff.), which probably can not be described as capital accumulation. 
But I agree that there is a relationship. 
 
When I talked about market forces, on the other hand, I had something in 
mind like the fact that in ancient times the 'town-baker' did most of the 
time rise the price when flour was scarce and that the townsmen did riot; 
the fact that the roman emperor Tiberius (1st century AD) knew that it was 
not sufficient just to lower the corn prices in the city of Rome by law, 
but that he also had to pay the merchants the difference between the legal 
maximum-price and the market price; or the fact that the same emperor knew 
that he not only had to cancel the credit-law introduced by the senate but 
that he also had to provide the roman-bankers with liquidity to solve the 
bank-crisis that the introduction of that law had caused around 33 AD 
(Tacitus Ann. 4,17); and the fact that Diocletian's attempt to control the 
market forces with his price-edictum in 301 AD did not only fail but also 
lead to results - as Lactantius tells us (mort. pers. 7) - contrary to the 
initial intention. Therefore, for my purpose, I would like to stay with the 
term 'market forces'. 
 
The ironical thing about Schumpeter's 'Great Gap'-thesis in my opinion 
seems  to be the fact that his own intention was to close a much greater 
gap that had occurred after Francis Bacon, Voltaire, Condorcet and also 
Jacob Burckhardt (1818-1897) with his concept of 'Renaissance' introduced 
the judgement of the Middle Ages as a period of philosophical and 
scientific stagnation (the 'dark ages'; including the myth that medieval 
and ancient men believed that the earth was flat). I am under the 
impression that Schumpeter's interest in the scholastics for the history of 
economics could be a parallel to Pierre Duhem's (1861-1916) attempt to 
offer a different vision by locating the origin of modern science in the 
teachings of medieval natural philosophers. 
 
 
************************************** 
Thomas Moser 
Center for Research of Economic Activity (KOF) 
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH) 
ETH-Zentrum, CH-8092 Zurich 
phone: (++41)-1-632 68 99 
fax: (++41)-1-632 12 34 
e-mail: [log in to unmask] 
homepage: http://www.kof.ethz.ch/tm.htm 
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