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From:          Giorgio Gilibert <[log in to unmask]>  
Cristina Marcuzzo has kindly passed me your query about Aristotle. 
 
If we look at the question from a factual viewpoint - which one among the 
various Aristotelian contributions has actually been the most influential 
in the field of economics - I would have no doubt: his short and criptic 
passage in the Nichomachean Ethics (V, 5) about justice in exchange. 
 
Aristotle illustates there the exchange ratio between two commodities by 
means of his Figure of Proportion, definitely the first graph in the 
history of economic analysis. The medieval commentaries about this 
passage, which is both abstract and obscure, have been the basis for the 
scholastic doctrine of the just price. Abstraction has forced the doctors 
to theorize without indulging in casuistry, and obscurity has given them 
ample opportunity for creative speculation. Modern value theory has largely 
inherited both its issues and concepts from these scholastic discussions - 
as professor Langholm* has shown. (While Quesnay has probably drawn from 
the Aristotelian figure the original idea of his zig-zags.) It is 
remarkable how powerful and versatile the Aristotelian approach can be: it 
clearly suggests the bifurcation between the so-called objective and 
subjective schools. It enables us to revisit the various versions of the 
modern theory of prices in a new perspective: from Isnard to Sraffa and 
von Neumann (the Albertus Magnus tradition) and from Galiani to Edgeworth 
and Walras (the Johannes Buridanus tradition). 
 
At least, that is what I have tried to show in a contribution - Necessary 
Price - to the forthcoming Elgar Companion to Classical Economics (of 
course I can e-mail the text to the interested reader). 
 
Yours sincerely 
 
Giorgio Gilibert 
 
*'Those who laid the foundations of economics in the eighteenth century 
were as familiar with the accumulated knowledge of scholastic analysis as 
the average twentieth century economist is ignorant of it.' (1976) 
 
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