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Fri Mar 31 17:18:38 2006 |
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======================= HES POSTING =================
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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