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Gregory Zorzos cited a lot of ancient sources for words related to
economist; my own knowledge is much more limited and focused. It
seems to me that for Aristotle economics is the art of household
management, which (for him) traditionally involved obtaining goods to
satisfy the needs of the household; and which had, in the conditions of
the developed Greek conditions in which he was writing, become more
complex and differentiated such that some activities (like exchange)
which had been originally used to satisfy neeeds were now being used
by merchants and bankers as a means to make money. (This is all
from the Politics, Bk I .)
So Aristotle had two senses of economics, from oikos, the art of
household management. His traditional (and 'natural') sense is what
*we* now see as the old-fashioned one: how to do home economics,
how to manage the finances of the family, and is in many ways out-
dated because family economics are not, as they frequently were (or
could be considered) for Aristotle, relatively independent of a larger
nexus of exchange, money supply, etc.: a (rich) family unit could be
relatively self-sufficient, for Aristotle.
His developed, 'unnatural' money-making trade and usury, where
individuals exchange goods and loan money in the hopes of making
more money, is, rather, what modern (capitalist) economics is about.
Aristotle saw and recognized this, saw that it could become
independent of the political order and could corrupt people from their
proper citizen concerns, and saw, implicitly (or from the perspective of
2000), that this kind of trade and usury could gain dominance in social
life.
Personally, I find a lot of what Aristotle says to be quite intelligent,
and,
as Ross Emmett suggests, to be common usage. Aristotle moralizes
(as I imply above), but Aristotle's main distinction has to do with
whether 'economic' activity is to satisfy human needs or to make
money, and Aristotle also looks to the human or psychological
implications and results of economic arrangements where the goal of
people is to make money: the pursuit of money is unlimited (whereas
need satisfaction, in Aristotle's non-capitalist world, has limits), it
detaches people from concern for human needs, it detaches people
from loyalty to family and state, etc.
(Marx, in Capital vol. I ch. 1, picks up on a lot of what Aristotle says,
beginning with Aristotle's distinction of use from exchange value. For
Marx, Aristotle is in the end a kind of reactionary, objecting to
unnatural exchange and trying to turn back the clock to a previous
stage of economic (under-)development; whereas Marx thinks that
exchange aimed at money-making can be eliminated only by going
beyond capitalism.)
To pick up on another strand, if you take an Aristotelean approach to
defining (modern) economics, it is the study of exchange and loans that
aims at money making.
Peter G. Stillman
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