----------------- HES POSTING ----------------- I think that one important historical root of just price doctrine is to be found in Aristotle's *Politics,* Bk I, chapters 8-10, lines 1256a1-1258b8. Aristotle does not focus on just prices, but on what is natural; unnatural economic activity, however, ties into unjust prices. Aristotle is discussing the art of household management and comparing it to the art of business -- the former involved in using goods, the latter in procuring them. For Aristotle, many different modes of procuring are "natural" (a protean and complex term in Aristotle's thought, and here connected to Aristotle's senses that: what we use directly (i.e., not money, which we use indirectly, as Midas learned) is natural; & what has a limit is natural (so that, e.g., our pursuit of health as a goal involves limited use of doctors, food, medicine, etc., whereas the pursuit of wealth is unlimited and can turn out to be all-consuming). Also, every object -- e.g., a shoe -- has a double value: as use and as exchange; and for Aristotle its use value seems rather more natural -- its "proper use". So Aristotle sees that there are a number of natural ways to procure goods for use: barter and exchanges like (Marx's) C M C, where we begin with a useful good and exchange it for money that we use to buy another useful good (i.e., where we are concerned primarily with the use value of the good). When however this "necessary exchange" becomes "commerce" involving expertise in business (1257a39-b3) and businessmen start to make commercial transactions in order to make money, then the economic system has moved from exchange of useful goods to commerce where the goal is to make a profit, and this commerce easily moves into the pursuit of profit for its own sake (wealth) and the use of money to make more money (loaning money at interest, i.e., usury). For Aristotle, these types of commerce are unnatural. Moreover, while the statesman must know about them (chapter 11), they threaten the well- being of the city and the individual, because the pursuit of wealth, being an unlimited and potentially never-ending pursuit (as Hobbes explains vividly in *Leviathan,* chs 11 & 13), displaces the quest for living well, or the pursuit of the good life. I.e. the pursuit of external goods displaces the pursuit of goods of the body and goods of the mind. The above, I think, is fairly straightforward interpretation. How it may link to theories of the just price requires more speculation, but I think it is tied to a sense that (i) the pursuit of wealth through commerce and usury involves potentially unnatural (therefore unjust (?)) prices on goods -- the businessman or banker will set whatever price he wishes, with no attention to the well-being of the individual or the city; and (ii) (what is close to the same) a focus on prices -- as opposed to what you need for subsistence and sustenance -- means a focus away from well-being. Also, I suspect that there is some element that all humans as a species share needs and so have similar or common items they need to use -- wine and grain, for instance. When a winemaker and a farmer exchange useful items, the price at which the exchange takes place should be such that each sells and receives enough of the items to be useful for his sustenance. (The above may have some of Marx's language, but it is Aristotle's language also. In the last paragraph, I may be eliding Aristotle and Hegel, for Hegel tries to set equivalence of value in exchange by relying on human use values.) Peter G. Stillman ------------ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ------------ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]