Two trends within the discipline of economics have produced a recent focus on values, in contrast to self-interest. The first trend takes seriously the role of institutions (e.g., the firm) in shaping economic behavior. The second applies economic forms of analysis to traditionally noneconomic venues. Both trends have revealed that predicting behavior in firms, political systems, and families requires, even more strongly than in the market, taking account of values other than self-interest. Yet for scholars trained in economics or game theory, the temptation is to derive values themselves from self-interest. The goal is to “start with nothing” – that is, nothing but self-interest and rationality.

This enterprise is as old as the beginning of written philosophy. If, as some speculate, this kind of theorizing in ancient Athens was particularly characteristic of the democrats, it may have been less likely to be preserved in the aristocrats' private libraries. Whatever the reason, today we have only fragments of pre-Socratic thinking. We must try to reconstruct what the various pre-Socratic schools believed primarily through the refutations of their opponents, Plato, Aristotle, and Xenophon. We can be fairly sure, however, that some of the pre-Socratic theorists tried to base morality primarily (or totally) on self-interest, and politics on a social contract of self-interested individuals.