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Modernism, economics, and the ancient economy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2013

Scott Meikle
Scott Meikle
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, University of Glasgow
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Extract

Modernism, as a phenomenon in the study of the ancient world, has shown miraculous powers of recuperation from repeated and apparently fatal blows, and the appearance in 1992 of Edward Cohen's book Athenian economy and society: a banking perspective is a reminder of the fact. Modernism's apparent capacity to postpone terminal decline obviously has something to do with the subject of economics, but the connections are unclear.

It might be imagined that modernism began with the first appearance of economics as an independent science in the eighteenth century. But in fact the classical political economists did not seek to universalize political economy backwards in time to cover the whole of human history in the way that today's modernists try to universalize economics. Adam Smith distinguished four stages in the development of mankind from the ‘rude’ to the ‘civilized’ state. He was perfectly aware that what he called ‘the stage of commerce’ was historically recent, that earlier forms of society had been quite different in character, and that the new science of political economy described only the operations of the last stage, that of commerce.

Type
Research Article
Information
Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society (Second Series) , Volume 41 , 1996 , pp. 174 - 191
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s). Published online by Cambridge University Press 1996

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References

Notes

1. Cohen, Edward E., Athenian economy and society: a banking perspective (Princeton, 1992)Google Scholar.

2. Grote, G., A history of Greece (London, 1869)Google Scholar, Part II, Chapter XI. Grote speaks in nineteenth-century tones of ‘the march of industry and commerce’, and exaggerates the scale and nature of the lending of money at interest.

3. Finley, M. I., The ancient economy2 (London, 1985), p. 21Google Scholar.

4. Millett, P., Lending and borrowing in ancient Athens (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 9 and 15CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5. Robbins, L., The nature and significance of economic science (London, 1932), p. 15Google Scholar. See also p. 69: ‘we regard [the economic system] as a series of interdependent but conceptually discrete relationships between men and economic goods’.

6. This is argued in my ‘Aristotle and exchange value’, in Keyt, D. and Miller, Fred D. (eds.), A companion to Aristotle's Politics (Blackwell, Oxford, 1991), pp. 156–81Google Scholar.

7. See Millett, Paul, ‘Sale, credit and exchange in Athenian law and society’, in Nomos: essays in Athenian law, politics and society (Cambridge, 1990)Google Scholar.

8. Polanyi, , ‘Aristotle discovers the economy’, in Dalton, G. (ed.), Primitive, archaic, and modern economies (New York, 1968), p. 107Google Scholar.

9. Polanyi (n. 8), pp. 109 and 96.

10. Thompson, W. E., ‘The Athenian entrepreneur’, L'Antiquité Classique 51 (1982), p. 53CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11. Rostovtzeff, , cited by D'Arms, J. H., Commerce and social standing in ancient Rome (Cambridge, Mass., 1981), p. 12Google Scholar.

12. D'Arms, loc. cit. (n. 11).

13. See de Ste Croix, G. E. M., ‘Greek and Roman accounting’, in Littleton, A. C. and Yamey, B. S. (eds.), Studies in the history of accounting (London, 1956), pp. 28, 30Google Scholar; see also Millett (n. 4), pp. 8, 191.

14. Millett (n. 4), p. 72.

15. de Ste Croix, G. E. M., The class struggle in the ancient Greek world (London, 1981), pp. 179–204Google Scholar.

16. Millett (n. 4), p. 59.

17. Millett (n. 4), p. 72.

18. Ste Croix (n. 15), pp. 35–7, 43–4, 51, 52–3.

19. D'Arms (n. 11), ch. 1.

20. Schumpeter, J., History of economic analysis (Oxford, 1954), p. 54Google Scholar.

21. Schumpeter (n. 20), p. 57.

22. Finley, , ‘Aristotle and economic analysis’, in Finley, M. I. (ed.), Studies in ancient society (London, 1974), pp. 44–5Google Scholar.

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26. Schumpeter's definition was crucial to Finley's argument and conclusion in ‘Aristotle and economic analysis’, and later in The ancient economy. Without a definition having the strengths that Schumpeter's has, Finley could not have constructed his case at all.

27. L. Robbins (n. 5), p. 69.

28. The example is Sweezy, Paul's, The theory of capitalist development (Oxford, 1942), pp. 5–6Google Scholar.

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30. Finley (n. 3), p. 23.

31. See Finley (n. 22), passim, and id. (n. 3), p. 22, for the first view. For the second view see (n. 3), pp. 19–20.

32. Polanyi (n. 8), p. 81.

33. See my ‘Aristotle on money’, Phronesis 39 (1994), pp. 26–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The issue is looked at in greater detail in my Aristotle's economic thought, forthcoming with the Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1995Google Scholar.

34. Cohen (n. 1), p. 3.

35. On the uses of economic terms to describe pre-capitalist societies see Meillassoux, C., ‘From reproduction to production’, Economy and Society 1 (1972), pp. 93–105CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

36. The collected writings of J. M. Keynes (London, 1973), vol. 29, p. 81Google Scholar.

37. Keynes, J. M., Essays in persuasion (London, 1931), p. 369Google Scholar.

38. See my review of Lowry, Todd, ‘Et in Arcadia Chicago’, Polis 8 (1989), 25–34Google Scholar.

39. Lowry, S. Todd, The archaeology of economic ideas (Durham, 1987), p. 10Google Scholar.

40. Todd Lowry (n. 39), p. 74.

41. Todd Lowry (n. 39), pp. 69–70.

42. Todd Lowry (n. 39), p. 159.

43. Todd Lowry (n. 39), p. 158.