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Reading Notes: Aristotle
and Economic Growth
J. Bradford DeLong
University of California at Berkeley
, Economics and Blum Center,
and WCEG
brad.delong@gmail.com
http://delong.typepad.com/
+1 925 708 0467
Last Edited January 6, 2020: 1723 words
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Living on the Internet at: <
https://www.bradford-delong.com/2020/01/reading-notes-on-
book-i-of-aristotles-politics.html
>
Who Aristotle Was
Let me remind you about Aristoteles son of Nikoma
k
h
o
s of Stag
e
ir
a.
sometime tutor of Alexandros III Argeádai of Macedon, called “The
Great”.
He lived from
-384 to -322
, in the Greek-speaking communities around
the Aegean Sea. He spent most of his time in Athens. For the two
millennia following his death, he would be, for a large chunk of the world,
THE Philosopher:
capital “P” and capital “THE”.
1650 years after his
death,
poet Dante Alighieri would call him “
the Master… of those who
know”
, “il Maestro di color che sanno”.
Aristotle’s
was, even at so long a
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distance in time,
the most
powerful intellectual name
that
one could
conjure with
.
Reading
Aristotle
I have assigned the beginning of
Aristotle’s
Politics
<
https://
delong.typepad.com/fi les/
aristotle-politics-book-i.pdf
>.
Aristotle
was a deep thinker—
perhaps the d
eepest thinker
millennia. Aristotle was tr
ying
hard to get it right
. As a result,
Aristotle is the m
ost respected
intellectual landmark
from
his day
at least up to the day of Isaac Newton.
But you are going to
read
Aristotle
,
and you are going too hit a wall
and think: “this is weird”—and a lot of it
is weird, and even repugnan
t.
Yet we read him.
For how could we learn if we only read people who we
found not-weird?
We read him as a
mighty, flawed thinker
whom
we can
learn from
. And we can learn from him for two reasons:
•
First, his
thought is mighty
, therefore we should pay attention to his
arguments and his conclusions.
•
Second, many
have taken his thought—even where it is flawed—to be
mighty
. That fact means that his thought and its reception has a lot to tell
us not just about Aristotle the intellectual and his doctrines, but about
what those who received Aristotle so favorably were thinking as well.
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Thus we
have a lot to learn from
reading Aristotle
—even if often
what we have to learn is not what
he set
out to teach
.
Yet
we don’t read Aristotle to
learn about the economy
,
just as
we would not read Aristotle to
learn about physics, or chemistry,
or
astronomy.
We read Aristotle to
learn how intelligent ancient
observers saw the economy
, t
aking
their
observation
both as a social fact worth study in itself, and as a window
into the pre-industrial economy.
The Beginning of
Aristotle
’s
Politics
Aristotle’s
Politics
is about how
Greek men
do
order and ought to order
and must order
their households and city-states
. And
a Greek man to have
a functional household, and for Greek men to have a functional city-state,
they need resources
.
Politics
Book I is
the preliminary chapter in which
Aristotle talks about those necessary resources. It contains
what Aristotle
believes people thinking about politics
—the ordering and the right
ordering by Greek men of their households and their city-states—
need to
know about acquiring, maintaining, and managing resources
. It is thus
what Aristotle has to say about what we would call the
economy
. That
make it an excellent place to start our history of economic growth, for it
sheds enormous light on the question: What was and what did smart
people think of the
economy
in the distant past—2.5 millennia ago?
Moreover, the answer to that question ramifi es, and suggests answers to
related questions, like: What light can be shed on what
Aristotle
thought
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2020-01-06 1723 words
about
economic growth
? What
were the
broader intellectual
currents
both generated by and the
result of people’s reflections on
the
economy
of their day in which
Aristotle was then swimming
?
What light can be shed on the
structure and functioning of the
economy in which
Aristotle
was
embedded
. And what can we say
abo
ut its process of growth—or of
not-growth
?
We Will Ask You
Questions
We want you to do more than just
passively read. Passive reading does
not work. As
knowledge system and cognitive science guru Andy
Matuschak
ranted last year <
https://andymatuschak.org/books/
>:
Have you ever had a book… come up… [and] discover[ed] that you’d
absorbed what amounts to a few sentences?… It happens to me regularly….
Someone asks a basic probing question… [and] I simply can’t recall the
relevant details… [or] I’ll realize I had never really understood the idea…
though I’d certainly thought I understood…. I’ll realize that I had barely
noticed how little I’d absorbed until that very moment…
The problem is that our brains are very good at forgetting irrelevant
information. And our brains take information that we do not fi nd ourselves
using and reusing to be irrelevant—to be thrown out so that we can focus
on information relevant to the continued life and reproductive success of
4
2020-01-06 1723 words
the East African Plains Ape. The things that we remember are things that
we think about over and over again in our inner monologue, and that we
then think about yet again as we apply the ideas to other things out there in
the world. The people who do
absorb
and retain books are people who
think
about what they
a
re reading
as they read, and whose inner
monologue sounds like “does that really make sense?”, “but what about?”,
“didn’t I see an analogous point last month?”, and “that reminds me of.” I
am rarely just reading: I am generally also analyzing, compressing,
synthesizing, and summarizing.
I was lucky enough to have an
upbringing in which I acquired
these habits of reading by pure
luck, and so I automatically retain
a great deal of what I read, and
that has led me to my current
position, in which I have a
moderately well-paying job in
which I spend little of my time
kowtowing to annoying authorities
and have virtually no heavy lifting
and little boring repetition of mindless tasks. You, probably and mostly, do
not, or do not have these skills and habits at the level I had when I was
your age and was smarter and more energetic than I am now. But you are
close—and you can build and have these skills and habits if you work at it.
Hence we have questions for you about Book I of Aristoteles son of
Nikomakhos’s Politics. We are going to ask you questions, if we have
time, at the fi rst lecture and at your fi rst section. So think about what
answers you would give to these:
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1.
What assumption that Aristotle made—perhaps (probably?) without
thinking about it, because it seemed most obvious to him—struck
you as the most wrong or repugnant or weird?
2.
What does Aristotle say are the four tasks of the Greek man in
managing his household? Why these four?
3.
What role do the “
statues of Da
i
dal
o
s,
[and]
the tripods
[robotic
catering vessels]
of
Hepha
i
st
o
s
” play in
Aristotle’s argument about
how the economy of his age
is, must be, and should be
structured?
4.
What role does Aristotle’s
claim that “
Of the art of
acquisition
[
ktêtike
]
then
there is one kind which by
nature is a part of the
management of a
household
…. T
here is
another
…
commonly and rightly called an art of wealth-getting
[
chrêmatistikê
]… [with]
the notion that riches and property have no
limit
…” play in his argument?
5.
At the end of the fi rst long paragraph of I.11, Aristotle writes: “
Of the
several divisions of wealth-getting I now speak generally; a minute
consideration of them might be useful in practice, but it would be
tiresome to dwell upon them at greater length now
…” An alternative
translation would say “
detailed and exact discussion would be useful
for the practical workings but to spend too much time on such things
is crude
…” (see
Josiah Ober
(2019):
Agamemnon’s Cluelessness
<
https://delong.typepad.com/fi les/ober-agamemnon-1.pdf
>).
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Aristotle considers knowledge of the art of wealth-getting “not
unworthy of philosophy”, but spending your time practicing this art
“illiberal an irksome”; philosophers should know how Thales of
Miletos got rich by cornering the olive-press market on the island of
Lesbos, but for Aristotle, his students, or his readers to dwell upon
these matters at greater length would be “tiresome” or “crude”. What
do you think is going on in Aristotle’s mind here?
6.
Did you fi nd any advice—even indirect and oblique advice—from
Aristotle in this passage about what the economic policy of a city-
state should be? If so, what was it? If not, why do you think he fails
to offer advice here (he offers lots of advice as to the organization
and policies of city-states later on in the book)?
7.
Near the start of Book I Aristotle divided household management
into four branches: (1) master-slave, (2) gender roles, (3) human
reproduction, and (4) acquiring material resources. he then skipped
over (2) and (3) to talk about (1) and (4). Near the very end of the
Book I, in I.12, he returns to (2) and (3). He says that “
A husband
and father, we saw, rules over wife and children, both free, but the
rule differs, the rule over his children being a royal, over his wife a
constitutional rule
”. What is the distinction that you think Aristotle is
drawing here? How important is it? (And do note that Aristoteles is
here having an argument with Sokrates and Platon, who believed in
gender equity: that the souls and thus “
the courage and justice of a
man and of a woman, are
…
the same
…”
8.
What does Aristotle conclude, at the end of the book, is the proper
way to rank in importance the different branches of the art of
household management?
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Further Reading
Dante Alighieri
(1320):
Inferno <
http://www.gutenberg.org/fi les/
41537/41537-h/41537-h.htm
>
Aristoteles of Stagira
(-340):
Nikomakhean Ethics
, V Justice <
https://
delong.typepad.com/fi les/aristotle-nicomachean-5.pdf
>
Gustave Dore
(1861):
Illustrations for Dante’s “Divine Comedy”
<
https://www.google.com/books/edition/
The_Doré_Illustrations_for_Dante_s_Divi/R2TkMiHSOjUC
>
Andy
Matuschak
(2019):
Why
B
ooks
D
on’t
W
ork
<
https://
andymatuschak.org/books/
>
Ian Morris
(2005):
The Growth of Greek Cities in the First Millennium
BC
<
https://www.princeton.edu/~pswpc/pdfs/morris/120509.pdf
>
Josiah Ober
(2019):
Agamemnon’s Cluelessness
<
https://
delong.typepad.com/fi les/ober-agamemnon-1.pdf
>
H.N. Turteltaub
(2001):
Over the Wine-Dark Sea
<
https://isbn.nu//
0765344513
>
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