Oikonomia: Ancient Greek Philosophers on the Meaning of Economic Life

By Étienne Helmer

A detailed analysis of oikonomia, an underexplored branch of knowledge in ancient Greek philosophy.
 
In this book, Étienne Helmer offers a comprehensive analysis of oikonomia in ancient Greek philosophy. Despite its similarity to the word “economy,” for the ancients, oikonomia named a branch of knowledge—the science of management—that was aimed at studying the practices we engage in to satisfy our needs. This began with the domestic sphere, but it radiated outward from the oikos (house) to encompass broader issues in the polis (city) as well. Helmer explores topics such as gender roles and marriage, property and the household, the acquisition and preservation of material goods, and how Greek philosophers addressed the issue of slavery in the ancient world. Even if we are not likely to share many of ancient thinkers’ beliefs today, Helmer shows that there was once a way of thinking of “economic life” that went beyond the mere accumulation of wealth, representing a key point of departure for understanding how to inhabit the world with others.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: May 8, 2024
• ISBN: 9780226827353

Book preview

Cover Page for Oikonomia

Oikonomia

Oikonomia

Ancient Greek Philosophers on the Meaning of Economic Life

Étienne Helmer

Translated by David A. Auerbach

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2024 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2024

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-82734-6 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-82735-3 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226827353.001.0001

Originally published as Oikonomia. Philosophie grecque de l’économie © 2021. Classiques Garnier, Paris.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Helmer, Étienne, author. | Auerbach, David (David Andrew), translator.

Title: Oikonomia : ancient Greek philosophers on the meaning of economic life / Étienne Helmer ; translated by David A. Auerbach.

Other titles: Oikonomia. English

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2024. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023038994 | ISBN 9780226827346 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226827353 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Economics—Greece—Philosophy. | Economics—Philosophy. | Philosophy, Ancient.

Classification: LCC HB108.A2 H4513 2021 | DDC 330.15/12—dc23/eng/20230922

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023038994

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

Introduction

Part I   Oikonomia as Knowledge

1 · Oikonomia versus Economics

2 · What Kind of Knowledge Is Oikonomia?

Part II   Organizing Human Beings

3 · Marriage, Household, and Community

4 · Masters and the Enslaved in the Oikos

Part III   Putting Things in Their Place

5 · Acquisition and Wealth

6 · Preservation and Balance

7 · Self-Sufficiency and the Science of Proper Use

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Notes

References

Index locorum

General Index

Introduction

When we think of classical Greece, we do not usually think of economics. The major themes we usually associate with this period are the city or polis, politics, democracy, and education, and it is to seek ancient answers to contemporary questions about these topics that we draw from Greek sources time and again. But few would think of turning to these texts—written about an economy quite unlike our own (one that was based, among other things, on enslavement)—to gain an understanding of economic modernity, let alone the very concept of economy. Quite reasonably, most would look to modern times, when political economy and the science of economics arose simultaneously. In this book, however, I ask a different question: What if, among the many subjects for which we seek their guidance, the Greeks had something to teach us about economics? And what if their understanding of economics and the economy were radically different from our own? After all, as one scholar notes, economics as a topic is omnipresent among Greek authors of the archaic and classical period.¹ The question is: Which authors, and in which texts?

Economics first appears in what we understand to be the inauguration of Greece as a universe of meaning, namely, in archaic and classical poetry. It occupies an important and often central place in this context, and for a long time it shaped the representation of practices, realities, and attitudes on the matter. This is evident in Hesiod’s Works and Days, one of the few fully preserved ancient texts the main object of which is of an economic nature, whatever definition may be adopted.² This is also the case with Homer’s Odyssey, about which a recent study has argued that it could be read as a treatise on political economy aimed at replacing the archaic practices of plunder and the spoils of war with the recognition of agricultural work, task sharing, and generalized exchange. Similarly, certain passages of Theognis’s Elegies contain scattered but recurring reflections of an economic nature.³ A similar observation can be made about historians, too, and especially Thucydides, whose masterpiece, History of the Peloponnesian War, would anticipate certain features of what is now referred to as behavioral economics.⁴

However, it is neither the poets nor the historians who will hold our attention but the philosophers. The reason for this is simple yet of crucial importance: It is philosophers who have been reproached, from a modern perspective, for not having theorized economics, for leaving such an important aspect of reality in the shadows, for not having formulated an adequate concept of it. While this last criticism has some validity, it is also—as we will see—partly unfounded. By starting from the presupposition that modern science, with its analytical aims, has (and must have) a monopoly over legitimate discourse on economics, modern readers have prevented themselves from recognizing the specific nature of ancient Greek reflection on the topic. My argument in this book is that there is a corpus of Greek theoretical reflection on the subject of economics, the rationality of which is not scientific but philosophical and that, for this reason, has either gone unnoticed or has not been appreciated for its true value. A careful examination of the passages devoted to economic questions among classical Greek and Hellenistic philosophers—mainly Plato, Aristotle, Xenophon, Pseudo-Aristotle, Epicurus and Philodemus of Gadara, Diogenes the Cynic and some of his disciples, as well as fragments of the Pythagoreans Callicratidas and Bryson—reveals a body of thought that has long remained invisible and that presents an alternative way of thinking about economics: a Greek philosophy of economics. I intend to examine this philosophy by retracing the major questions that guided these thinkers’ reflections and the main concepts that they formulated in the course of their writing, focusing on oikonomia or domestic and civic economic administration.⁵

A few words of caution are necessary. First, the use of the singular Greek philosophy, as opposed to the plurality of philosophical schools, does not mean that I will ignore the at times great differences between the reflections of authors from distinct philosophical schools or currents. It only indicates that all these thinkers engage with analogous or closely related questions and concepts concerning oikonomia, variations notwithstanding, a fact that one can interpret as a sign that these concepts and questions were being debated within a broadly defined theoretical framework. So defined, in fact, that the basic structure of different authors’ thinking on the topic remains relatively stable over the course of a few centuries, roughly from the fourth century BCE to the first century CE, though again, it is far from monolithic, as we will see.

Finally, the decision not to include the pre-Socratics and the Stoics is due to the fact that their concerns regarding oikonomia—insofar as the surviving texts allow us to reach a conclusion—do not make a great contribution to the topic that interests us here. For example, there is a fragment of Democritus that certainly indicates the close link between domestic order and happiness (Diels–Kranz 68B140),⁶ and it is true that the economic treatise by the Stoic Hierocles examines the subject of marriage and the distribution of tasks between spouses. Yet neither of these authors reflects at any length on the acquisition, conservation, or the use of goods, which are central topics in the texts that concern us.⁷ As for the Sophists, they "seem to have actively contributed to the appearance of oikonomia⁸—consider Protagoras, for example, who promised to teach his readers how to deliberate in affairs private as well as public [. . .] to order one’s own house in the best manner."⁹ But because of lack of detailed testimony, it is difficult to say more about the effects of these teachings. And although the Anonymous of Iamblichus examines the link between the value of money and its circulation, he does not say much about specific practices relating to domestic or civic economic administration.¹⁰

Let’s begin by posing an essential question: What do we mean by economics when we speak of these texts? And if the Greeks did not have a concept of economics because at the time the institution of a financial market as we understand it did not exist,¹¹ is it still possible to write a book about what ancient Greek philosophers thought of the topic? By seeking to locate or pinpoint the economics in oikonomia, is there a risk of forcing etymology to bear the burden of an illusory continuity between the Greek world and the modern one?¹² Instead of the older position that on the basis of such objections concedes the existence of economic activities among the ancient Greeks while at the same time minimizing their importance or, more precisely, denying them any genuinely economic significance, recent historians have proposed a more qualified account based on epigraphic evidence and archaeological remains. They argue that whether or not the ancient Greeks had an understanding of the market, they nonetheless engaged in complex and diverse economic activities.¹³ And although it is through the prism of the categories of modern and contemporary political economy that these scholars have sought to understand the ancient Greeks’ economic activities—for example, by projecting back onto them the categories of production, distribution, and consumption¹⁴—their work has made it possible to wrest the Greeks from the state of economic innocence many had ascribed to them until recently.

However, this renewed approach to the Greek historical economic realities has not been paralleled regarding the ancient theoretical thinking about economics, especially in the ancient Greek context. No book has comprehensively examined how classical or Hellenistic philosophers approached this realm of reality, what questions they raised about it, or what concepts they developed to understand it. And for good reason. To analyze such a subject in the light of modern categories, instead of understanding it on its own terms, would lead to inevitable misunderstandings, not least of which that the Greeks had no concept of economics. This is, strictly speaking, because the Greeks did not produce, consume, or distribute: They acquired, conserved, and made use of—practices that can only be understood if one has first overcome the illusion that our modern categories of economics are the only valid ones. On the basis of this persistent misunderstanding, we have perpetuated the myth that the Greeks were disinterested in economic thinking, that they were purely political beings (homines politici). The most notable example of this misunderstanding, extended to the whole of Greek civilization, appears in Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition:

Neither labor nor work was considered to possess sufficient dignity to constitute a bios at all, an autonomous and authentically human way of life; since they served and produced what was necessary and useful, they could not be free, independent of human needs and wants. [. . .]

Natural community in the household therefore was born of necessity, and necessity ruled over all activities performed in it. The realm of the polis, on the contrary, was the sphere of freedom. [. . .]

The good life, as Aristotle called the life of the citizen, therefore was not merely better, more carefree or nobler than ordinary life, but of an altogether different quality. It was good to the extent that by having mastered the necessities of sheer life, by being freed from labor and work, and by overcoming the innate urge of all living creatures for their own survival, it was no longer bound to the biological life process.¹⁵

What this quote implies is a strict division between, on the one hand, being subjugated by the biological and the economic (which is barely mentioned) and, on the other, being free through one’s participation in politics, the reign of values and freedom. One could not better contribute to the myth of the nonexistence or infancy of economic thought among the Greeks than by relegating it to the netherworld of enslaving vital necessities.

To undo this obfuscating division and restore a sense of richness to Greek philosophical reflection on economics, it is necessary first to entertain the possibility of an alternative way of thinking about economics than the one in which we currently engage, an alternative endowed with its own unique language, questions, and concepts. But how can one be certain that the object of such a study would be economics and not something else? The difficulty of defining our subject is twofold: One must begin from a sense of economics broad enough to include the Greeks, so that they can be appropriately situated and so that the analysis is a legitimate one, and then one must follow the path of a more specific meaning to do justice to the singularity of the Greek philosophers’ approach to the subject, avoiding the biases that we just mentioned. How do we achieve this?

Regarding the first point, considering economic knowledge as the study of the nature and meaning of the collective human practices aimed at the satisfaction of their needs offers a sufficiently broad definition to embrace different modalities of this knowledge as well as a broad variety of practices and meanings for those modalities. As for pinpointing the specificity of Greek economic knowledge, we begin with Karl Polanyi’s reflections in his posthumously published work The Livelihood of Man.¹⁶ According to Polanyi, the concept of economics is not limited to its formal meaning, that is, to the calculated relations between a specific objective, the satisfaction of human appetites, and the means available to achieve that objective. Based on the dogmatic assertion of scarcity—an assertion both historically constructed by as well as constructed for the institution of the market and that has become a nearly universally held credo—this formal meaning posits the discrepancy between the limited character of supply on the one hand and the unlimited nature of needs, demands, and desires on the other, leading to individual and collective calculation of the optimization of earnings.¹⁷ Alongside this definition of economics, which goes hand in hand with the idea that there is only scientific knowledge of economics, there is another definition that is called substantive, which, Polanyi writes, "points to the elemental fact that human beings, like all other living things, cannot exist for any length of time without a physical environment that sustains them; this is the origin of the substantive definition of economic.¹⁸ Man is envisioned as an entity arising of nature, dependent for its existence on the favor of environmental conditions."¹⁹

This substantive understanding of economics, detached from the idea of scarcity, escapes the grip of formal categories indexed to the idea of maximization of gain. It thus makes it possible to approach Greek philosophical reflection on its own terms. The authors that we will examine see in economics the problematic site of the social articulation of necessity and freedom, nature and convention, the starting (and, in part, determining) point of the complex inscription of humankind within ethical and political relationships, and, for some thinkers, the closed totality of the cosmos itself. More precisely, the same concern runs through all these reflections: to what extent is economics a domain for the expression and potential realization of the Good? How can individuals and communities make their practices in this domain into a legitimate form of fulfillment, transcending vital necessity while at the same time fulfilling themselves in and through it? As we will see, far from the mere prescription of effective techniques, Greek thinking on economic practices and phenomena tends to view them as a specific art of individual and collective realization, a praxis that is indexed to a higher moral or political value. Greek economic knowledge is neither the only nor the highest art from this standpoint—ethics and politics remain paramount for the Greeks—but it is certainly the most surprising and perhaps the most interesting because it is the one that most directly grapples with the element within us that can cause us to live to the detriment of the Good, namely, our appetites and all that they involve as they relate to ourselves and to others.

This book, then, is not a historical study. In this sense it does not aspire to definitive conclusions about whether the Greeks of the classical and Hellenistic periods conceptualized something like a market, and it does not advance any claims about whether their economy shared or prefigured any of the features of modern capitalism. Similarly, the book does not venture into the historical economic mechanisms and institutions from which these thinkers may have drawn to power their thinking.²⁰ Instead, by following the questions they raised and the concepts they forged in order to think about what we now designate economy and economics, we hope to clarify these notions, and we aim to depict the Greeks not only as homines politici (political beings) but also as homines oeconomici (economic beings) in their own sense of economic, which, as we see, departs radically from ours.

A last point: we should acknowledge that the terms economy and economics as we use them—which encompass the production, consumption, and exchange of goods as well as the study of the formation of value—have no equivalent in Greek. Oikonomia, in the period that interests us, is concerned only with the administration of the household and sometimes that of the city or other civic entities, and there is no word or concept that subsumes all that might have to do with money or commercial activities. To speak of Greek economic knowledge is therefore to employ a convenient but inadequate term, to divide the study of practices in two in order to adhere as closely as possible to what seems to have been their own articulation of reality: Oikonomia, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the institutions and practices of commerce and money. As a result, this book is the first of two volumes. This volume deals with oikonomia, and the next, currently in progress, will be about the practices and institutions of commerce, the marketplace, and money in the writings of these same philosophers.

The first part of this book is methodological. It outlines the reasons why ancient Greek theoretical reflection on economics was neglected for so long as well as the difficulties to be overcome and the paths to follow in order to gain an understanding of this topic and the matters most closely related to it. The following parts elaborate on this groundwork and present the philosophical questions and concepts developed by prominent Greek thinkers on the topic of the domestic economic space (and, at times, the civic economic space as well). In so doing, I attempt to restore what seems to me to be the general architecture of the thought of these philosophers on the subject, variations notwithstanding. This requires a close examination of the human beings who make up this domestic economic space as well as the material aspects and practices that lie at the heart of the activities that form oikonomia.

Part I

Oikonomia as Knowledge

Taking ancient economic thinking seriously as economics and, more specifically, oikonomia as the science of administering the oikos or city is tantamount to resuscitating a phantom by understanding how that phantom was stripped of its attributes to the point of being made unrecognizable, like the heroes of the Underworld, who have become a shadow of themselves in Greek poetry. The next two chapters deal with the nature of this occult knowledge. The first chapter examines how it was ostracized from the field of legitimate science because it does not conform to a certain idea of economic science, and it proposes to find its true nature