Alisdair MacIntyre says that whereas Plato’s Republic was irreconcilable with the realm of the historically existing polis, Aristotle’s telos was implicitly embodied and acknowledged within the actual social practices of the time. For Aristotle, universal form only had meaning in relation to the particular: “Aristotle understood that movement from human potential to its actualization within the polis as exemplifying the metaphysical and theological character of a perfected universe.”i
In Aristotle’s concept of teleology Nature was characterized by “meaning.” Development in nature involved not just causality and mechanical motion but also the potentiality for form in the material itself. Nature, within its own order and hierarchy, was seen as always striving towards the “good.” Just as form and cosmos struggled to overcome boundlessness and chaos, so Aristotle’s city state (the polis) sought to control the “unlimited desires” of those within its walls and subdue the “untamed nature” of the “barbarians” on the “outside.”
Aristotle advocated a polis in which principles of “excellence” and “justice” would be administered by an elite of educated citizens; for only those able to command the labor of others could be “free” enough to be educated in the required “virtues.” Everyone else he excluded from citizenship: slaves, women, artisans, wage workers, merchants and bankers; all of whom, he argued, would in any case be better off in a well-run Greek polis than in a barbarian camp or a tyrannical oligarchy.
Jose Perez Adan’s Reformist Anarchism examines the influence of Thomas Aquinas’s “Aristotelianism” on anarchist economics. Aquinas argued that considerations of production and exchange had to be subservient to the concerns of a “commutative justice” which deliberated about ultimate (divine) ends as well as proximate (earthly) ones. Money was seen as simply “the translation of fixed and invariable value into an easy measure of exchange.” Usury – “generating money out of want without contributing to the creation of value” – was considered a sort of ontological disorder, because it suggested that money, rather than the labour and moral order, created value.
The regulations of mediaeval guilds were seen as essential to stabilize prices and ensure the compensation of producers for their toil and costs in replacement of materials invested in production. Whereas later, in neo-classicist political economy, wages were seen as determined a posteriori by the fluctuating whims of the market, in Scholastic metaphysics wages represented an “objective value.” Aquinas argued that exchange of goods by a trader could be regarded as legitimate activity only “for the sake of public utility so that necessary things should not be lacking… and he seeks money, not as an end, but as a wage for labor.” In a famine property rights were to be overridden by social necessity: to prevent starvation, and it would be justified to expropriate, if necessary, a supply of grain surplus to the owner’s personal needs. ii
Such “objective values” were of course anathema to the liberal advocates of free-trade and property rights in the eighteenth century. MacIntyre, writing in Whose Justice? Which Rationality? on the influence of Aristotelian and Calvinist theology on the Scottish Enlightenment, describes how an ideology had developed in Scotland which saw the basic unit of the “good” society as the household of the small-holding farmer - guided from above by definite social, moral and theological principles. Against this tradition stood the new “Anglicising liberalism” of David Hume and Adam Smith, for whom the basic unit of society was the acquisitive individual. The liberals saw land, like everything else, as just a commodity; and the continued existence of the peasantry was seen as obstacle to economic development.
After the Civil Wars of the 17th century and the Jacobite rebellions of the 18th, the English bourgeoisie wanted no more arguments about how “higher” principles should govern the “natural” order of society. The time had come to recognize that society had become a mass of competing passions and needs which functioned “naturally” through transactions and exchanges. What was needed was a political and social structure to facilitate trade, protect private property and quell any “lawless” resistance. This structure, Hume claimed, was essentially what had been established by the “Glorious Revolution” led by “Dutch William” in 1688.
Hume’s notion of the “acquisitive individual” underpinned the Labour Theory of Value. The basis of the theory was that the price of a commodity, representing its exchange value, was based on the toil of making it or the toil saved by having it. In Adam Smith’s development of the theory, the “natural price” of the commodity was what was sufficient “to pay the rent of the land, the wages of the labour, and the profits of the stock employed in raising, preparing, and bringing it to market.”
William Godwin, whom Adam designates as the first “reformist anarchist,” built on Smith’s Labour Theory of Value, as implying that labour and wealth were the same thing. Later, socialists preached that “Labour is the Source of All Wealth,” a slogan Karl Marx thought to be simple-minded and misleading. For was not nature also a source of wealth? If so shouldn’t the wealth and wonders of nature, be enjoyed by all without being commodified for capitalist profit??
In the period of peak-Jacobism (1789-1815), the ideas of Adam Smith, William Godwin,Tom Paine and Thomas Spence had revolutionary implications. Smith counterposed the “natural” individual to the ossified institutions of society. But whereas Smith argued that church and state should be persuaded to encourage, rather than hinder individual self-sufficiency and progress, Godwin saw these institutions as enemies of morality and freedom, which needed to be got rid of as soon as possible. Godwin called for social and economic reforms which would be subservient to the “final destination” (telos) of a good life for all in a free society. He recognised that the “proximate ends” – of material returns and economic stability – might help to bring the true liberty to fruition, but he insisted that they were not ends in themselves.iii Here the influence of Aristotle on Godwin is evident.
Rosa Luxemburg says that at the moment the Greeks enter history their situation is that of a disintegrated primitive communism. The ancient society, in which all members of the tribe are entitled to an equal share of their collective produce and collective plunder, is undermined by the rise of aristocracy and the spread of monetisation. So, at the very time in Greek history when primitive communism is extinguished in reality, it is reinvented as an elitist ideal by Plato; and the ancient myths are rewritten as comedies and tragedies, approved of by Aristotle as “cathartic.”
For Aristotle the “good life” is not a project in which the end takes primacy over the means; one’s life is not a means to something else; life’s activity is an end in itself. Aristotle, like Plato, divides the human community into three parts: at the top is the realm of theory and philosophy, secondly there is the realm of praxis (which means action in the sense of free activity) and thirdly at the bottom of society is production. Whilst philosophy and praxis are activities with no other ends than themselves, production - as performed by slaves, women, artisans and others who Aristotle excludes from citizenship - has its end outside of itself.
Like Plato, Aristotle believes that ideal forms and universals are real in the logical-metaphysical sense. But unlike Plato, Aristotle argues that ideal forms and universals cannot exist separately from the material reality. In Aristotle’s polis, what he calls the material cause is the quality and quantity of the citizens rather than the physical territory, which he assumes to be under private ownership. What he calls the efficient cause of the polis is the legislator – the revolutionary leader who founds the constitution to keep the peace. And what he calls the final cause (the telos or purpose) of the polis is the self-sufficient community and the good life.
According to Aristotle’s concept of totality in the polis, the whole is more than the sum of its parts. By contrast, if we accept our fate under capitalism, we are just a collection of atomised individuals subject to a treadmill of unlimited value-production, rather than members of a self-sufficient, rational community. In Capital Marx describes the polis of Greek Antiquity as well as primitive communism as societies in which it is the actual community that presents itself as the basis of production; and in which the final purpose of production is the reproduction of the community. Marx says that in mediaeval feudalism the forms of domination appear quite openly as the motive power of production; whilst in capitalism the domination is characterised by economic mystification. When Marx talks about the communist ‘realm of freedom’ in relation to community and final purpose he is using Aristotle’s terminology. But Marx is also suggesting that society can consist of the Good Life without a class system that Plato and Aristotle could see no alternative to.
i Alisdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988) 149-53. Jose Perez Adan, Reformist Anarchism 1800-1936 (London: Merlin Press, 1992).
ii Jose Perez Adan, Reformist Anarchism 1800-1936 (London: Merlin, 1992) 216-223.
iii Ibid 184-86.