ABSTRACT
The first analysis of the way people deal with each other in economic exchange was not in Xenophon’s Oeconomicus or Aristotle’s (largely spurious) Oeconomica, but in Aristotle’s Ethica Nicomachean. Aristotle’s motivation was to show how justice could be respected by exchange. His time-honored principle of just exchange was perpetuated over centuries by the Christian ethic, which insisted that exchange should not be an occasion for hurting one’s neighbor. Political economy retained this indigenous outlook for centuries. It was primarily with the Enlightenment that we began looking at our economic activities by taking the pleasures and the self-interest of the individual as the polestar. Economics was thus metamorphosed into a mercantilistic discipline whose main preoccupation has ever since remained with the bids on the market place. Inevitably, the Socratic traditional ethics according to which humans are potentially capable of distinguishing by dialectics between “good” and “evil” also was challenged. The new view was that “Ought” must either be established by the Understanding (the human intellectual power which the Enlightenment promoted to the first rank by demoting Reason) or discarded altogether. With the gate opened, ethics became the most free-for-all of all intellectual endeavors.
