ABSTRACT
Referring to ‘pre-capitalist economic formations,’ Marx once praised the sublimity of the ancient conception that made man the objective of production, by contrast to a modern world in which production is the objective of man, and gain the objective of production. Aristotle’s sense of an ‘economy’ whose aim was the welfare of the oikòs and the polis was perhaps the first scholarly treatment of developman economics. Nor is the idea that the economy is socially ordered out of
date, however much it seems to us a domain of purely practical wisdom. We only deceive ourselves by this disenchanted consciousness, as if we lived by a purely utilitarian rationality. Not everything in our rationality is rational.
