The Mediterranean Trajectory of Aristotle's Economic Canon

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In Greece of the fourth century BCE, Xenophon was a famous author of practical textbooks on household management and on the financial management of the polis; but in the conceptual domain Aristotle was a richer source since he pioneered in fundamentals. In his works on practical philosophy he initiated an analytical thematization on three cardinal topics, namely on the transition from a natural household economy towards a society moved by the chrematistic spirit; on justice in the terms of trade; and on the nature of money. For almost a millennium and a half the scholars of the succeeding civilizations in the Mediterranean gave but little attention to and even criticized Aristotle s analytical schemes. With the advent of the Late Middle Ages, however, the Stagirite's constructs underwent a spectacular revival with the novel and trend-setting commentaries of the Arab scholar Ibn Rushd. And in the "summae" of the Latin Scholastics his "peri economias" flowered into a canon. In the Latin Scholastic texts the Aristotelian canon was amended by Christian ethics with a medieval flavour. The Latin Scholastics, more than preceding schools of moral philosophy, came to grips with the challenge of explaining the new and disturbing market forces in their feudal societies. The rhetoric schools of the Italian humanists re-interpreted Aristotle 's political and economic thematizations from their own historical context. With a greater emphasis on utility and hedonism, the humanists produced significant hermeneutical shifts. In the reworkings of the "Quattrocento ", economic attitudes and humanistic culture met halfway. The humanists announced the spirit of modern times, characterized by the assumption that human beings possess an innate self-interested and economic mentality. With the breakthrough of this modern mindset, Aristotle's concept of development went into decline.