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Pagina 1
Bekijk in PDF(opent in een nieuw venster)How to create a perfect society: from the Presocratics to Aristotle
Rowett, C.
"Many commentators suggest that extreme economic crises, such as the one we have been
observing over the last few years, are precipitated when bankers and investors are encouraged
to take excessive risks, by the perverse incentives of huge bonuses that they will be able to
keep even when the stock market crashes.
What would the world be like if there were no economic incentives to encourage that kind of
behaviour, or if the people who had the power were not motivated by the idea of economic
gain? Has anyone ever tried to organise society so that it would not be so?
In this paper I examine the economic considerations and analysis of the role of incentives that
underpin radical political solutions, in the utopian thinking of Pythagoras, Plato and
Aristotle."
More Info: Draft paper for discussion.
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Pagina 2
Bekijk in PDF(opent in een nieuw venster)How to create a perfect society: from the Presocratics
to Aristotle.
Catherine Rowett, UEA
Many commentators suggest that extreme economic crises, such as the one
we have been observing over the last few years, are precipitated when bankers and
investors are encouraged to take excessive risks, by the perverse incentives of huge
bonuses that they will be able to keep even when the stock market crashes.
What would the world be like if there were no economic incentives to
encourage that kind of behaviour, or if the people who had the power were not
motivated by the idea of economic gain? Has anyone ever tried to organise society
so that it would not be so?
1
Aristotle.
It is sometimes said that Aristotle was the earliest economic thinker, because
of his detailed analysis of the rules for fair exchange where something is valued more
highly by one party than the other.
But according to another tradition, even Aristotle was not doing economic
thought, because he had no real notion of the market economy. For those who think
that "economic thinking" is, by definition, thinking about the market economy,
Aristotle was not engaged in what we know as "economics".
This is not really a plausible view. As Scott Meikle has argued, the Greeks had
money, commerce, exchange value, and they did engage in systematic thought about
these things.1 Miekle suggests that Aristotle was doing what we would call economic
theory. It is just hair splitting to say that it does not count as economic analysis if it
does not analyse the behaviour of the capitalist market economy.
Yet I wonder whether it is even true that the Greeks lacked the ideas
required to analyse the market economy. Several of their common practices, such as
1
Scott Meikle, Aristotle's Economic Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1997) p. 149-50.
Pagina 3
Bekijk in PDF(opent in een nieuw venster)slave markets and bottomry loans, seem to presuppose the systems involved in
modern markets and investment. And for an early example, take Thales, the very
first philosopher in the Western world, perhaps before they even had coinage. One
of the most famous stories is of how he took out a lease on all the olive presses in
Miletus and Chios, because—realising that olive trees produce a bumper crop in
some years— he invests in the olive presses while the price is low, thereby obtaining
a monopoly on the means of production, and can then charge an exorbitant price to
each of the farmers for using them. Since the harvest is great, the farmers can afford
to pay the higher price, and the community doesn't die of starvation; but effectively
the producers lose their profit margin, which ends up in the philosopher's pocket—
probably in the form of a good few bottles of extra virgin olive oil.
Doubtless Thales puts an advance deposit at the low price charged in a poor
cropping year, and then charges the higher price achievable in a good year. This is
capitalism: you buy when the shares are cheap and then reap the dividends when the
price goes up, due to scarcity, high demand or abundant productivity that only you
could predict. One can do all this without the invention of money, since it is simply a
matter of the changing exchange value of commodities depending on need and
demand. A monetised economy is not needed for market forces of this kind to be
apparent.
The Thales story is preserved as an anecdote in Aristotle’s Politics.
Text 1
It’s also important to collect the scattered sayings about the ways in which
some people have hit upon some way of becoming wealthy. For all these are
useful for those who hold the accumulation of wealth as a thing deserving
honour. For instance the story of Thales of Miletus. They attribute it to
Thales because of his wisdom, but it’s a financial idea of quite general
application. For when people were despising Thales for his poverty, on the
basis that philosophy was useless, they say that he observed (by means of his
astronomical expertise) that there would be a glut of olives. So while it was
still winter, and he being in possession of a little money, he put down
deposits (ἀρραβῶνας διαδοῦναι) on all the olive presses in the region, both in
Miletus and Chios, paying only a small price for them at the time since there
was no rival bidder. But then when the olive season arrived, and there was a
huge demand suddenly and all at the same time, and he could get any kind of
repayment he liked, Thales accumulated loads of profits. And that’s how he
demonstrated that it’s easy for philosophers to get rich, if they want to. It’s
just that they’re not that bothered about that kind of thing.
Pagina 4
Bekijk in PDF(opent in een nieuw venster)Aristotle’s Politics 1.11, 1259a9-18.
Perhaps this tells us more about what used to happen in Aristotle’s day than
in that of Thales. We can’t be sure who would have owned the olive presses or
what Aristotle means by “putting down a deposit”).2 On the other hand, Aristotle is
evidently transmitting an existing anecdote from sometime earlier, and as Presocratic
sources go, Aristotle is on the early side.3 This is not Plutarch, or Diogenes Laertius,
writing with experience of the Roman economy. The story must have made sense to
Aristotle, and it clearly employs the thinking associated with capitalist investment. It
is hard to see how such a story could even have been invented at or before the time
of Aristotle, if the idea of speculating in the expectation of increased profit margins
due to surplus were not familiar. The whole point of the story is that astronomical
wisdom can turn out surprisingly useful.
Plainly, then, the Greeks were not innocent of market forces. Yet Aristotle
himself, in analysing the economics of exchange, concentrates on what makes
exchanges fair.4 He stresses the importance of "friendship" in regulating the exchange
systems of a political community. 5 This can’t be because he is unaware that
competition forces prices down, or that investors try to outwit each other by buying
cheap and selling dear. Doubtless he knows all that. But he also knows (anticipated
2
ἀρραβῶνας διαδοῦναι, Aristotle Politics 1259a13.
3
Alan Greaves, Miletos: a history (London: Routledge, 2002) pp 26-28 despises
the evidence as too late to be useful, but there is no obvious conflict with the
archaeological evidence of olive oil trade in the period. Cf. Alan Greaves, The Land of
Ionia: Society and Economy in the Archaic Period (Chichester and Malden, MA: WileyBlackwell, 2010) chapter 4.
4
See Meikle, Aristotle's Economic Thought and Scott Meikle, 'Aristotle and
Exchange Value' in David Keyt and Fred D. Miller Jr (eds.), A Companion to Aristotle's
Politics (Cambridge Mass.: Blackwell, 1991), 156-81
5
Suzanne Stern-Gillet, Aristotle's Philosophy of Friendship (Albany: SUNY Press,
1995) pp 147-69; Richard Kraut, Aristotle: Political Philosophy, ed. Mark Philp (Founders
of Modern Political and Social Thought; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) pp
Pagina 5
Bekijk in PDF(opent in een nieuw venster)by Plato and Pythagoras I suspect) that friendship and fairness are crucial to a good
community. He is aware that a community in which people are not out to compete,
but rather to collaborate for the good of everyone, is a healthier and happier one.
There is something that he calls the "spirit of koinonia"; he associates it with the
Graces.6 It is partly about reciprocity, mutual give and take, and partly about having a
common purpose. It is incompatible with an ideology that tries to reward
competitive rivalry and unequal advantage.
When Aristotle suggests that your friend is another self,7 he means that if the
other person suffers, you are disadvantaged too. Friendship is a mechanism for
preventing the "no skin in the game" position enjoyed by today’s bankers and
investors. In a situation of corporate friendship, the agent suffers with the patient,
because the patient is, like a member of his own family, someone whose well-being is
as important as his own or more so.
But Aristotle also thinks that inequalities of wealth can be damaging. In Text
2, he observes that the people in charge mustn’t be people who are always
hankering after the things that others have got, nor being envied by people who
hanker after their goods, nor do they want to be the target of plots nor engaged in
plots against others.8 Unlike Plato, to whose parallel passage we shall come in Text
5, Aristotle concludes that the people in charge will be immune to these dangers not
because they are free of the burdens of wealth altogether, as Plato suggested, but
because they are all equally and moderately wealthy. They are the middle class.
Aristotle thinks that being in the middle range of wealth makes you immune from
the vices of avarice, competition and sedition, including the vice of being the target
of sedition—vices that he attributes to the poor above all. Plato, by contrast,
attributes such vices to the wealthy, precisely because they have private property.
Aristotle concluded that the rulers should be the middle class, owners of just the
right amount of property, neither too much nor too little. So very Aristotelian.
6
Nicomachean Ethics V. 5, 1133a3-5. See Meikle, 'Aristotle and Exchange
Value' p.179-80.
7
Nicomachean Ethics IX 1170b6-9.
Politics IV, 1295b29-33.
Pagina 6
Bekijk in PDF(opent in een nieuw venster)Plato
Plato has much to say on how to run a society in which the human spirit can
flourish. I will mention only the Republic today. It seems to me that the Republic is
(among other things) an exercise in what we know as economic theory, and that it is
particular interested in what we think of as perverse incentives, and how to
eliminate them. In this section I shall look briefly at some of Plato’s alternative
provision for better incentives to produce the desired results, and then in Part 3 I
shall go on to suggest that Plato’s thought experiment was inspired by an earlier
experiment, a real life utopian project successfully developed by Pythagoras in
Southern Italy in the sixth century.
In the Republic, Socrates reflects directly on how monetary rewards and
private possession affect people’s motivation and values. He tries to imagine what
would happen if he could completely eliminate the connection between material
wealth and power. He pictures how one might create a society in which the state
and its institutions promote the things that actually have intrinsic value, instead of
subordinating them to misguided values. The things that have real value (according to
the Socrates in the dialogue) are truth, knowledge and wisdom. If, as Socrates
supposes (at least for the sake of argument), these things are more important than
money, possessions, entertainment or even personal affections, then we don't want a
state or an economy that treats money or possessions as most important, and leaves
things like knowledge, wisdom, education and so on as optional extras, which the
wealthy citizens can choose to spend their money on if they fancy doing so. We
need instead a state that makes education for wisdom and truth the first and
inalienable thing, without which life is not worth living. If you don’t need money to
get these things, then arguably you don’t need money at all. Socrates imagines a state
in which you can have other things, such as money or friends, only if they don't
destroy the things that are truly good.
I am not sure that Socrates is right to value truth and wisdom so highly above
other goods like love, friendship, and artistic creativity; indeed we might doubt
whether Plato himself means us to think that the state that Socrates describes is
truly the ideal state, with its values all correct and in good order. Perhaps Plato just
has Socrates work it all out hypothetically, to see what it would be like were
knowledge the only value worth pursuing. But even if it is only a thought experiment,
Pagina 7
Bekijk in PDF(opent in een nieuw venster)its contribution to economic and political analysis is important, and can be
transferred to different ideas about the supreme values in life. Think about what we
truly believe are the highest and most wonderful things that human beings can
achieve. Are they things that can be achieved in a state with the kind of economic
goals and incentives that we currently have, or do we need a radically different
approach? Various things come to mind: for instance, love, art, music, truth, loyalty,
honesty, knowledge, freedom, spiritual gifts or intellectual discovery. If these are our
goals, our political institutions need to be structured to ensure that once our needs
for simple subsistence have been satisfied, the rest goes into supporting those things.
The last thing we want is institutions that render those goals harder to achieve or
impossible. So as well as asking what institutions could help us to achieve these good
things, we must also consider whether some things would make them impossible to
achieve.
Socrates starts from simple economic analysis of the processes of exchange
among equals. He sketches a system of division of labour, whereby a subsistence
community develops specialist crafts to improve its standard of living. But once that
has been done, his next task is to increase the sophistication of his society, to give
the citizens opportunities to exercise their higher capacities, and to pursue activities
that are good for their own sake, not merely for utilitarian purposes.
It is at this point that Socrates’ economic thinking radically diverges from
economics as we know it. This is not because Plato is unable to do economic
analysis, or diagnose how a market economy would work. It is because Plato is doing
economic analysis, and because he does understand how a market economy works,
and what the effects of it are. In the background is surely the commodification of
expertise and education at the hands of the Sophists in fifth century Greece, on
which Plato had surely already reflected several times in some of his other dialogues.
In the Republic, Socrates identifies a potential conflict between the
motivations that drive economic activity and the motivations needed for a society
such as he has in mind, in which intellectual enquiry can be freely exercised without
risk of corruption, and in which virtue is not under pressure from materialist values.
To solve this problem, Socrates has his rulers and all the public servants
maintained at state expense.
Pagina 8
Bekijk in PDF(opent in een nieuw venster)Text 4
"First, private property: none of them should own anything of their own,
except what is unavoidable. Second, no house or storeroom or anything like
that should be provided for any of them that isn’t a place that anyone can go
into at will. Third, the rations, such as would be needed by sober and
dedicated men trained for war; these—sufficient for a year, with no surplus
or shortfall— should be provided out of a tax levy on the rest of the citizens,
in return for the protection that the Guardians provide; they'll live a
communal life like soldiers, eating together in the refectory.9
This allows the Guardians to be free of all contact with money or private property.
Although Socrates has not yet drawn the distinction between two kinds of
Guardians, on the one hand the auxiliaries, entrusted with the preservation of law
and order, and on the other hand the philosopher kings, entrusted with determining
the goals and policies of the state, he is already seeking to eliminate corruption in
any of the positions of responsibility. Here, at the end of Book 3, he decides that the
entirety of his elite, the Guardian classes taken together, is to be deprived of all
material reward, and all contact with monetary gain or corruption. He continues as
follows:
Text 5
And we'll advise them that they have from the gods all the divine gold and
silver that they need permanently in their own souls, and they have no
additional need of the human kind—indeed it is offensive for them to defile
the possession of that gold with an admixture of possession of the mortal
kind, because many unholy things result from the currency of the hoi polloi,
but the gold they have is not debased.10
The contrast in Text 5 between the gold in the soul and the currency of the hoi
polloi is no fanciful metaphor. Socrates asks us to consider which kind of currency is
valuable, in political decision-making: what do we want our leaders to value—their
trustworthy and wise souls, or monetary gain? If anyone thinks that getting rich
means getting money they have made a big mistake, because the true riches are
something that cannot be bought for money: indeed worse than that, money
destroys them. Trust is one such thing, to which we shall return.
9
416 d-e.
Pagina 9
Bekijk in PDF(opent in een nieuw venster)The danger, Socrates observes in Text 3, is that the ones who were
supposed to protect the people may instead become their oppressors, as if
shepherds who rear dogs to protect their flocks were to train the dogs in such a
way that they turn into wolves.11 But, says Socrates,
Text 6
“if the Guardians acquire private land, houses and money, they’ll become
hostile dictators instead of allies of the people, they’ll live their whole life
hating and being hated, plotting and targeted by plotters, more afraid of the
enemies at home than of the enemies abroad, and running themselves and
the whole city to ruin at once.”12
Adeimantus observes that this austere communal lifestyle puts the Guardians at a
disadvantage compared to the ordinary working folk, who have money to give dinner
parties and enjoy life. Socrates agrees. The Guardians can’t have dinner parties; they
have no money to spend on their mistresses; they have no foreign holidays, and no
money to spend on other luxuries. In Adeimantus’s eyes this is a topsy turvy state,
because the leaders and bosses have less fun than the people they are in charge of.
That idea seemed bonkers to Adeimantus and it probably seems bonkers to most
people today.
It’s not clear what Socrates’ answer is. He seems, initially, to concede that
the Guardians do have a poor deal, as regards their personal happiness. He says that
this is a necessary sacrifice on their part, because it’s essential for the general well
being (as we saw in Text 6) that those in power should not be exposed to envy or
malice. So he seems to be saying that the personal happiness of the most powerful
section of society is sacrificed for the general good.
But this is not the answer we should expect, nor the one we should accept, I
submit. We should not accept it, because it unthinkingly goes along with
Adeimantus’s mistaken idea that what the Guardians are losing is something truly
worth having. It accepts Adeimantus’s idea that what they are gaining, the gold and
silver in the soul, can't be a source of happiness or well-being. Instead of accepting
Socrates’ answer, we should question Adeimantus's values. Is not what the
11
416a.
Pagina 10
Bekijk in PDF(opent in een nieuw venster)Guardians get, in this topsy-turvy political thought experiment, something of
supreme value? Something that outstrips anything that money can buy?
It may be that the true answer to whether the Guardians can be personally
happy cannot emerge at this early stage of the Republic, where Socrates is primarily
concerned with providing an army-cum-police-force, not a group of intellectuals. The
Republic falls into two quite distinct halves, modelled respectively on two quite
different historical antecedents, as I shall go on to suggest. At this stage, we are still
in what we might call the Spartan city. We have not yet divided the gold and the
silver career paths. We are not asking yet about what there is of supreme value that
those on the gold path will be offered instead of dinner parties. The values are still
those of Sparta.
Socrates probably thinks that the auxiliaries, devoted to physical defence of
the state, do not really gain something of supreme value in the exercise of their duty.
He does not envisage that physical training is a desirable end of greater value than
anything that money could buy. Yet this must be what counts as success for them. If
these auxiliaries were to be happy in their role, it would have to be because
exercising their physical and moral strength is a good thing. Probably we could
accept that it is indeed so, if we think about how such a life of caring and protecting
can be satisfying. And we might agree that such a perfect life might indeed be
somewhat undermined by monetary rewards, if that implies that acting for the good
of others is not something one could choose for its own sake. But Plato does not
attend much to the self-giving love and care that might be motivational as an end in
itself for those who follow a Silver path in life.
So I think that he is thinking of the auxiliaries, when he suggests that their
prescribed career involves sacrificing their personal happiness. He seems to grant
that a life with material resources would be more personally fulfilling for them. It is
forbidden not because it is not attractive but because of the risk of envy and malice.
By contrast, later in the book, when Socrates is thinking about philosopher
rulers, the situation is rather different. Their intellectual training leads them to
achievements that Socrates thinks have genuine and intrinsic value, not just
instrumental value for the preservation of the community. The philosophical life has
real value in Plato's eyes, and is expected to be thrilling for those who follow it, in a
Pagina 11
Bekijk in PDF(opent in een nieuw venster)way that nothing else could ever be thrilling. Socrates is experimenting with the idea
that pure knowledge might be the highest goal. On that supposition, it follows that
what the philosophers gain is better than anything that anyone might ever attain, or
that any amount of ordinary gold might buy. So it would be absurd to think that by
lacking the money to do something else, they are deprived of something worth
having. It seems to me therefore that Socrates ought eventually to be able to say
that the gold souls lose nothing that they could ever want or desire by having no
money for dinners or whoring or foreign holidays.
But this answer would become available only later in the Republic, when we
understand why the gold in the soul is the best thing one could ever have. It is not
immediately available, nor plausible, at the earlier stage, when we consider the
rewards available for the military trainees. Nor does it fit with the Spartan part of
the book.
Adeimantus is right that the idea of leaving the rulers and guardians in
poverty and austerity is topsy-turvy. But it is topsy-turny, not because Plato was
ignoring the rules economic theory, nor because he did not know about the effects
of competition and incentives, profit margins, bonuses and rewards. On the
contrary, he is precisely thinking about those things. And he is saying, “Suppose we
changed all that, and divorced power from the ability to deliver financial advantages:
what then?”
I think that Plato is right to suggest that where political power is linked to
personal wealth and private property, the desire for wealth will lead others to
compete for power, and to defraud the people rather than defend them. In Plato's
imaginary system, it is the least powerful who are the most wealthy (in conventional
money). The least wealthy in conventional money are the most wealthy in the
immaterial goods. But these immaterial goods might be way more important for a
flourishing society, Plato suggests.
Plato’s conclusions about what gets destroyed by money are telling: it is not
just that good and trustworthy leadership can be destroyed when the leaders are
allowed to accumulate private wealth (so that the leaders trained to be guard dogs
turn into ravening wolves, as he says in Text 3), but also that a certain kind of
motivation is lost: namely the motivation to do what is best because it is best; and
Pagina 12
Bekijk in PDF(opent in een nieuw venster)also a certain kind of care: the care of a craftsman who tries to make the best job he
can of what he is making. Socrates observes, in Text 7, that both too much wealth
and too little wealth undermine craft:13 if a man is in abject poverty he cannot buy
good materials, and hence however good his skills and his will, the products that he
makes will be shoddy and unsatisfying.14 Though he wanted to do better, he was
prevented by poverty. On the other hand, if a man has too much wealth, and comes
to value that above his own products, he will lose interest in the craft and in the
quality of his products; he will become lazy and unmotivated.15 So even among the
working people excessive wealth can corrupt good intentions, even the good
intentions of a craftsman who once cared about whether what he made was the best
it could be. And the same is true of bankers and investors and stock-market
advisors. The ethics of careful craftsmanship, with the motive to deliver products
that have genuine value, and to invest in capital projects that are genuinely beneficial
and not destructive or exploitative, this craftsman mentality is easily lost, when the
desire to make or do something fine is replaced by the desire to go home a whole
lot wealthier than your neighbour, or worse still, by finding that you have a shed load
of wealth already.
3
Pythagoras and Southern Italy
Plato’s political thought experiment was not without precedent. In fact I
believe that there was a precedent that was not just a thought experiment but a
living experiment, of such phenomenal success that it probably inspired Plato with
many of his ideas and institutions.
It is often supposed that the institutions in the Republic are modelled on the
highly conservative and archaic institutions that survived at Sparta. Sparta was a
military regime in which the elite citizens were banned from engaging in trade and
commerce, and were trained for military service. The elite citizens shared a common
table in their assigned regimental club. The eponymous Spartan way of life idealised
13
421d-e.
14
421d13.
Pagina 13
Bekijk in PDF(opent in een nieuw venster)austerity over luxury. And, as in Plato’s city, all the productive labour was done by
other classes. In Sparta, though not in Plato, there was a subject labour force who
had no political rights and were only partly free, if at all.
Was Plato inspired by this military powerhouse? “Yes” is the standard
answer. For instance we read on Wikipedia (fount of all wisdom) the following under
"Laconophilia":
Some of the young men who were followers of Socrates had been
Laconophiles. Socrates himself is portrayed as having often praised the laws
of Sparta and Crete. … Plato also, in his writings, seems to prefer a Spartantype regime over a democratic one.
Well, of course there are many similarities, especially in the part of the book that we
have just been examining. That is why I have called that part of the work the Spartan
part of the Republic. The preference for a certain kind of austerity, the common
refectories for the Guardians, and their exclusion from commerce and monetary
gain are all recognisable as features of Sparta (though, as we shall see, not just of
Sparta). But I suspect that the resemblance to Sparta in this part of the work may be
a cunning joke on Plato's part. Perhaps he is deliberately sounding like a Laconophile,
so as to capture the attention of his listeners, many of them doubtless Laconophiles.
The listeners in Socrates’ audience are, among others, members of Plato's rather
oligarchically inclined family. So at the beginning, in books 2 to 4, Socrates starts to
describe a society that sounds uncannily like Sparta. The Laconophiles among us are
lulled into a false sense of security. We think that we know where this discussion is
going.
But that is a temporary illusion. As the conversation proceeds, this Spartanstyle military regime is radically transformed into a philosophical one. Intellectual
prowess, not physical training, is what is to give this society its success. And its
success is not going to be defined by its power or landed wealth, as Sparta’s was, but
by its moral and intellectual wealth, and above all its justice and well-being. The book
is carefully constructed so that what seemed at first like a familiar description of a
Spartan regime, devoted to austerity in order to produce good soldiers, turns out
(once the audience has been apprized of the role and importance of philosophy) to
become a regime that is devoted to austerity in order to produce good thinkers. By
Book 6 we begin to realise that this is not Sparta after all, but something else.
Pagina 14
Bekijk in PDF(opent in een nieuw venster)What is it then? My suggestion is that it is not Sparta but Croton. In setting
up his philosopharchy, with its focus on the idea that friends have all things in
common, and that what is mine is yours too, Plato was surely thinking of the
Pythagorean states of Southern Italy. In the late sixth century, Pythagoras fled from
the island of Samos, where—so we are told— a new dictator was making the
environment hostile to philosophy.16 When he arrived in Croton in Southern Italy,
after perhaps stopping at Delphi on the way, he set about reforming Croton in some
way, possibly improving its military discipline, possibly improving its moral condition,
certainly becoming influential in its political organisation. Within about ten to twenty
years, he and his followers occupied all the most influential leadership positions, not
only in Croton itself but also in a whole tranche of other cities in the region.
It is hard to discover from the sources exactly what the Pythagoreans’ key to
success was, or what their political approach was. Modern scholars, obsessed with
the only distinctions they can think of, between aristocracy and democracy, landed
wealth versus commerce, and conservative versus progressive, have typically tried to
characterise Pythagoras' policies as conservative and aristocratic.17 The same thing
has often happened when historians and political thinkers try to explain what Plato’s
political views were.
16
Porphyry V.P. 9; 16; Strabo XIV 638 (citing Timaeus of Tauromenium, 4th
Century BC historian). Iamblichus places the departure from Samos later. See Kurt
von Fritz, Pythagorean Politics in Southern Italy: an analysis of the sources (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1940), 47-57.
17
See Edwin L Minar, Early Pythagorean Politics in Practice and Theory
(Baltimore: Waverley Press, 1942), vi-vii and chapter 2, citing A Krische, De Societatis
a Pythagora in urbe Crotoniatarum condita scopo politico (Göttingen, 1830) and W.A.
Oldfather, 'Pythagoras on Individual Differences and the Authoritarian Principle',
Classical Journal, 33 (1938), 537-9, against a minority represented by John Burnet,
Early Greek Philosophy (4th Edition 1930 edn.; London, 1892/1930), G Thomson, The
Oresteia of Aeschylus, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1938), 349 and G Thomson, Aeschylus and
Athens (London, 1941), 210-19 (who had suggested that Pythagorean politics was
mildly democratic).
Pagina 15
Bekijk in PDF(opent in een nieuw venster)But I think it is clear that, like Plato, Pythagoras was doing something
completely different and far more radical, something that has nothing to do with the
traditional set up—in which wealth always coincides with power, and there is always
a struggle between those whose wealth comes from commerce, and those who
inherit wealth and influence from a powerful family. I think that scholars have
mistaken Pythagoras’ philosopharchy for aristocracy, as they often do with Plato’s.
It seems that the first thing that Pythagoras did was to separate the children
from their parents and start to make them think about another set of values, that
had nothing to do with competing for financial gain. This idea of starting with the
children itself is echoed in Plato’s suggestion about how one might begin to set up
the Republic in practice.18 All the sources agree that when Pythagoras arrived in
Croton, his impact was dramatic and pervasive. Diogenes Laertius has just this to
say:
Text 8
… He set sail for Croton. And there he legislated for the Italians, and was greatly
honoured together with his disciples. They numbered something approaching 300
and they ran the city in the best possible way, so that the constitution was more or
less literally "an aristocracy".19
But Porphyry, following Dicaearchus, has a more elaborate legend:
Text 9
When he disembarked in Italy and arrived in Croton, so Dicaearchus says,20 they
were struck by his appearance: he had the look of a gentleman of liberal birth, with
a gracious and orderly manner, voice and everything, and he seemed like someone
well-travelled, naturally blessed by fortune and remarkably gifted in every way. Such
an effect did he have on the city of Crotonians that when he had inspired the
council of elder statesmen that was in charge of the city, by presenting a range of
admirable ideas to them, the rulers then appointed him to deliver a youth mission
18
Republic VII, 540e5-541a7.
19
D.L. VIII 3.
20
Dicaearchus, pupil of Aristotle, late 4th Century, contemporary of
Aristoxenus. Fragments collected in William Fortenbaugh and E Schütrumpf, eds,
Dicaearchus of Messana: Text, Translation, and Discussion. (New Brunswick:
Transaction, 2001). His attitude to Pythagoras is sceptical, emphasising the
charismatic personality. See Huffman in Huffman.
Pagina 16
Bekijk in PDF(opent in een nieuw venster)programme to the adolescents. And after that he was asked to address the children
from the schools all congregated together, and then the women. Even a meeting of
women was fixed up for him.
Porphyry V.P. 18
In Dicaearchus' imagination, Pythagoras' influence flowed from a charismatic
personality, though I suspect that he probably arrived with some token of authority
from the oracle of Apollo at Delphi.21
If the traditional dating is right Pythagoreans were the leading political
influence in Croton and its regional cities for about 80 years after Pythagoras' arrival.
But what exactly was their role? We are faced with a persistent difficulty, of
disentangling stories about the Pythagorean "brotherhood"—an inner circle who
studied arcane matters, shared some kind of secret passwords, perhaps a coenobitic
life— from information concerning the influence that Pythagorean political leaders
had on a larger community, the whole city of Croton, and the subsequent alliance of
cities in Southern Italy. It is implausible to imagine the whole population joining the
Pythagorean philosophical circle. 22 What, then, was the wider political role of
Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans? 23 Was the society structured somewhat like
Plato’s, with on the one hand a coenobitic community of scholar-philosophers, and
on the other a separate garrison of military guardians, with the rest of the
population living a normal life under the moral instruction of the leaders? The idea
seems plausible.
First let us sketch the political situation when Pythagoras arrived. It is widely
thought that he came to Croton shortly after Croton was defeated by Locri at the
Battle of the Sagra river, conventionally dated circa 530 BC.24 Justinus (epitomising
21
For the argument to this effect see my paper in Huffman.
22
On the Pythagorean way of life, see chapter 6 in this volume.
23
For more detail on the historical evidence for this period see Minar, Early
Pythagorean Politics in Practice and Theory, Ch. 3: I dispute Minar's interpretation,
particularly his insistence that the Pythagoreans were aristocratic and reactionary in
their political leanings.
24
Strabo 261, 263; Justinus XX 2.10-3.9. Peter Bicknell, 'The date of the
battle of the Sagra river', Phoenix, 20 (1966), 294-301 argues for a much earlier dating
Pagina 17
Bekijk in PDF(opent in een nieuw venster)Trogus) suggests that Pythagoras revives their Crotonians' morale in the aftermath
of that defeat:
Text 10
After this the Crotonians lost their interest in the exercise of military prowess or
arms. For they hated the arms that they had taken up with such bad luck; and had
Pythagoras the philosopher not been there, they would have given their life over to
luxury… Having studied under all these [sc. the Egyptians, Babyonians etc]
Pythagoras came to Croton and by his authority recalled the citizens from the
luxury they had fallen into, bringing them back to frugal ways. Every day he praised
excellence…
Justinus XX 4. 1-3, 5-6.
Justinus sees the city's post-traumatic disillusionment as the context for Pythagoras'
mission, and thinks that the aim was to motivate the young men and boys to military
enterprise.
If Justinus is right,25 Croton would evidently have lost a generation of young
men in the disastrous battle of Sagra, less than a decade before Pythagoras arrived.
The citizens are now reluctant to risk provoking war; a whole generation of youth
has been raised with a desire to enjoy life while they can, and not to follow their lost
brothers into battle. Matching the lost generation of boys would be a generation of
young women without husbands or potential husbands. It makes sense that
Pythagoras needed to engage the women, and the younger children of both sexes, in
raising aspirations.26 The sources suggest that he held assemblies of women and of
children, each group separately but each with a role to play.
Besides this attention to women and children, we hear of young men flocking
to join up with Pythagoras. Joining the clique apparently committed the member to a
special kind of friendship, sharing of personal property, secrecy and a variety of
special rituals or passwords whereby the members could identify who did or didn't
(570s) using material from Theopompus found in Suda: Phormio. For further
questions on chronology see below, note 45
25
For other options see below.
On women see further below.
Pagina 18
Bekijk in PDF(opent in een nieuw venster)belong.27 These details tell us little about what the recruits would have learned, or
how it might bear on politics in Croton or in other cities where, eventually, they
obtained positions of power and influence.
As I have mentioned, I do not find it helpful to think of the emergence (or
decline) of Pythagorean influence in the traditional terms used for describing political
conflict. The emergence of Pythagorean politics in Southern Italy was not a coup or a
revolution. It was probably a creeping enthusiasm for certain ideas and ideals. How
would Pythagorean thinking have come to replace the earlier approach to
government? If, as seems likely, the 2000 followers who joined, with wives and
children, after Pythagoras' first speech,28 were mainly younger citizens, rather than
serving Council members, then we can imagine that Pythagorean ideas would have
spread upwards, partly as younger men became elders in their family, and partly as
their attitudes and values spread to others, not just the wealthy but also ordinary
citizens, thereby changing the rulers' options for internal policy. Similarly, as
Pythagorean groups emerged elsewhere in the region, their greater loyalty to the
Pythagorean way of life than to their separate poleis, and their pact of philia towards
fellow members, would facilitate the growth of an alliance among the cities of Magna
Graecia.29 Not that this happened entirely without violence, however.
Probably Croton remained an oligarchy under Pythagorean influence and
beyond. But this need not mean that the Pythagoreans favoured aristocratic
27
See Chapter 6 in Huffman.
28
Porphyry VP 20, citing Nicomachus (1st Century A.D. Pythagorean
mathematician, whose biography of Pythagoras is used by Porphyry and Iamblichus).
See Walter Burkert, Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism, trans. E.L. Minar Jr
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972), 98-99.
29
Porphyry VP 20 seems to use the term "Magna Graecia", normally used to
refer generally to the Greek colonies in southern Italy, to mean the voluntary
adherence of members to the Pythagorean discipleship and community living, as
though it named the Pythagorean political alliance. On the league of cities see below.
Pagina 19
Bekijk in PDF(opent in een nieuw venster)oligarchy over other systems.30 The Pythagoreans can hardly favour "aristocracy", if
"aristocracy" makes property a criterion for influence. For, by all accounts,
Pythagoreans owned no private property, lived a life of simple frugality, and
promoted non-materialist values among both themselves and those they governed.
Joining meant handing over one's entire wealth, for five years probation. Only if not
admitted to full membership after five years could one reclaim the property.31 A
Pythagorean considers nothing idion (private): for friends everything is koinon
(common).32 So private property would be no mark of esteem or qualification for
government, but rather the reverse. When Diogenes remarks, in Text 4, that the
three hundred disciples who ran the city "in the best possible way" constituted
literally an "aristocracy", he means neither that they were, nor that they were not
promoting aristocracy: he means that they ruled well. 33 Surely Pythagoras' agerelated hetaireiai, his distribution of cult duties by age rather than inherited
priesthoods, and his confiscation of members' property, precisely preclude inherited
status. Again the egalitarian aims of Plato's myth of the metals come to mind.34
These egalitarian ideals—against privilege, private property, depravity,
hostility; for equality of opportunity, communism, the life of the mind and virtuous
friendship—can we square these ideals with the history of Southern Italy after
Pythagoras' arrival? Two key events are, first, Croton's defeat of Sybaris,35 and,
second, Croton's dominance in an unusual political and monetary league of cities.
30
Pace Minar, Early Pythagorean Politics in Practice and Theory .
31
D.L. 8.10; on issues of the monetary value of property see below.
32
D.L. 8.23. See above, n. Error! Bookmark not defined..
33
D.L. 8.3.
34
Plato's system for eliminating inherited privilege has been similarly
misunderstood by those who use a simple-minded dichotomy between "elitist" and
"egalitarian" political systems. An egalitarian system to facilitate equality of
opportunity will reject existing criteria of privilege, but have its own criteria to select
an elite by merit.
Probably 510 BC, but see further below.
Pagina 20
Bekijk in PDF(opent in een nieuw venster)The latter fits well with the idea canvassed here, of a spreading undercurrent of
allegiance, as Pythagoreans with an overriding loyalty to each other increasingly
dominated neighbouring cities. Of this period, Iamblichus writes:
Text 11
It is said, then, that on moving to Italy and Sicily, he found those cities enslaved to
one another—some for many years, and other just recently. By filling these cities
with thoughts of freedom by way of his "hearers" in each city, he pulled them back
and made them free: Croton and Sybaris and Catania and Rhegium and Himera and
Acragas and Tauromenium and some others, for which he established laws through
Charondas of Catania and Zaleucus of Locri. As a result of these laws these cities
were the most well-provisioned legally and the most worthy of admiration for those
dwelling in the vicinity, for a long time. He completely removed civil strife and rival
views and difference of opinion, not just among his own associates and their
offspring during several generations (as is recorded) but also generally from all the
cities in Italy and Sicily, both in terms of their internal affairs and in their relations
with the other cities.
Iamblichus VP 33-4.36
Text 11 supports my suggestion that the Pythagorean "revolution" was more
philosophical than political. People came from afar to enrol, and to invite
Pythagorean communities into their city. Such non-violent change side-steps
conventional categories like tyranny, oligarchy, aristocracy and democracy; likewise
it eludes standard models of revolution and regime-change. Immaterial ideas, values
and allegiance spread by contagion, not by power, force or military success.
Croton's conquest of the notoriously wealthy city of Sybaris is harder to
square with this picture. Roughly ten years after Pythagoras arrived, according to the
standard chronology, Croton defeated Sybaris at the river Traeis. Not content with
victory, they then massacred the survivors, flooded the city and killed the civilians.37
This genocide became a byword in the history of hostility of Greek against Greek.
36
Iamblichus' source is probably Nicomachus. Cf Porphyry VP 21-22.
Porphyry continues "When Simmichus the dictator of Centuripa heard him, he laid
aside his dictatorship and he gave some of his property to his sister and some to the
citizens." (VP 21).
37
Sources for these events include Diodorus Siculus XII 9.3; Strabo VI.1.13;
Herodotus V.44; Athenaeus Deipn. XII 521e-f. Some cite the lack of archaeological
Pagina 21
Bekijk in PDF(opent in een nieuw venster)Was this what Pythagoras had taught them to do? Diodorus, placing the
battle in 510 BC,38 explains it thus: the new despot in Sybaris demands the return
and execution of some refugees, presumably his political opponents, who are seeking
asylum in the agora at Croton—probably at the shrine of Hera.39 Croton must
choose: betray the suppliants, or protect them and expect retaliation. At first they
favour betrayal, but they are then converted to the nobler choice by Pythagoras.
This leads to hostilities. After a surprising victory, given their small army, the
Crotoniates, angry and triumphant, kill everyone, instead of taking prisoners of
war.40
There is nothing here about ideological conflicts between democrats and
aristocrats, or commerce and gentry.41 Diodorus' mentions no such ideologies,42 but
speaks of moral motivation: whether to betray suppliants at Hera's altar, zealous
hatred of a demonised enemy and so on. Such explanations, in terms of human
psychology, are compatible with seeing Pythagoras as Croton's moral conscience
rather than its political leader.43
traces of Sybaris to support the genocide story (but see below on later references to
"Sybaris").
38
Diodorus Siculus XII 9.3.
39
See note 45 for implied offence to Hera.
40
D.S. XII 10.1
41
For explanations deploying these concepts see Minar, Early Pythagorean
Politics in Practice and Theory, 12-14.
42
Minar finds support where Diodorus’ describes the dictator (Telys) as a
demagogue and the exiles as megistoi andres and euporotatoi. D.S. XII 9.2. But surely
Diodorus simply means that Telys bought the people's support by confiscating
wealth from some fat cats and distributing it to the rest. It says nothing about what
existing support he had—arguably it implies that he did not already have popular
support—, nor whether the fat cats were traditional gentry or commercial types.
43
In Athenaeus the Sybarites had not only killed Telys' opponents, but also
some Crotoniate ambassadors, and had established some extravagant games to
Pagina 22
Bekijk in PDF(opent in een nieuw venster)If this still seems too violent for Pythagoras to have been responsible, we
could experiment with an alternative chronology. Suppose that what prompted
Pythagoras to begin his teaching was the moral decline associated with Croton's
victory over Sybaris, not by falling morale after the defeat at Sagra River, as Justinus
had suggested44 His teaching on friendship, and not punishing in anger, might be
measures to prevent a repeat of such atrocities, to replace rivalry with collaboration,
substitute common frugality for competitive consumption, and devise a politics of
friendship and humane justice: all corrections to the arrogance resulting from a
magnificent defeat of the world's most gluttonous city. This otherwise speculative
hypothesis finds support in Athenaeus (following Timaeus), who says that Croton
became decadent after defeating Sybaris,45 not after losing at Sagra River, and that
Pythagoras' mission to Croton came after, not before, the destruction of Sybaris.
Either chronology makes sense. Perhaps we could even combine them, if
Pythagoras has to add new measures to curb the zeal resulting from his first revival
of piety.
Women and philosophy.
We have mentioned that Pythagoras chose to speak not just to men and
boys, but also to women. They too would have a role in moral support,46 and also in
the renewal of cult.
Pythagoras apparently introduced a combined sanctuary for the Muses, to
regularise an earlier plurality of separate cults. 47 It is not clear why, though a
connection with Pythagorean interests in music is tempting.
undermine the Olympics. These crimes cause Hera to vomit bile in the agora, and a
fountain of blood (XII 522a).
44
See above, note 24.
45
Athenaeus XII 522a.
46
In Iamblichus VP 54 wives are to take pride in letting the husband win an
argument.
Pagina 23
Bekijk in PDF(opent in een nieuw venster)In Iamblichus' account, Pythagoras urges women to avoid animal sacrifice, to
offer frugal home-baked goods, and to take their offerings to the sanctuary in
person, not by sending a slave. He pictures Pythagoras reviving old-fashioned values,
with time-honoured domestic and religious roles for men and women. But should
we not prefer a different picture, in which Pythagoras has a quite revolutionary and
unconventional effect? Notice a widespread tradition whereby Pythagoras did not
just teach women to be faithful wives, but made them part of an intellectual
project. 48 As ever, it is hard to separate evidence about polis structures from
accounts of the inner Pythagorean circle, but Iamblichus (VP 56, following Timaeus, it
seems)49 says that Pythagoras created an age-related cursus for women, identifying
them with different deities at different stages of their lives (based on some arcane
interest in the meaning of names). A woman starts as a kore when unmarried,
becomes a nymphe when betrothed, a meter when producing children, and maia (a
Doric dialect term) when her child has children. 50 What might such life-stagegroupings be for? Were they to privilege those with children and grandchildren over
the childless? To encourage competitive virtue within each category? To distribute
cult and ritual duties to different age groups? To provide support and opportunities
for unmarried girls and childless widows in the aftermath of war? To assign identities
and roles by age or experience, not social status or wealth? While some of these
(particularly the first) could be ways to reinforce traditional aristocratic values,
others (especially the last two) would be radical egalitarian projects. So which is the
better reconstruction? If I am right that Pythagoras is in the background of Plato’s
model city, this adds support for the idea that the project was not a reactionary
47
Iamblichus V.P. 45. Cf VP 264 (from Apollonius) where a Pythagorean
revival is marked by public sacrifice at "the shrine to the Muses established by
Pythagoras"; and D.L. VIII 40. See Pierre Boyancé, Le culte des muses chez lles
philosophes grecs (Paris: Boccard, 1937).
48
Porphyry VP 19.
49
See also Diogenes Laertius 8.11.
50
D.L. 8.10 describes a similar fourfold division of life for males in terms of
seasons of the year.
Pagina 24
Bekijk in PDF(opent in een nieuw venster)attempt to put women back in the home, but a radical attempt to give women a
range of other options.
Another tradition names some women who held important positions in this
sequence of sacralised life-stages: Porphyry (VP 4, based on Timaeus) says that
Pythagoras' daughter "led the girls in Croton" and his wife led the wives. Since these
were educated women, "leading the girls" etc might not just mean leading cult or
maidenly duties, but might identify the girl's rank among students; or her role as an
instructor for the women's class. Some sayings are attributed to Theano, his wife,51
concerning modesty and ritual purity around sexual intercourse.52 She is also said to
have written "some things" (unlike her son, Telauges).53 Diogenes and Iamblichus give
the name Damo for their daughter, 54 and Bitale for a granddaughter (Damo's
daughter, later Telauges' wife—Telauges being much younger than Damo, and raised
by Theano after Pythagoras' death).55 Much of this must be legend, but the names
seem to be authentic, and the tradition that Telauges taught Empedocles fits the
chronology, if nothing else.56
So in Pythagoras’s Croton, and in the neighbouring cities that belonged to the
same league of cities in southern Italy, we find a society that made friendship the
51
Diogenes Laertius attributes both to Theano. Iamblichus attributes one to
Pythagoras (VP 55), the other to "Deino, wife of Brontinos" though he knows
another tradition ascribing it to Theano (VP 132). Some traditions evidently made
Pythagoras celibate, and Theano or Deino the wife or daughter of Brontinus.
52
D.L. 8.43. The point of the remark that "when she puts on her shame again,
after removing it for intercourse, she puts on what makes her a woman" is probably
that apart from womanly modesty, which is a superficial mark of gender, there is no
real distinction between a man and a woman.
53
D.L. 8.43.
54
D.L. 8.42.
55
Iamblichus VP 146.
56
See the allegedly spurious verse of Empedocles, DK 31B155, quoted by
Pagina 25
Bekijk in PDF(opent in een nieuw venster)supreme value, in such a way that competition for resources and conflict over
possessions would be replaced by a total absence of possessiveness. The expression
"for friends everything is shared" (koina ta ton philon) which is used repeatedly by
Plato, in the Republic and elsewhere, seems to have been a catch phrase of the
Pythagorean society, from which, presumably, Plato must have got it.57 And similarly
the idea that people do not call different things "mine", but that everyone says "mine"
of the same things. As people have noted, when Plato prescribes years of training in
geometry and harmonics for those who are training to be leaders in the Republic, he
appears to be adopting the schedule of training traditionally associated with
Pythagorean mathematicians and philosophers. Once you think about it, Plato's idea
looks to be riddled with Pythagorean-inspired institutions. Of course there is a risk
because the sources from which we learn of Pythagoras’s activities in Croton are all
later than Plato. and they may have embellished their accounts with Platonic
material, but it is far more likely that Plato’s idea of a training in geometry and a
residential community of philosophers engaged in speculative astronomy and politics
as part of the same endeavour was inspired by Pythagoras’s extraordinary political
regime in southern Italy, than by Sparta, and it is far more likely that Plato acquired
the idea from something in Pythagoras’s project, than that the sources wrote it into
Pythagorean legend after Plato (particularly as in order to find it in Pythagoras we
have to peel off a layer of interpretation that positively conceals these Platonic
themes under a layer of misinformation).
57
κοινὰ τὰ τῶν φίλων. Plato Republic 424a, 449c5. Cf Phaedrus 279c; Lysis
207c10; Critias 112e10; Laws 739c2-d5. See Timaeus apud Diogenes Laertius VIII 10,
Schol in Platonis Phaedrum 279, and Iamblichus V.P. XVIII 81; Fritz, Pythagorean
Politics in Southern Italy: an analysis of the sources, 35, 39. Porphyry V.P. 33 attributes to
Pythagoras both κοινὰ τὰ τῶν φίλων and ὁ φίλος ἄλλος ἑαυτός (the friend is
another self). Iamblichus V.P. XXIX, 167 traces the notion of "calling the same things
'mine' and 'not mine'" (Republic 462c) to the Pythagorean model. For resistance to
these themes see J.A. Philip, Pythagoras and early Pythagoreanism (Phoenix
Supplementary Volumes; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1966), 140-1 and
Peter Garnsey, 'Pythagoras, Plato and communality: a note', Hermathena, 179 (2005),
77-87 (who ignores Plato's emphasis on shared property).
Pagina 26
Bekijk in PDF(opent in een nieuw venster)Did the Pythagorean project in Croton work? It seems that there was a
period of flourishing political and monetary collaboration in the region for about 70
years. With a few minor hiccups, the Pythagoreans held control not just of Croton
itself, but also of all the cities nearby, until they were assassinated in an arson attack
in the mid fifth century, after a long period of stability and prosperity. The coinage of
the region suggests that the otherwise independent cities were working together,
with a common currency and mutual exchange. It was something like the EU, except
that it wasn't. It was more successful. Every city flourished. And the reason for this
seems to be that the friendship between the leaders in the cities—the friendship of
Pythagorean brother to Pythagorean brother— was more powerful and bonded
them more strongly than any economic motives towards competition or rivalry that
might cause them to fall into hostility. It was that kind of friendship, and that kind of
political harmony, that Plato had in mind when urged that the key to political success
for his city was that friends must have all things in common.
4
Reflections.
Both Pythagoras and Plato deliberately remove monetary rewards and all
other material bonuses from public life, and replace them with benefits calculated by
a quite different measure of worth: with, for instance, the freedom to pursue the
things they love best, including—for those who care about such things— abstract
enquiry, wisdom and understanding, or equal conversation among like-minded
friends uncontaminated by rivalry or competition.
On the one hand this anticipates a standard economic observation frequently
attributed to Aristotle (but actually much older), that exchange value depends upon
needs and the ability to use the commodity, and will not be equal among unequals.
Because education is of little value to some and of great value to others, it cannot be
given a standard price or handed out randomly to all. For, as Heraclitus remarked
(Text 12) nearly two centuries before Aristotle,
Donkeys prefer the sweepings from the threshing floor rather than gold.
(Heraclitus. B9).
But more than that, Plato and Pythagoras remind us that some things are
precious in a way that money can't measure, and indeed money can't buy, because
buying it ruins it. Among these goods are friendship, love, loyalty, trust and wisdom.
Pagina 27
Bekijk in PDF(opent in een nieuw venster)For these things there is no law of diminishing utility. Which means that these things
are the only goods that are unqualifiedly worth having and always having more of.
But an economy based on monetary rewards for supposed "success" systematically
perverts the value system by promoting above all else the means for destroying
trust, equality, love, wisdom and the other rewards that maintain their value without
diminishing returns.
Plato was probably following Pythagoras when he said that what causes
conflict and unease in a community is when one person says "mine" about one thing
and another says "mine" about something else. Aristotle thought that this was
nonsense. He responded, as many capitalists would today, by arguing that people
care more about what is their own, and less about communal or publicly owned
goods.
But this is too quick. Plato is not talking about publicly owned things—about
which we would surely say "ours" rather than “mine”. Plato is reminding us that it is
actually possible in some other cases for us to care about things that we share, and
for each of us to regard them equally as our own, and to say “mine” not “ours”
about them. These are not shared things in the sense of public ownership. To name
some familiar examples where we use "Mine" in just Plato's way, we typically speak
of "my team" in referring to the football team that we support, or "my university" of
the place where we studied. We say "my mother" and "my Aunt" and this does not
at all mean that they are not also someone else's mother or Aunt. We say "my
daughter", not meaning to say that there is no other parent whom she will say
"mine" in return about. She is “my” daughter and I am “her” parent. This is not a
kind of ownership.
When two of us both identify something as "mine" in this way, we also care
for each other. In these cases we are pleased, not offended, by finding someone else
who says "mine" of the same football team or is an alumnus of the same university,
whereas when someone else says "mine" of our private property we become
possessive and deny that it is theirs at all. So there are two kinds of possession or
belonging expressed by the term "mine", and there is a massive difference between
them in what the effects are for cohesion among the group who feel attachment to
that thing. It is a sad thing about our society and much superficial political thought
that it has no grasp of the difference between ownership and belonging. My aunt is
Pagina 28
Bekijk in PDF(opent in een nieuw venster)not mine to dispose of or sell, but she does belong to me and I care about her. The
same with my body.
So our shared loyalty to something that we both call “mine” typically
motivates us to endeavour jointly to support it, not to compete or withdraw and
leave it to others. We do not withdraw our loyalty to the football team just because
someone else is also a keen supporter. Arguably there are limits, as explored by
sociologists, to the size of the group that can feel shared belonging and maintain a
level of commitment; and possibly there also needs to be some other, distant if not
nearby, that is not the one we are loyal to. It is not clear whether we can have global
belonging (though the idea of a shared planet is not far from this notion).
Nevertheless, the phenomenon is apparent and is a counter-example to the claim
that the only thing that motivates us to commitment and enthusiasm is private
ownership and individual rewards or benefits. In fact the institutions in question,
such as a team or a school or a parent, are not owned at all by the group who
regards them as "mine". And the same goes for "my country" and "my religion". Yet
typically those who feel that way about them will willingly to put some, or indeed all,
of their private wealth into supporting those concerns, even though they do not own
them nor any of their achievements and goals.
When we say "mine" in this sense we do not express ownership but a
relation of care and responsibility. These relations seem to me to be some of the
most important ones for economics to keep in mind. And they are the way that
Pythagoras and Plato thought one could make for a different kind of society, where
economic motivations were not the incentives involved. And, it seems, Pythagoras
made it work. It would be nice to know how.
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