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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 October 2013
Commercial buying and selling had replaced mutual gift giving long before Aristotle's time, and he gives fair exchange primacy over the other forms of justice in book five of the Nicomachean Ethics just because it provided philia for an activity which he knew to be more basic than any other in the life of the polis. He calls it ‘the salvation of states’, and repeats the judgement in the Politics.
Yet the account of fair exchange in EN v 5 has a reputation for obscurity which ought to seem surprising. There is no agreed meaning for the formula ‘as builder to shoemaker, so many shoes to a house’ (1133a23-5, 32-3), and chapter 5 has become the poor relation in book five partly for this reason. The formula has a simple explanation, however, which has been overlooked because of a mistaken belief that inequality enters into it.
2 D. G. Ritchie took this view, and concluded that fair exchange was wrongly considered to be merely another subdivision of particular justice; see his ‘Aristotle's subdivisions of particular justice’, CR vii (1894) 185–92. It seems to have been a commonplace in Plato's time that cities were formed in the first place in order to acquire a greater abundance of necessities by dividing labours; see Rep. ii 369b–371e.
3 1132b33, Jowett. ‘Wherefore the principle of reciprocity, as I have already remarked in the Ethics, is the salvation of states’, Politics, 1261a30–31.
4 There are two reasons. The second is that Aristotle's discussion of summetria which is the heart of the chapter, has not generally been understood. See n.16 below.
5 Finley, M. I., ‘Aristotle and economic analysis’, P&P xlvii (1970) 3–25Google Scholar; reprinted in Finley, M. I. ed., Studies in ancient society (London 1974) 33Google Scholar. All references to Finley will be to this article in the latter publication.
6 Williams, R., The Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle (London 1869) 154Google Scholar. Grant, A., The Ethics of Aristotle (London 1874) ii 118Google Scholar. Rackham, H., The Nicomachean Ethics (London 1926) 283nGoogle Scholar. Burnet, J., The Ethics of Aristotle (London 1900) 225nGoogle Scholar. Meek, R. L., Studies in the labour theory of value (London 1956) 295nGoogle Scholar. Soudek, J., ‘Aristotle's theory of exchange: an enquiry into the origin of economic analysis’, Proc.Am.Philos.Soc. xcvi (1952) 46Google Scholar, 60.
7 D. G. Ritchie, op. cit. 186. Ross, W. D., Ethics Nicomachea (Oxford 1925) 1133a5nGoogle Scholar. Hardie, W. F. R., Aristotle's ethical theory (Oxford 1968) 191–201Google Scholar. Schumpeter, J., History of economic analysis (Oxford 1954) 60–62Google Scholar. Gordon, Barry J., ‘Aristotle and the development of value theory’, Quarterly journal of economics lxxvii (1964) 115–128CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
8 Marx sought to explain why Aristotle, and the Greeks generally, lacked such a notion of labour: Capital i (ed. London 1970) 65–6; Finley accepts the case, Finley 38.
9 Joachim, H. H., The Nicomachean Ethics (Oxford 1951) 150Google Scholar. Finley 38.
10 Heath, T. L., Mathematics in Aristotle (Oxford 1949) 274–5Google Scholar. Gauthier, R. A. and Jolif, J. Y., L'Éthique à Nicomaque, ii (Louvain and Paris, 2nd ed. 1970) 377Google Scholar. Finley 34.
11 Cf. 1133a10, 14, 17, 21, 25; 1133b4, 10, 25, 27. Concern with products rather than producers is evident in the textual detail too. What have to be equalised (ἱσασθῆναι at 1133a13–14 are referred to by a neuter plural pronoun (ταῦτα). At 1133b5 it is the ἔργα of shoemaker and farmer that have to be equalized. What have to be ‘comparable in some way’ (συμβλητά πως) if they are to be equalized are πάντα, 1133a19. What money equalises are πάντα, 1133a20. The τὴν ὐπεροχὴν καὶ τὴν ἔλλειψιν in 1133a21 are the members of πάντα again, and Aristotle instances shoes and houses.
12 Ross and others translate κρεῖττον at 1133a13 as ‘better than’ or ‘superior to’, possibly suggesting that Aristotle might have the quality of products in mind. There is no justification for such a suggestion either in the immediate context or elsewhere in the chapter. Aristotle deals only with quantities, and simply assumes products to be of exchangeable quality. It is better to translate κρεῖττον εἶναι as ‘to be too much’ or ‘to be worth more’, because the context is the unfairness of exchanging one house for one shoe. Rackham has ‘worth more than’, and Dirlmeier ‘hochwertiger … als’.
13 In this passage it is, admittedly, the goodness or badness of a man that the law is said to ignore. But if the law had recognized some sort of inequality as pertinent, we should not expect Aristotle to say that the law ‘treats the parties as equals' without mentioning it.
14 The case is one of corrective justice, but the offence being corrected is one against distributive justice. Aristotle's point is that where an offence under corrective justice (hitting someone) is committed by an inferior on a superior, the simple reciprocity of Rhadamanthys (getting back what you did) is unfitting, though it might be fitting between equals.
15 Aristotle considers buying and selling under corrective justice (1131a2), because it corrects transations in which parties end up with less or more than ‘their own’. Similarly, if he thought fair buying and selling should involve inequality, we should expect them to be considered in the chapter on distributive justice and they are not.
16 The discussion is analysed in my ‘Aristotle and the political economy of the polis’, JHS xcix (1979) 57–73, substantially revised in Keyt, D. and Miller, Fred D. Jr, eds., A companion to Aristotle's Politics (Oxford 1991) 156–81Google Scholar, reprinted in Blaug, Mark, ed., Aristotle (London 1991) 195–220Google Scholar.
17 von Böhm-Bawerk, E., Karl Marx mid the close of his system, ed. Sweezy, Paul M. (London 1975) 68Google Scholar.
