It is remarkable that the great burst of economic thinking in the ancient world covered only two centuries – the fifth and the fourth BC – and only in one country, Greece. The rest of the ancient world, and even Greece before and after these centuries, was essentially a desert of economic thought. Nothing of substance came out of the great ancient civilizations in Mesopotamia and India, and very little except political thought in the many centuries-long civilization of China. Remarkably, little or no economic thought emerged out of those civilizations, even though the economic institutions: trade, credit, mining, crafts, etc. were often far advanced, and even more so than in Greece. Here is an important indication that, contrary to Marxists and other economic determinists, economic thought and ideas do not simply emerge as a reflex of the development of economic institutions.
There is no way that historians of thought can ever completely penetrate the mysteries of creativity in the human soul, and thus completely explain this relatively brief flowering of human thought. But it is surely no accident that it was the Greek philosophers who provided us with the first fragments of systematic economic theory. For philosophy, too, was virtually non-existent in the rest of the ancient world or before this era in Greece. The essence of philosophic thought is that it penetrates the ad hoc vagaries of day-to-day life in order to arrive at truths that transcend the daily accidents of time and place. Philosophy arrives at truths about the world and about human life that are absolute, universal and eternal – at least while the world and humanity last. It arrives, in short, at a system of natural laws. But economic analysis is a subset of such investigation, because genuine economic theory can only advance beyond shifting day-to-day events by penetrating truths about human action which are absolute, unchanging and eternal, which are unaffected by changes of time and place. Economic thought, at least correct economic thought, is itself a subset of natural laws in its own branch of investigation.
If we remember the snatches of economic thought contributed by the Greeks: Hesiod on scarcity, Democritus on subjective value and utility, the influence of supply and demand on value, and on time-preference, Plato and Xenophon on the division of labour, Plato on the functions of money, Aristotle on supply and demand, money, exchange, and the imputation of value from ends to means, we see that all of these men were focusing on the logical implications of a few broadly empirical axioms of human life: the existence of human action, the eternal pursuit of goals by employing scarce means, the diversity and inequality among men. These axioms are certainly empirical, but they are so broad and pervasive that they apply to all of human life, at any time and place. Once articulated and set forth, they impel assent to their truth by a shock of recognition: once articulated, they become evident to the human mind. Since these axioms are then established as certain and apodictic, the processes of logic – themselves universal and apodictic and transcending time and place – can be used to arrive at absolutely true conclusions.
While this method of reasoning – of philosophy and of economics – is both empirical, being derived from the world, and true, it runs against the grain of modern philosophies of science. In modern positivism, or neopositivism, for example, ‘evidence’ is much narrower, fleeting and open to change. In much of modern economics, using the positivist method, ‘empirical evidence’ is a congeries of isolated and narrow economic events, each of which is conceived as homogeneous bits of information, supposedly used to ‘test’, to confirm or refute, economic hypotheses. These bits, like laboratory experiments, are supposed to result in ‘evidence’ to test a theory. Modern positivism is unequipped to understand or handle a system of analysis – whether classical Greek philosophy or economic theory – grounded on deductions from fundamental axioms so broadly empirical as to be virtually self-evident – evident to the self – once they are articulated. Positivism fails to understand that the results of laboratory experiments are only ‘evidence’ because they too make evident to the scientists (or to others who follow the experiments), that is, make evident to the self, facts or truths not evident before. The deductive processes of logic and mathematics do the same thing: they compel assent by making things evident to people which were not evident before. Correct economic theory, which we have named as ‘praxeological’ theory, is another way by which truths are made evident to the human mind.
Even politics, which some scoff at as not purely or strictly economics, impinges heavily on economic thought. Politics is of course an aspect of human action, and much of it has a crucial impact on economic life. Eternal natural law truths about economic aspects of politics may be and have been arrived at, and cannot be neglected in a study of the development of economic thought. When Democritus and Aristotle defended a regime of private property and Aristotle demolished Plato's portrayal of an ideal communism, they were engaging in important economic analysis of the nature and consequences of alternative systems of control and ownership of property.
Aristotle was the culmination of ancient economic thought as he was of classical philosophy. Economic theorizing collapsed after the death of Aristotle, and later Hellenistic and Roman epochs were virtually devoid of economic thought. Again, it is impossible to explain fully the disappearance of economic thought, but surely one reason must have been the disintegration of the once proud Greek polis after the time of Aristotle. The Greek city-states were subjected to conquest and disintegration beginning with the empire of Alexander the Great during the life of his former mentor Aristotle. Eventually Greece, much diminished in wealth and economic prosperity, became absorbed by the Roman Empire.
Small wonder, then, that the only references to economic affairs should be counsels of despair, with various Greek philosophers futilely urging their followers to solve the problem of aggravated scarcity by drastically curbing their wants and desires. In short, if you're miserable and poverty-stricken, accept your lot as man's inevitable fate and try to want no more than you have. This counsel of hopelessness and despair was preached by Diogenes (412–323 BC) the founder of the school of Cynics, and by Epicurus (343– 270 BC), the founder of the Epicureans. Diogenes and the Cynics pursued this culture of poverty to such length as to adopt the name and the life of dogs; Diogenes himself made his home in a barrel. Consistent with his outlook, Diogenes denounced the hero Prometheus, who in Greek myth stole the gift of fire from the gods and thus made possible innovation, the growth of human knowledge, and the progress of mankind. Prometheus, wrote Diogenes, was properly punished by the gods for this fateful deed.
As Bertrand Russell summed up:
... Aristotle is the last Greek philosopher who faces the world cheerfully; after him, all have, in one form or another, a philosophy of retreat. The world is bad; let us learn to be independent of it. External goods are precarious; they are the gift of fortune, not the reward of our own efforts.
The most interesting and influential school of Greek philosophers after Aristotle was the Stoics, founded by Zeno of Clitium (c.336–264 BC), who appeared about the year 300 BC in Athens to teach at a painted porch (stoa poikile) after which he and his followers were called Stoics. While the Stoics began as an offshoot of Cynicism, preaching the quenching of desire for worldly goods, it took on a new and more optimistic note with Stoicism's second great founder, Chrysippus (281–208 BC). Whereas Diogenes had preached that the love of money was the root of all evil, Chrysippus countered with the quip that the ‘wise man will turn three somersaults for an adequate fee’. Chrysippus was also sound on the inherent inequality and diversity of man: ‘Nothing’, he pointed out, ‘can prevent some seats in the theatre from being better than others’.
But the most important contribution of Stoic thought was in ethical, political and legal philosophy, for it was the Stoics who first developed and systematized, especially in the legal sphere, the concept and the philosophy of natural law. It was precisely because Plato and Aristotle were circumscribed politically by the Greek polis that their moral and legal philosophy became closely intertwined with the Greek city-state. For the Socratics, the city-state, not the individual, was the locus of human virtue. But the destruction or subjugation of the Greek polis after Aristotle freed the thought of the Stoics from its admixture with politics. The Stoics were therefore free to use their reason to set forth a doctrine of natural law focusing not on the polis but on each individual, and not on each state but on all states everywhere. In short, in the hands of the Stoics, natural law became absolute and universal, transcending political barriers or fleeting limitations of time and place. Law and ethics, the principles of justice, became transcultural and transnational, applying to all human beings everywhere. And since every man possesses the faculty of reason, he can employ right reason to understand the truths of the natural law. The important implication for politics is that the natural law, the just and proper moral law discovered by man's right reason, can and should be used to engage in a moral critique of the positive man-made laws of any state or polis. For the first time, positive law became continually subject to a transcendent critique based on the universal and eternal nature of man.
The Stoics were undoubtedly aided in arriving at their cosmopolitan disregard for the narrow interests of the polis by the fact that most of them were Easterners who had come from outside the Greek mainland. Zeno, the founder, described as ‘tall, gaunt, and swarthy’, came from Clitium on the island of Cyprus. Many, including Chrysippus, came from Tarsus, in Cilicia, on the Asia Minor mainland near Syria. Later Greek Stoics were centred in Rhodes, an island off Asia Minor.
Stoicism lasted 500 years, and its most important influence was transmitted from Greece to Rome. The later Stoics, during the first two centuries after the birth of Christ, were Roman rather than Greek. The great transmitter of Stoic ideas from Greece to Rome was the famous Roman statesman, jurist, and orator Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BC). Following Cicero, Stoic natural law doctrines heavily influenced the Roman jurists of the second and third centuries AD, and thus helped shape the great structures of Roman law which became pervasive in Western civilization. Cicero's influence was assured by his lucid and sparkling style, and by the fact that he was the first Stoic to write in Latin, the language of Roman law and of all thinkers and writers in the West down to the end of the seventeenth century. Moreover, Cicero's and other Latin writings have been far better preserved than the fragmentary remains we have from the Greeks.
Cicero's writings were heavily influenced by the Greek Stoic leader, the aristocratic Panaetius of Rhodes (c. 185–110 BC) and as a young man he travelled there to study with his follower, Posidonius of Rhodes (135–51 BC), the greatest Stoic of his age. There is no better way to sum up Cicero's Stoic natural law philosophy than by quoting what one of his followers called his ‘almost divine words’. Paraphrasing and developing the definition and insight of Chrysippus, Cicero wrote:
There is a true law, right reason, agreeable to nature, known to all men, constant and eternal, which calls to duty by its precepts, deters from evil by its prohibition... This law cannot be departed from without guilt... Nor is there one law at Rome and another at Athens, one thing now and another afterward; but the same law, unchanging and eternal, binds all races of man and all times; and there is one common, as it were, master and ruler – God, the author, promulgator and mover of this law. Whoever does not obey it departs from [his true] self, contemns the nature of man and inflicts upon himself the greatest penalties...
Cicero also contributed to Western thought a great anti-statist parable which resounded through the centuries, a parable that revealed the nature of rulers of state as nothing more than pirates writ large. Cicero told the story of a pirate who was dragged into the court of Alexander the Great. When Alexander denounced him for piracy and brigandage and asked the pirate what impulse had led him to make the sea unsafe with his one little ship, the pirate trenchantly replied, ‘the same impulse which has led you [Alexander] to make the whole world unsafe’.
But despite their important contributions to moral and legal philosophy, neither the Stoics nor other Romans contributed anything else of significance to economic thought. Roman law, however, heavily influenced and pervaded later legal developments in the West. Roman private law elaborated, for the first time in the West, the idea of property rights as absolute, with each owner having the right to use his property as he saw fit. From this stemmed the right to make contracts freely, with contracts interpreted as transfers of titles to property. Some Roman jurists declared that property rights were required by the natural law. The Romans also founded the law merchant, and Roman law strongly influenced the common law of the English-speaking countries and the civil law of the continent of Europe.
No comments:
Post a Comment