Thursday, August 9, 2012

Aristotle on Nomisma


Here is an excerpt from Alexander del Mar's "A history of money in ancient countries from the earliest times to the present" (c. 1885) (page 172) which quotes Aristotle on the ancient Greek nomisma system or what we today would perhaps call a "state currency" system or a "non-convertible state currency" system:
"Nomisma by itself is a mere device which has value only by nomos (law) and not by nature; so that a change of convention between those who use it, is sufficient to deprive it of value and its power to satisfy our wants." — Aristotle, "Politica."
"By virtue of voluntary convention nomisma  has become the medium of exchange. We call it nomisma, because its efficacy is due not to nature but to nomos (law), and because it is always in our power to control it." — Aristotle, " Ethica."
Not according to the warped "metal lovers" uncle Ari !

I wonder who Aristotle meant when he used the word "our" in the second quote, as in "it is in our power to control it"?  Who is "us" here?  And then correspondingly who is NOT  "us", or, who is "them"?

I believe I am one of the "us" who he is talking about for sure...

19 comments:

Tom Hickey said...

Matt: I wonder who Aristotle meant when he used the word "our" in the second quote, as in "it is in our power to control it"?  Who is "us" here?  And then correspondingly who is NOT  "us", or, who is "them"?

Athens was a democracy, so I assume that Aristotle would mean those eligible to vote, i.e., citizens of the polis.

Matt Franko said...

Tom,
Do you think he was drawing a line here though?

It reads like a Comparative sentence, iow he was pointing out that 'they' could control it, vs. What other arrangements?

Rsp

David said...

Matt,
this might provide clues to whom Aristotle would have included among the "us" and those whom will have been considered the "them:"
Aristotle was appointed as the head of the royal academy of Macedon. During that time he gave lessons not only to Alexander, but also to two other future kings: Ptolemy and Cassander. In his Politics, Aristotle states that only one thing could justify monarchy, and that was if the virtue of the king and his family were greater than the virtue of the rest of the citizens put together. Tactfully, he included the young prince and his father in that category. Aristotle encouraged Alexander toward eastern conquest, and his attitude towards Persia was unabashedly ethnocentric. In one famous example, he counsels Alexander to be 'a leader to the Greeks and a despot to the barbarians, to look after the former as after friends and relatives, and to deal with the latter as with beasts or plants'.

Tom Hickey said...

@ David

Also from the Wikipedia article on Aristotle:

Near the end of Alexander's life, Alexander began to suspect plots against himself, and threatened Aristotle in letters. Aristotle had made no secret of his contempt for Alexander's pretense of divinity, and the king had executed Aristotle's grandnephew Callisthenes as a traitor. A widespread tradition in antiquity suspected Aristotle of playing a role in Alexander's death, but there is little evidence for this.[11]

Matt Franko said...

David,

Do you think Ari's seeming disrespect for the Persians was due to perhaps Persia being overcome by "metal love"?? And Ari had no respect for a culture that would be traitorous to our own lawful authority of our own human race... sub-human?

In Isaiah, the prophet indicates that it is the Mede's lack of 'accounting in silver, and delighting in gold' that would contribute to their ability to conquer Babylon... then I guess the Persians came after the Medes and then Alexander conquered the world, it got split up to 6 sons, then the Romans, etc.... I have to look into it but perhaps all of these empires eventually succumbed to "metal love" and got taken down....

Wouldnt that be something! All the morons go around saying it was their "debasing the currency" when it could be JUST THE OPPOSITE...

Rsp,

David said...

Tom,
it seems, as often happens, the pupil got "too big for his britches." I would conjecture that Aristotle, while paying lip service to democracy, was more oriented toward elite control. We might describe him today as a "technocrat." Kings are okay as long as they are counseled by the wise and hearken to such counsel. The last part is the rub, though.

Matt Franko said...

Tom,

You may want to run that source down... I have found that a lot of the manuscripts that these "scholars" deem authentic are from 1,000 years later by carbon dating, and transcribed by Catholic monks under the sponsorship of Venetian bankers.... much of the whole view of these "scholars" of history could be completely fabricated imo...

best to look only at the contemporaneous records or as close as you can get to them imo, the further away in time, the more skepticism imo...

Rsp,

Tom Hickey said...

@ David

That's not what Aristotle wrote in the Politics tho. He disagreed with his teacher Plato's position, which is generally thought unusual for a student.

Aristotle thought that the rule of the many was superior to the rule of the few or one. He distinguished good forms of these types of rule from bad — monarchy-tyranny, aristocracy-oligarchy, and virtuous citizens-the poor or "rabble."

Aristotle was a democrat rather than an advocate of either monarchy or aristocracy in the sense that he though citizens ruling themselves would produce the best results for the polis. However, Aristotle would restrict citizenship to men of leisure who had the time to pursue excellence, whereas those who had to work for a living would never attain the qualifications to participate in governing.

This was the attitude of many of the Founding Fathers, and the US Constitution establishes a constitutional republic rather than a popular democracy, as some wanted at the time.

Matt Franko said...

Right Tom, Ari mentions "voluntary convention" (under law) I take this to mean some sort of vote was taken.

He writes of it as though it was the implemented common practice... "We call it" (plural)...

rsp,

Tom Hickey said...

Matt You may want to run that source down

Most of the originals and early copies of most ancient documents were lost and what he have are copies from hundreds of years later. Aristotle's works were lost to the West for centuries and only reappeared in the Middle Ages mostly by way of Arabia, where they had been preserved and used — although a few had been preserved in Irish monasteries during the Dark Ages. It really was not until the Renaissance that Classical knowledge began to influence the West in a way that would become transformative.

See Wikipedia-Transmission of the Classics for details.

Matt Franko said...

btw I think this is an applicable Greek Scripture on this topic:

"14 For whenever they of the nations that have no law, by nature may be doing that which the law demands, these, having no law, are a law to themselves,
15 who are displaying the action of the law written in their hearts, their conscience testifying together and their reckonings between one another, accusing or defending them," Romans 2:14-15

You can see the Greeks trying to figure this out on their own (ie no law) here and working thru CIVIL laws and philosophy to create a better society... trying to make the best of their situation...

rsp,

David said...

"Do you think Ari's seeming disrespect for the Persians was due to perhaps Persia being overcome by "metal love"?? And Ari had no respect for a culture that would be traitorous to our own lawful authority of our own human race... sub-human?"

Matt,
in a way, yes. Gold was so tied up with the sun god as emperor game that where there was one you would usually find the other. Aristotle, I suspect, would have thought such people to be incapable of anything but the abject slavery in which they lived.

And Tom this is somewhat pertinent to your point about Aristotle's belief in democracy: his approval is qualified based on the qualifications of the polis.

But if, with the heroic exceptions mentioned, the rural populations endured it (emperor worship) without repugnance, the great cities of the empire, such as Antioch, Alexandria, Athens and Rome, found it too degrading for continued acceptance. It was these centres of intellectual activity that gave effect to the revolts which emperor-worship had provoked in Britain, Frisia, Saxony and Judea; and it was out of this combination of popular resistance and intellectual disgust that arose a long and deadly struggle against the worship of Augustus and
the wide-spread and firmly-rooted superstitions upon which it was founded; a struggle which finally ended in the adoption of Christianity. "


The Worship of Augustus Caesar
Alexander del Mar
p.333

Del Mar thus thinks that susceptibility to emperor worship is proportional to educational level which tends to run along urban-rural lines. As for "metal love" I don't know if it divides so easily along the lines of urban-rural, educated-uneducated. Perhaps in the example you cited from Isaiah, if a people were found who hadn't yet been corrupted by emperor worship and the gold money system that usually went along with it, then you could count on such a people being more cohesive, less manipulable, more independent, etc.

David said...

Matt,
We also know that the Greeks and Romans had their greatest periods of internal development before they were infected with "metal love," and that the strong qualities we tend to associate with those peoples declined as it took hold.

Tom Hickey said...

The classical Greeks were opposed to emperors,, let alone emperor-worship.

Persia was the dominant empire of the time and the major external threat to Greece, whose city states may have been disunited but they all recognized that the Persian Empire was their common enemy.

Persia invaded Greece in the 5 century BCE but the Greeks drove them off (490-480). Peace was entered into in 387. Alexander attacked and defeated the Persian forces in 333, ending the Persian Empire.

The Hellenistic Age began with the death of Alexander in 323. Aristotle died in 322.

David said...

Tom,
I never said the classical Greeks did approve of emperor worship. Part of the discussion was around Aristotle splitting with Alexander over the latter's indulgence in promoting it for himself. Your saying that Aristotle's encouragement of Alexander's conquests had more to do with realpolitik than with the merits or lack of same of the Persians seems correct

Matt Franko said...

David,

wrt "Caesar Worship" an observation I have is that there is no mention of this phenom to my immediate recollection in any of the Greek scriptures... the context wrt Caesar is one of a "king" or "ruler" or perhaps "chief executive/judge" type of relationship with the people.

Caesar is mentioned in (top of head) Matthew, Luke, Acts.

No mention at all of Caesar much less his "worship" in Paul's letter to the Romans interestingly.

Here is Paul in Acts in Athens, to the Athenians, at the Areopagus:

"29 The race, then, is inherently of God; we ought not to be inferring that the Divine is like gold, or silver, or stone, a sculpture of art and human sentiment." Acts 17:29

No mention of Caesar, 2 metals mentioned specifically though... in fact when Paul mentions "the race" I assume he means the "human race" and WE ALL being INHERENTLY OF GOD, NOT THE METALS.

So it is probably disrespectful to God for us to be surrendering our human authority (which is OF GOD) over to our ability to find mere metals in the ground. We should not allow metals to intermediate between us.

I think the Greeks and Romans knew this at some level (see Romans clip above: "whenever they of the nations that have no law, by nature may be doing that which the law demands, these, having no law, are a law to themselves,
15 who are displaying the action of the law written in their hearts").

Striking a human image in the metal to impart utility to it as a medium of exchange symbolizes this claim of human autonomy/authority.

so I dont know about all of this "Caesar worship"... I have not read that Del Mar book on the topic yet so I'll withhold judgement, but if all he has is that Caesars image was struck on coins, imo that does NOT indicate "Caesar worship" per se imo...

we still do that same thing today, and nobody thinks of all the dead Presidents as "gods" to be offered divine service...

Anyways good stuff!! Rsp,

Roger Erickson said...

"...a change of convention between those who use it, is sufficient to deprive it of value and its power to satisfy our wants."

Yet the same would also hold for arbitrary convertibility of valuation between commodities.

Also, interesting that Aristotle apparently missed the inverse relationship - between agility of nomisma and the organizational agility needed to quickly mobilize large scale operations.

Apparently the Romans caught on to that along the way. Not clear that either the Greeks or Alexander ever did. They never scaled up sustained management of any large empire.

Tom Hickey said...

They [Greeks] never scaled up sustained management of any large empire.

Not in the Greek character to be imperialists. Alexander was interested in conquest (the fight) and not rule. He kept on moving on.

Not in the American character either. It has been wool pulled over people's eyes by an elite.

Matt Franko said...

Roger,

"Yet the same would also hold for arbitrary convertibility of valuation between commodities."

Right but this would perhaps be a barter economy that they were perhaps trying to get away from (too inefficient and not enough group options with barter)...

So if you set up an economy that relied on a unit of exchange, then they wanted it to be nomisma as like Ari says, the only thing that would change the value was if the two parties using it came to a different agreement or convention on price....

With a metal, if there were shortages or supluses of the actual physical metal itself, THAT could effect the value of the unit of exchange... this they wanted to avoid probably...

And good observations wrt conquest/empire, looks like the Greeks took advantage of nomisma for conquest, then the Romans followed that up with using it for empire...

Rsp,