Aristotle on Moneymaking: The Roads not Taken

Abstract

This paper considers the relationship between the critique of moneymaking that Aristotle develops in Book I of the Politics and the rest of his social and political theory. I argue that there are several places where Aristotle ought to have drawn out the consequences of the former for the latter, and that his failure to do so reveals something about the deep structure of his way of thinking about political life. In short, Aristotle's account of economic life is constrained by his political ontology, according to which a polity consists in a particular arrangement and distribution of offices.