economic thought today. The best economists are now insisting more and more on the Greek idea that economic problems must be considered from the standpoint of the whole man as a citizen in society. Modern political economy “has placed man as man and not wealth in the foreground, and subordinated everything to his true welfare.” “Love, generosity, nobility of character, self-sacrifice, and all that is best and truest in our nature have their place in economic life.”11 “The science which deals with wealth, so far from being a ‘gospel of Mammon,’ necessarily begins and ends in the study of man.”12 “Es soll kein Widerspruch zwischen Ethik und Volkswirtschaft bestehen, es soll das Sittengesetz für die Wirtschaft gelten und in ihr ausgeführt werden.”13 Such strong statements taken at random from modern economists should serve to temper our criticism of the Greek confusion. Plato’s definition of economics, as suggested by one of the most recent historians of economic thought,14 could easily be accepted by many a modern scholar: “Economics is the science which deals with the satisfaction of human wants through exchange, seeking so to regulate the industries of the state as to make its citizens good and happy, and so to promote the highest well-being of the whole.” The contention of the Socratics, that all economic operations must finally root in the moral, that all economic problems are moral problems, and that the province of economics is human welfare, is thus a dominant twentieth-century idea. And just as the ethical interest of the Greek philosophers caused them to emphasize the problems of distribution and consumption, so these are the phases of economics that receive chief consideration today. To be sure, modern thought appreciates more fully the complementary truth that all our social and moral problems root essentially in economic conditions, though this too was by no means overlooked by Plato and Aristotle.
- Ascetic tendency.—It cannot be denied, however, that, as a result of the overemphasis on the ethical, Greek economic thought was hampered by a certain asceticism. But this was also an outgrowth