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 of pessimistic tendencies in Greek philosophy itself. Moreover, the ascetic ideas of the philosophers cannot be accepted as the common attitude of Athenian citizens, any more than Thoreau can be recognized as a criterion of the economic thought of his day in New England.15 Asceticism was certainly foreign to the mind of Pericles and Thucydides. In the course of our discussion, also, we shall find that it represents, after