Other reasons for the limited development of Greek economic thought are:
a) The dominance of the state over the individual citizen, which fact caused political rather than economic speculation to absorb the attention of Greek thinkers. It is stated that the importance of the individual must be recognized before a science of economics can develop.63 This reason is also usually overemphasized.
b) The general prejudice in Greece against industry, labor for another, and finance for its own sake. That such a prejudice existed to some degree, arising from the old aristocratic feeling, moral objections, the reflex influence of slavery, the spirit of independence, and the belief that leisure was necessary for the proper performance of the duties of citizenship, is generally admitted.
The commonly assumed universality of this feeling is, however, open to grave question. The prejudice against skilled labor was probably limited to the moral philosophers, and perhaps to the more aristocratic portion of the citizens, and we shall see in another chapter that the hostile attitude of the philosophers themselves has been considerably exaggerated. The evil effects of slavery also could not have been so marked in Greece, before the age of machinery. Moreover, as Meyer has pointed out, a prejudice against manual labor is evident among the more favored classes in most European countries today, yet it does not appear to retard the advance of industry in the least.64
c) The approval of conquest as a legitimate source of wealth.
This is somewhat true as applied to the state, but it certainly is irrelevant for the individual citizen of fifth-century Athens. To appeal to Aristotle’s list of legitimate employments as evidence of this is to misinterpret his meaning, for he is thinking of a primitive life, not of contemporary Greece.65