Aristotle’s dream is our reality. Our machines, with breath of fire, with limbs of unwearying steel, with fruitfulness, wonderful inexhaustible, accomplish by themselves with docility their sacred labor. And nevertheless the genius of the great philosophers of capitalism remains dominated by the prejudice of the wage system, worst of slaveries. They do not yet understand that the machine is the saviour of humanity, the god who shall redeem man from the sordidae artes and from working for hire, the god who shall give him leisure and liberty.
Footnotes
[1] Herodotus. Book II.
[2] Biot. De l’abolition de l’esclavage ancien en Occident, 1840.
[3] Livy, Book I.
[4] Plato’s Republic, Book V.
[5] Cicero’s De Officilis, I, 42.