investigation. In his division of the arts into productive and acquisitive, for example, he would rank together fishing and philosophy, under the latter heading. Now the notion of production itself, as the bringing into being of something new, could not in the Fine Arts, and need not in the handicrafts, mean anything more than change of form. Again, if production and acquisition are represented in Economics by production and distribution, we see how difficult it is felt, in the one case by the philosopher and in the other by the economist, to keep the two absolutely separate. It is impossible, for example, to separate the "acquisition" of knowledge by the artist or artisan from the "production" by either of them. And in the region of economics by itself, if we begin at a point anterior to the artisan's completed act of production, it is impossible to say that the persons whose help was indispensable to him are not in various degrees as truly productive as he; if we follow the finished product till the producer himself has got the fruits of it, this will involve, under any system of division of labour (i.e. under any organized society whatsoever), an inseparable association of distributors with producers. Even in Plato's City of Pigs the product would not be ready for the consumer till it was landed in the market; and it becomes difficult to refuse to retail dealers, and much more to wholesale, a certain title to the name productive. It would be difficult to say then at what point the economic categories pass into the historical. To construct a society on abstract principles is even harder than to do what the classical economists are supposed to have attempted-to construct an abstract individual man. Plato does his best to look at the matter in a dry light;1 but he is forced to turn from the abstract to the concrete; and, relapsing into common prejudices, he tells us that, in the concrete, a freeman should consider retail trading to be beneath him. Even the craftsmen who produce the articles afterwards retailed need surveillance in their work, or they will charge their customers above its value (acía). What this value is, and how it is to be judged, 1 As in the case of retail dealers, Laws, X. 919, B, C. Plato does not explain, but says that "they themselves know perfectly well what it is. It is not enough for them to be honest (he adds), they must aim at good work and not simply at excelling their neighbours. Even when they obey all these rules they are still, in a sense, unprofitable servants, for their work spoils their body and cramps their mind; they can never be in the first rank of citizens or know the highest good. They are genuine producers of a definite and unquestioned good, whereas such a pretentious pursuit as Rhetoric can point to no definite product, and is therefore, in a bad sense, unproductive." The artisan is from one point of view before the artist himself; he is one degree nearer to the reality. But the artisan is as full of self-conceit as the most pretentious philosopher.* Plato has undoubtedly a prejudice against manual labour, more especially in its harder and coarser forms. Tolstoi and St. Paul, however like him in some important respects, have nothing in common with him in this matter. No doubt there was here a general prejudice of Greek philosophers, due partly to the idea that an artisan's work unfitted him for military service, partly to the association of it with the labour of slaves, and partly to the fact that many of the industrial arts were introduced by foreigners. The same prejudice existed among the Persians, and has probably prevailed more or less among all warlike nations at a certain stage of development. Socrates, the son of an artisan, rose above it, and it was perhaps was perhaps dying out at Athens in Plato's time. It was a common taunt of the critics of democracy that democracies admitted artisans and shopkeepers to the government of the State. They never forgot that Cleon was a tanner, and Agoracritus a sausage-seller." 5 In Plato, however, the prejudice against shopkeepers and merchants is much stronger than against the artisan. He grudgingly allows that division of labour seems to require them; but he thinks that, even on the strength 1 Laws, XI. 921. 3 Republ., X. 596-598. 5 2 Gorgias, 452, C. 4 Apology, 22, D, E. For his senti ovpуov, sculptor, stone-carver, or stone-mason. ments on the subject, see Xen. Mem., I. ii. 56, ii. 7. 6 Aristoph., Knights. of this principle, only the physically weakest men unable to do anything else should take up such work.' They were at the best a necessary evil. Their trades were under the strongest of temptations to the accumulation of wealth in private hands; and gold and silver money, by facilitating trade, facilitated this accumulation. 2 Money-making as an end in itself is to Plato an unmixed evil. An art, especially of a high degree of skill, such as the physician's, ought (he thinks) to be practised disinterestedly from an eye to the ideal of the art itself, not from an eye to the fortune it may bring. It should lead to good work done for its own sake. To turn an art into a trade is, he says (in the first book of the Republic), to add to it the art of money-making. He condemns usury with equal emphasis; he excludes it, in the Laws, from the ideal city described there, allowing only one exception in its favour, the case of a customer who does not promptly pay for work that has been duly executed to his order, and who must after a certain time pay interest as well as the sum due. 3 Finally, he thinks he can prevent most of the abuses of money-making, money-lending, and trading by decreeing that gold and silver money shall never be private property, and the only currency shall be a small change of the nature of a token money." He would be glad if he could to taboo private property also, which he thinks to be one main root of the evil. In his perfect ideal city (of the Republic) as distinguished from his practicable ideal (of the Laws), he had forbidden to the Guardians both private property in general, and gold and silver money in particular. Plato's Economics of Production may be thus summed up. Industrial Production is only one species of a genus Production which includes every kind of creation, mental 1 Republ., II. 371, C. On the other hand it is the common view of commercial men in England and the U.S. that only those take up professions who are not fit for business. 2 Laws, XI. 918, D, E. 3 V. 742, C. VIII. 842, D. 4 Laws, XI. 921, C, D. The mediæval usura punitoria. 5 Ib., V. 742, A. 7 ib., VIII. 831, C. 6 ib., V. 739. 8 Republ., III. 416, 417. or material, as distinguished from mere transfer or transformation of what is created; and industrial transfer is only one species of a genus Acquisition which includes every kind of transfer, material or mental, voluntary or involuntary. He attempts to draw something like a hard and fast line between the two genera, but only lands himself in the difficulty which all philosophers have experienced in separating the inseparable. He comes near to anticipate the economic controversy as to the possibility of drawing a line between productive and unproductive labour. He leaves indications that he would have settled it by falling back on the common prejudice of Greek philosophers against "vulgar" trades and in favour of the "liberal" arts. He avoids the diffi cult questions of exchange and value, though he admits that even in his simplest Ideal State there must be commerce and a market, contracts, and therefore customs and laws. He thus suggests to us the conclusion that the simplest form of industrial society must rest on a basis of complex custom. This appears more clearly when we consider in the third place Plato's conception of Civil Society and the State. 2 III. Plato professes to begin the foundation of his Ideal State by an act of abstraction. He proposes to make a clean sweep of things as they are, both in politics and in manners.' But he knows very well that his State is to be Hellenic, and not Barbarian; and, though the surface is rubbed smooth, the material of the tablet remains. Even his strong imagination cannot body forth the form of a society of men with no character already stamped on them, and no habits already formed. He is deeply impressed with differences of race, and we must not suppose him to mean that social as well as political institutions can be made and unmade by the lawgiver's fiat. It is a well-known fact that to most human beings even their political rulers seem, like the sun and the seasons, a matter beyond their control; 1 Λαβόντες, ἦν δ ̓ ἐγώ, ὥσπερ πίνακα πόλιν τε καὶ ἤθη ἀνθρώπων, πρῶτον μὲν καθαρὰν ποιήσειαν ἂν [οἱ φιλόσοφοι]. Republ., VI. 501, A. 2 οὐχ Ἑλληνὶς ἔσται ; Republ., V. 471. 3 Republ., IV. 435, E., 436. and still more is it so in regard to social customs and rules, where there are no visible rulers, to be cashiered for misconduct, or made to govern differently. Though Plato occasionally speaks as if an absolute beginning could really be made, yet the current of his reasoning implies the contrary; we gather that the successful reformer is he who by instinct or intellect discovers the existing principle of the growth of a society, and grafts a new idea upon that principle. Human societies (as we now see more clearly than Plato), like animal organisms, do not owe their beginnings to the deliberate contrivance of their members; their union and their behaviour seem rather to be a matter of instinctive growth. Even in the Republic, Plato has practically acknowledged this; and in the Laws he has expressed it unmistakeably. Instead of trying to trace the origin of modern States from an absolutely first starting point, he begins with the simple shepherds who are supposed to have survived the primæval deluge. In a passage near the beginning of the seventh book of the Laws, after he has been discussing the nursing of children and its effects on the life of the adults, he says: "All such arrangements come under the head of what the common people call 'unwritten rules,' and what they call 'laws of our forefathers,' are simply these several unwritten rules viewed as a whole. Our present description seems happy, for it implies that these rules should neither go without a name nor be mis-called 'laws.' They are the bonds that hold every State together, lying between all the written ordinances already in force and the ordinances that are to come. What is true of the ancestral rules is true of the rest. The ancestral and primæval rules, if rightly laid down (ie. rightly worked into the people's habits), invest the primæval statutes with a shield of perfect security; but, if they go wrong, it is as with the main props of a building when they are off their centre; they bring down themselves and all dependent on them in one common ruin. We must keep this in mind, and bind your new city together for you throughout, leaving nothing out, if possible, great or small, that could be called a law or a 2 Ib., VII. 793, A-D. 1 Laws, III. 677. |