Aristotle: Slavery, Inequality, and Money

In Aristotle’s time, coinage had only recently permeated the Mediterranean world, and so he is positioned to see money as a transformative new technology. He describes it as a peculiar organon—a tool or an organ—and contrasts it with specialist tools like medical instruments. For Aristotle, two kinds of users are especially qualified to deploy money: the estate manager (oikonomikos) and the politician (politikos). Aristotle thinks money allows estate managers to express virtue in the unique political circumstances in which their lives are entangled with those of strangers from home and abroad. And he thinks that it shares the core features of the other distinctive instrument of the Attic farmstead, the chattel slave. Both are for Aristotle multi-tools that transmit their users’ goals onto a multifaceted world. The politician may use monetary tools on a broader canvas than the estate manager, fostering a form of exchange that helps “hold the political community together” by facilitating mutual giving. But notwithstanding the references to equality in Aristotle’s discussion of exchange, his monetary policy is designed to sustain differences in social status that modern readers should not readily accept.