Aristotle on Wealth
Aristole on wealth
• What human beings want is to increase wealth with no limit and to maintain their store of money. They are so occupied with life that they want to live it, not live it well. And since their appetite for life is unlimited, they also want an unlimited amount of what sustains it. And those who do aim at living well seek what promotes physical gratification. So, since this too seems to depend on having property, they spend all their time acquiring wealth. And the second kind of wealth acquisition arose because of this.
• There is two types of wealth acquisition. One has to do with commerce, the other with household management.
• Money was introduced to facilitate exchange, but interest makes money itself grow bigger.
• Household management is more concerned with human beings than with inanimate property, with their virtue more than with its wealth, and with the virtue of free people more than with that of slaves.
• Temperance, virtue, justice, courage of a man are not the same as of a woman, s Socrates supposed; the one courage is that of the ruler, the other that of an assistant, and similarly in the case of the other virtues too.
• For every household is part of a city-state, these are parts of a household, and the virtue of a part must be determined by looking to the virtue of the whole.
Book II
• For all citizens must share everything, or nothing, or something in the middle. It is impossible for them to share nothing. For a constitution is sort of a community, and so they must, in the first instance, share their location; for one city-state occupies one location and citizen’s share that one city-state. But is it better for a city state that is to be well managed to share everything possible
• All is ambiguous. One cannot say mine and not mine. If it means individually, perhaps more of what Socrates wants will come about, since each will then call the same woman his wife, the same
• What human beings want is to increase wealth with no limit and to maintain their store of money. They are so occupied with life that they want to live it, not live it well. And since their appetite for life is unlimited, they also want an unlimited amount of what sustains it. And those who do aim at living well seek what promotes physical gratification. So, since this too seems to depend on having property, they spend all their time acquiring wealth. And the second kind of wealth acquisition arose because of this.
• There is two types of wealth acquisition. One has to do with commerce, the other with household management.
• Money was introduced to facilitate exchange, but interest makes money itself grow bigger.
• Household management is more concerned with human beings than with inanimate property, with their virtue more than with its wealth, and with the virtue of free people more than with that of slaves.
• Temperance, virtue, justice, courage of a man are not the same as of a woman, s Socrates supposed; the one courage is that of the ruler, the other that of an assistant, and similarly in the case of the other virtues too.
• For every household is part of a city-state, these are parts of a household, and the virtue of a part must be determined by looking to the virtue of the whole.
Book II
• For all citizens must share everything, or nothing, or something in the middle. It is impossible for them to share nothing. For a constitution is sort of a community, and so they must, in the first instance, share their location; for one city-state occupies one location and citizen’s share that one city-state. But is it better for a city state that is to be well managed to share everything possible
• All is ambiguous. One cannot say mine and not mine. If it means individually, perhaps more of what Socrates wants will come about, since each will then call the same woman his wife, the same