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The Economic Background of Plato's Communism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 February 2011

C. Bradford Welles
C. Bradford Welles
Affiliation:
Yale University
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Extract

It is unnecessary to insist on the differences between the communism of Plato's political writings and the modern political systems and theories of the same name. Politically, economically, and geographically the world of Marx and his followers is different from that of Greece in the fourth century b.c., and even modern Utopias are founded on modern technology.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 8 , supplement S1 , January 1948 , pp. 101 - 114
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1948

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References

1 The only monograph on Plato's economics known to me is the Chicago dissertation of Trever, A. A., A History of Greek. Economic Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1916)Google Scholar. Zwengel, O., Verhāhnis von Stoat und Wirttchaft in Platan's Staatschriften (Diss. Giessen, 1940)Google Scholar, is inaccessible.

2 There is no need of repeating the numerous and familiar bibliography of Greek and Athenian economic history. Cf. Select Bibliography in the valuable book of Michell, H., The Economics of Ancient Greece (Cambridge: The University Press, 1940), pp. 395–98Google Scholar; Rostovtzeff, M., Social and Economic History of the Hellenistic World (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941), I, chap, ii, 90–125Google Scholar, and references where a new approach is given to the economics of the fourth century b.c.; the excellent Munich dissertation of Otto Huber, Die wirtschaftlichen Verhāltnisse Athens vom Ende dcs peloponnesischen Krieges bis zum Königsfrieden, dargestellt vor diem auf Grund der attischen Redner (1939). The book of Palet, A., Le Communisme dans la pensée grecque (Cairo, 1947)Google Scholar, is known to me only by title.

3 The basic work remains that of Ardaillon, Ed., Les Mines du Laurion dans l'antiquité (Bibl. d. Ec. fr. d'Athènes et de Rome), LXXVII (1897)Google Scholar, but cf. Andreadcs, C. M., A History of Greek Public Finance (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1933)Google Scholar, tr. C. N. Brown, I, 286–91; Cary, M., Mélanges Glotz, I (1933), 1938Google Scholar; Davics, Oliver, Roman Mines in Europe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925), p. 249Google Scholar; and in general the references cited by Huber, Die wirtschaftlichen Verhältnisse Athens, p. 46 and n. 286.

4 Most useful for the economic effect of the introduction of coinage in the Greek world remains the paper of Heichelheim, F. M. in Schmollers Jahrbuch, LV, No. 1 (1931), 229–54Google Scholar. Cf. also the same author in the Transactions of the International Numismatic Congress (London, 1936), pp. 68–78Google Scholar.

5 The primary study of Athens' public finance is that of Boeckh, A., Die Staalshaushaltung der Athener, ed. Frānkel, M. (3d ed.; Berlin, 1886)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and more recently Swoboda's, H. edition of Busolt's, G.Gricchische Staatskunde (Mūller-Otto, Handbuch, IV, 1, 1, 2, 1926), pp. 1210–40Google Scholar. A convenient summary is that of Andreades, History of Greek Public Finance.

6 The Greeks reckoned 6,000 drachmas to the talent. No system of representing these values in terms of modern currency is very satisfactory, but it may be noted that (1) the silver content of the drachma was about that of an American quarter dollar; (2) a standard day's wage for skilled labor was one drachma, perhaps six times the cost of a day's food for a single adult; and (3) one hundred talents of property constituted a very large fortune.

7 Cf. Isocrates, xxi 12: “It is worse [for the defendant] to be rich than to be guilty,” and Lysias xxvii, i, where it is pointed out that the jurors' pay depends on convictions (quoted by Huber, Die winschaftlichen Verhältnissc Athens, p. 65). On the general question of wealth and poverty in Athens cf. the valuable book of Bolkcstein, H., Wohlitätigkeit und Armcnpflege im vorchristlichen Alterlum (Utrecht, 1939)Google Scholar.

8 Cf. Schmid-Stāhlin, Handbuch dcr Altertumtivittetuchaft, VII, i, I, 432; von Wilamowitz-Modlendorf, , Der griechische und dcr platonische Staatsgedanke (Berlin 1919)Google Scholar. Of fundamental importance for the problem is the invaluable von Pöhlmann, Robert, Geschichte dcr sozialen Frage und det Sozialismus in dcr antiken Welt, ed. Oertel, F. (3d ed.; Munich, 1925)Google Scholar. Cf. also Schwann, W., “Gehalts und Lohnzahhengen in Athen,” Rhcinisches Museum, LXXIX (1930), 170–77Google Scholar.

9 It is the claim of the aged Cephalus that wealth enables a man to avoid injustice that starts the discussion of this subject. Cf. I, 330d–331b. Cf. now Kakrides, J. T., “The Part of Cephalus in Plato's Republic,” Eranos, XLVI (1948), 35–41Google Scholar.

10 “For indeed any city, however small, is in fact divided into two, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich; these are at war with one another” (IV, 422e; cf. VIII, 551d). It is surprising to find Salin, Edgar, Platon und die griechitche Utopie (Munich, 1921), p. 17Google Scholar, claiming that Plato was ignorant of the problem of class war.

11 II, 319b. Karl Marx puts this rather more elaborately: “The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society—the real foundation, on which rise legal and political superstructures and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness.”—Critique of Political Economy, as quoted by Chang, Sherman H. M., The Marxian Theory of the State (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1931), p. 27Google Scholar.

12 Rostovtzeff, Social and Economic History of the Hellenistic World, pp. 101–125. Most of the material still remains to be collected.

13 Milne, J. G., “Trade between Greece and Egypt before Alexander the Great,” Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, XXV (1939). p. 183Google Scholar.

14 This is a gratuitous assumption, but one which is commonly made. The anxiety of cities throughout classical antiquity to issue their own currency is explained in part by local pride, but it is often thought that there was a profit in it also, that especially the autonomous coins of the independent periods were issued at a token value greater than that of their silver content. So far as I know, however, the theory remains unproved, and may be unprovable.

15 The subject has never been investigated in its entirety, but cf., for example, Wenger, L., “Ancient Legal History,” Factors Determining Human Behavior (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1937)Google Scholar.

Incidentally, it may be noted also that Plato's definition of money, as that which “reduces the inequalities and incommensurabilities of goods to equality and common measure” (XI, 918b), anticipates the well-known and much longer definition of Adam Smith in An Enquiry into the Wealth of Nations.

16 Women undergo the same training and education as men (VII, 806c; VIII, 828–842) and are not mentioned in the list of seven categories of persons who are subjects by nature (III, 690). They go to war, but rather as spectators than as participants (VIII, 829b), and they will eat at common tables (VI, 781). Nevertheless, they are under some legal disabilities, and can sue and be sued only through their husbands, if living (XI, 9372). They are not specifically mentioned as voting or as being elected to other than specially female offices, such as that of the overseers of marriage (VI, 784a), and the community seems to be essentially masculine.

17 The population was to be about 60,000, for there were exactly 5,040 citizen families, each consisting of exactly four members (V, 737e; 740a–741a), and they received exactly one third of the farm produce (VIII, 848b). As the city was to lie in the midst of its territory (V, 745b) and eight miles from the harbor (IV, 704b), its area was somewhere between π 8a or 16a square miles, depending on its shape. It is, of course, a question whether Plato figured this closely, but it would be rash to insist that he did not. The density of population in Attica was about 200 per square mile, so the relief which Plato foresaw was in organization, not in resources.

18 Or to coin a word koinonia, with Otto Erb, Wirtsckaft und Geselltchaft im Denken der hellenischen Antike (Neue Reihe Staatswissenschaftlicher Arbeiten, Vol. Vii, 1939).