8g - Society and Economy

Summary

The only “statement which can be made with security about Athenian society and economy in the Periclean period is that they were evolving rapidly but unsystematically. Since very much the same can be said of our scholarly understanding of those processes, the reader should be warned that this section must needs be more provisional than most, and is likely to date rapidly even so.

It may be helpful to explain why. Earlier generations of scholarship on the subject were (in broad terms) split between two approaches. Some adopted an antiquarian approach, organized according to the sector of economic activity or to the legal status and socio-economic functions of population groups. This approach served essentially as a backdrop to the political, military, artistic and intellectual history of Athens and the rest of Greece. Others, more interpretatively inclined, became enmeshed in the unending debate between those who saw the Greek (including the Athenian) economy as essentially agrarian and undeveloped, based upon the largely autarkic farm plus family (oikos), and those who consciously or subconsciously saw the city states in Hanseatic terms, with a corresponding emphasis on capital, innovation, and market-oriented production and competition. The post-war debate, having belatedly absorbed Hasebroek's fundamental attack of 1928 (a 60) on the latter view, came to be dominated by the late Sir Moses Finley. For present purposes the salient features of his approach were three. The first was methodological, comprising the claim that economic or social institutions and practices cannot be seen in isolation but must be interpreted as integral parts of the general fabric of a society and its value-systems.