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Household and Market: On the Origins of Moral Economic Philosophy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

William James Booth
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Extract

This article explores a neglected area in political philosophy and moral economic theory: the origins of normative economic theorizing in classical Greek philosophy. That theory is a critique of the market and the acquisitive life in light of an alternative location of the economy in the oikos or household oriented towards the securing of the good life. Its core elements of the well-ordered community, the good life, and of the foreignness of economic activity to these ends are analyzed here. The article concludes with a critical appraisal of this theory, and an examination of its value for political philosophers concerned to find a non-rights based approach to the economy.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 56 , Issue 2 , Spring 1994 , pp. 207 - 235
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1994

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References

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52. I am indebted to Amartya Sen's analysis for pointing to the ambiguities involved in the idea of the standard of living. See Sen, Amartya et al. , The Standard of Living, ed. Hawthorn, Geoffrey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

53. Consider Rawls's argument that “the question the dominant tradition has tried to answer has no answer: no comprehensive doctrine is appropriate as a political conception for a constitutional regime” (Rawls, , Political Liberalism [New York: Columbia University Press, 1993], p. 135).Google Scholar