Though Aristotle defines money as representative wealth, like Plato, he fails to apprehend its meaning as representative, and therefore productive capital.[697] In his eyes, such a use of money is unjust and contrary to nature. He counts usury (τοκισμός) to be a large part of that false finance, which turns money from its true function to be made an object of traffic.[698] Those who lend small sums at a high rate of interest are contemptible,[699] and petty usury (ἡ ὀβολοστατική) is the most unnatural and violent form of chrematistik, since it makes money reproduce money.[700] It is to be observed, however, that his criticism is directed chiefly against petty interest, and that he does not appear to be thinking of “heavy loans on the security of a whole cargo, but of petty lendings to the necessitous poor, at heavy interest.”[701] Though his entire account of false finance exhibits an animus against the precious metals, as its basal cause, and as the source of individual and national degeneration,[702] yet he clearly appreciates their necessary function in the state, and his hostility is actually directed against the spirit of commercialism. Money, the means, has usurped the place of the end, until domestic and public economy alike have come to mean only the vulgar art of acquisition.[703]
The usual explanation of the fact that the Greek theorists failed to grasp the fact of the productive power of money is that loans were almost entirely for consumption, and hence seemed like an oppression of the poor.[704] This explanation, however, does not accord with the facts of Athenian life, at least for Aristotle’s day. It is clear from the _Private Orations_ of Demosthenes that there did exist an extensive banking and credit system for productive purposes in the Athens of his time.[705] Moreover, the hostility to interest and credit was not the rule, but the exception, for Demosthenes and not the philosophers should be accepted as voicing public opinion on this point. He considered credit to be of as much importance as money itself in the business world,[706] and declared one who ignored this elementary fact to be a mere know-nothing.[707] Indeed, the money-lenders were, to him, the very foundation of the prosperity of the state.[708] The prejudice of Plato and Aristotle represent merely the exceptional attitude of the pure moralist, who because of the questionable tactics of money-lenders, and the injustice and greed in some phases of contemporary business life, became critics of all money-making operations.[709]