Here we have the very antithesis of the modern commercial standpoint. However, the truth is not all with the moderns, for a highly developed commerce and industry and the general prosperity of the mass of the people are not always necessarily coincident. Moreover, it is hardly fair to interpret Aristotle too rigidly. He understood well the necessity of craftsmen and all other industrial workers to the state.[619] The burden of his attack was directed against retail trade. Like Plato’s his prejudice had a moral and political root,[620] and was arrayed against the extreme application to labor, and against its false purpose, rather than against labor itself. He insisted that even intellectual work, when carried to an extreme, and pursued with the wrong aim, might become equally demoralizing.[621]
Here is a doctrine which our modern age, that would place even education on a bread-and-butter basis, and that tends to kill initiative and vision by extreme specialization, might well consider. Even Latin literature, when taught as it too often is, merely as a syntactical grind to prepare teachers to pursue the same folly is no more one of the humanities than is industrial chemistry.[622] Furthermore, Aristotle and Plato are doubtless right in their belief that a necessary extreme application to physical labor to earn the daily bread inevitably prevents mental and moral development and the proper performance of the duties of citizenship. And our modern democracies with their boasts of universal suffrage are still something of a farce, as long as economic conditions are such that the mass of the population has left no time to think of anything, except how to provide the bare physical necessities. Aristotle’s insistence upon leisure for the life of the citizen is no demand for aristocratic indolence.[623] Neither is it Jowett’s “condition of a gentleman,” or merely the idealized notion of an “internal state” in which “the intellect, free from the cares of practical life, energizes or reposes in the consciousness of truth.” It is rather a demand for release from material cares, so as to insure the highest degree of activity in self-development and political service.[624]
It may well be observed too, that Aristotle, the special champion of slavery, and reputed scorner of physical labor for freemen, exhibits a real interest in industry, in unguarded moments. One of his arguments against communism is that it would take from the citizen the desire to work.[625] He repudiates the life of indolence, and finds happiness in action.[626] He considers a practical knowledge of agriculture as essential to the successful economist,[627] and defines the just as those who live upon their own resources or labor, instead of making profit from others, especially the farmers, who live from the land which they cultivate.[628] We have seen above also that he makes labor one of the prime factors that determine value, and thus the most important element in production.[629] Moreover, he shows that he has a practical grasp of the importance of productive employment for the citizens of a democracy. He advises the rich to furnish plots of land (γήδια) to the poor, from the public revenues, or else that they give the poor a start (ἀφορμή) in other business, and thus turn them to industry.[630]