The word “economics” comes from the ancient Greek “oikonomia,” with both words denoting the rational management of material goods and labor. But, as economic historian Dotan Leshem writes, the two concepts reveal very different ways of looking at that project.
Leshem writes that oikonomia can be translated as “household management.” The ancient Greek households (oikos) to which it refers were the estates of wealthy landowners. The term came into use in Greece’s classical age, which began around 500 BCE, and was used to identify the domain of material needs, as opposed to the public, political world. At Socrates’s trial, for example, he said that he was uninterested in things most men cared about, such as oikonomia.
An oikos was a unit of both production and consumption. Elite women, who were generally excluded from both the political and philosophical spheres, were generally responsible for organizing this activity, along with enslaved household managers.
“The figure of the matron, more than any other figure in the ancient Greek oikonomia literature, shares traits with the modern homo economicus,” Leshem writes.
Ancient Greek philosophers offered advice on how to improve efficiency within the oikos, such as Aristotle’s exploration of the “science of using slaves.” Leshem notes that the welfare of the enslaved received little attention, though—in theory—an enslaver’s soundness of mind was supposed to ensure that they weren’t excessively overworked.
Modern economics tends to be explicitly agnostic about ethical issues, treating the desires of economic actors as outside its realm and looking only at the mechanics of fulfilling them. In contrast, oikonomia was inextricably tied to ethics, which the philosophers understood mostly in relation to what the head of the household did with any surplus it produced beyond its own needs.
Contrary to the economic logic of capitalism, the ancient Greek philosophers considered both indulging in luxuries and channeling surplus back into the economy to be ethical mistakes. For them, the goal of rational management—involving not just expanding production but moderating consumption—was inextricably tied to morality. The point, Leshem writes, was to channel more resources toward allowing male, land-owning citizens to engage in “the spiritual realm of philosophy” and the “heroic realm of politics.” Citizens were encouraged to use extra wealth to help their relatives and friends, distribute to the poor, support public institutions, and sock away some savings as a hedge against hard times.
One key difference in approaches to economic activity is that, where contemporary economics is often described as the study of the allocation of scarce resources, oikonomia is based in the assumption of a world of abundance. Aristotle wrote that “property, in the sense of a bare livelihood, seems to be given by nature herself to all.”
Leshem writes that, rather than worrying about the problem of scarcity, Aristotle and his peers were fundamentally concerned with “how to set a limit to engaging in economic matters, since nature possesses excessive means that can supply all of people’s needs as well as their unnatural desires.”
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