The Aristotelian Theory of Economic Justice Revisited

Kunitake Ito

Economic Review, 2016, vol. 67, issue 2, 134-146

Abstract: Aristotle develops his theoryof economic justice in Nicomachean Ethics and Politics. The theoryis interesting because his discussion of economic justice is connected to his larger concern about the relationship between the commensurable and incommensurable. Commodities are mutually incommensurable from the viewpoint of their use value but commensurable from that of exchange value. Theyare reduced to be mutuallycommensurable on the basis of "need (chreia)". The medium of this quantitative comparison is money, which is introduced by "convention (hypothesis)". There have been various interpretations concerning the meaning of "need", but little discussion about the meaning of "convention". I propose in this paper that Hume's analysis of convention in The Treatise of Human Nature could be profitably made use of for understanding the Aristotelian idea of convention.

JEL-codes: B11 B12 B31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hermes-ir.lib.hit-u.ac.jp/hermes/ir/re/27902/keizaikenkyu06702134.pdf

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hit:ecorev:v:67:y:2016:i:2:p:134-146

DOI: 10.15057/27902

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Economic Review from Hitotsubashi University Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Digital Resources Section, Hitotsubashi University Library ().