Economic Scarcity and Political Philosophy

Abstract

The history of political philosophy exhibits two fundamentally opposed responses to economic scarcity. The classical view, exemplified by Aristotle's Politics, accepts scarcity as an inevitable feature of human existence, but endeavors to direct at least some individuals toward a life of virtue that transcends the concern with economic acquisition. Aristotle rhetorically exaggerates nature's beneficence to humans in order to facilitate this goal. A concomitant of his approach is the acceptance of slavery, despite its acknowledged injustice, as the precondition of the leisure essential to the practice of virtue by the city's governing class. In contrast, the modern doctrine, as expounded in Montaigne's Essays, emphasizes the natural neediness of humans and their consequent need to ameliorate their condition by the technological mastery of nature. The modern view aims to liberate human acquisitiveness from the moral and political restraints that both classical and medieval thinkers had endeavored to impose on it. Part of the reason for Montaigne's advocacy of acquisitiveness and self-indulgence had been the desire to divert people's minds from the religious, moral, and political concerns that generated civil strife and religious persecution. The materialism and privatism that characterize modern liberal society render it vulnerable to the attacks of the radical left, however, and subject also to the more profound criticism of Solzhenitsyn.