The Currency of Justice:
Aristotle on the Politics of Monetary Reciprocity
Stefan Eich
Princeton University
Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts
10 Joseph Henry House
08544 Princeton NJ
[email protected]
Abstract: This article reconstructs Aristotle’s conception of currency (nomisma) as a political
institution of civic reciprocity. For Aristotle, a just political community depends on its ability to
find similarity in difference and foster habits of reciprocity. Conventionally, speech and law have
been seen to fulfill this role. In this article, I argue that currency issued by the polis was another
tool of political commensurability and reciprocity in the classical Greek world. By placing
Aristotle’s treatment of currency in the Nicomachean Ethics in the context of an Athenian
politics of money, currency emerges not merely as a medium of economic exchange but also as a
bond of political reciprocity and the conventional measure of excess and deficiency. As a tool of
reciprocity analogous to rhetoric and law, currency sustains habits of citizenship and forms an
important pillar of Aristotle’s account of the just political community.
Key words: Aristotle, Reciprocity, Money, Justice, Exchange, Law, Rhetoric
The Currency of Justice:
Aristotle on the Politics of Monetary Reciprocity
Since the global financial crisis monetary policy has received intense political scrutiny.
Accompanying this politicization has been a renascent if hazy awareness that money not only
greases the wheels of commerce but is also a political institution and a public good (Martin 2014;
Pettifor 2014). Yet while political economists explore the various political dimensions of
monetary policy (Kirshner 2003), political theorists remain mired in a conceptual vocabulary that
pits politics against economics (Satz 2010; Sandel 2012, Walzer 1983). Critiques of money’s
influence on social relations and elections are indispensable, but their implicit flipside is rarely
considered. In attempting to contain the intrusion of money into politics, they often unwittingly
accept that money is merely economic in the first place. On its own, this picture of neatly
separated economic and political realms obscures that money is itself a complex political
phenomenon. If the financial crisis has been a reminder of the politics of money, this challenges
political theorists to develop a better understanding of currency as a political institution.
In this paper I turn to Aristotle for this purpose by reconstructing his account of currency
(nomisma) and monetary reciprocity in the Nicomachean Ethics.1 This requires as a first step
carefully distinguishing conceptually between two key terms of Aristotle’s discussion often
indiscriminately translated as money – nomisma (currency) and chrēmata (wealth) – before
placing his account of nomisma in the historical context of the invention of coinage and the rise
of the polis. On Aristotle’s conception, I argue, currency fulfilled three important political
functions. First, currency acted as a medium of civic commensurability that helped to foster
1
Translations rely heavily on Irwin (Aristotle 1999) for the Nicomachean Ethics (hereafter NE)
and Reeve (Aristotle 1998) for the Politics (hereafter Pol.). Where I have adapted the translation
this is marked in a note. For classical sources other than Aristotle and Plato, I provide both page
references to a modern edition as well as standard classical references.
1
bonds of abstract reciprocity and impersonal trust among citizens. Secondly, it served as a
conventional measure of justice that enabled both distributive and corrective justice, and ensured
the just distribution of wealth and honor. Finally, currency enabled a range of civic activities that
furthered civic-mindedness, checked the accumulation of wealth, and assisted the cultivation of
virtuous citizenship.2
The ancient Greeks, it has rightly been noted, did not have a concept of “money” that
maps onto ours. If we approach Aristotle’s argument with a preformed and anachronistic concept
of “money” in mind, the political significance of coinage is easily obscured. Instead, behind what
is usually rendered “money” stand two Greek terms: chrēmata, which meant material wealth in
general, including non-monetary wealth; and nomisma, which indicated a specific conception of
currency issued by the polis. Nomisma, the classicist Sitta von Reden (1995) explains, “referred
most generally to anything that was sanctioned by current or established usage. This meaning
became more and more associated with coinage yet never lost its wider connotations.” (189n22)
Nomisma thus retained a connotation of collective political choice and conventionalism arguably
absent from the modern English “money,” though partially preserved in the term “currency.”3
This connotation is crucial to Aristotle’s conceptualization of the political uses of coinage.
Once we pay close attention to the Greek terms underlying Aristotle’s discussion of
reciprocity in the Nicomachean Ethics and attend to how Aristotle employs nomisma, the
political dimension of his discussion of currency emerges. Arguing against the limitless pursuit
2
The terms I use in this paper to describe the causal role of Aristotelian monetary reciprocity –
ranging from “sustain” to “foster” – are meant to express a critical but essentially supportive
role. While I consider currency an important tool of fair equality and therefore a facilitator of
political justice, it necessarily operates alongside other such tools, in particular law and speech,
and is frequently dependent on them.
3
As a reminder of this gap I have left nomisma at times untranslated. Where translated, I have
rendered it as currency to preserve the conventional, “quasi-fiduciary” (Ober 2008, 237)
character that was explicit linguistically and practically.
2
of wealth in the Politics, Aristotle usually speaks of chrēmata, material wealth, or ploutos,
wealth in the abstract. When he concludes, for example, that “the love of honor and the love of
wealth are the causes of most voluntary wrong-doings among human beings,” the phrase “love of
wealth” (philochrēmatia) is often misleadingly translated “love of money” but stands for the love
of all material wealth (Pol. 1271a15-17). In his discussion of justice and reciprocity in the
Nicomachean Ethics, by contrast, the term Aristotle uses is always nomisma, which designates
not any kind of money but coinage issued by the polis. Chrēmata can certainly mean money, just
as currency is a form of wealth. But to elide the conceptual distinction between the two obscures
not only Aristotle’s argument but forestalls a more political conception of currency.
Over the past two decades work on the history of ancient money has persuasively
established the symbolic, philosophical, and political significance of coinage in the classical
Greek world (von Reden 1995; 1997; Kurke 1999; Schaps 2004; Seaford 1994; Seaford 2004;
Bresson 2016).4 As these scholars have shown, the rapid spread of currency through the Greek
world went hand in hand with the development of new forms of political rule and abstract
reciprocity. What enabled Greek coins to trade at conventional values, often in excess of their
metal value (Seaford 2004; Schaps 2008), was the collective trust of the polis and the habitual
acts of reciprocity sustaining this trust.5 Coinage was in this sense a system of impersonal trust
4
Where the above political accounts of ancient coinage highlight its symbolic and distributive
dimensions, new-institutionalist economic readings have emphasized the ways in which coinage
reduced transaction costs and intensified market exchange (Ober 2008, 222; Ober 2015). When
combined with new archaeological findings such readings have shed much light on the historical
spread of coinage in the Greek world. They have however contributed less to elucidating ancient
discussions of coinage to which I turn here. These divergent emphases do not necessarily
contradict one another and Van Alfen (2012) and Bresson (2016) offer judicious proposals for
reconciling economic with political readings.
5
While transaction action cost-based studies have also tended to focus on trust they have
emphasized traders’ trust in the reliable silver content of coins (Ober 2008, 49-50), I am here
primarily concerned with the domestic political problem of coinage’s relation to civic trust.
3
that politicized relationships by substituting civic for personal trust (see Johnstone 2011).
Political scientists have long emphasized the importance of generalized reciprocity and civic
trust for well-functioning political communities (Putnam 1993).6 In this paper, I focus on the
prior question of what can ground this trust by arguing that the novel use of currency in the
ancient Greek world sustained new forms of impersonal trust production among the citizens of
the polis. This political centrality of currency, I argue, is reflected in Aristotle’s account of
reciprocal justice in the Nicomachean Ethics.
My argument gives rise to a subtle but far-reaching interpretative re-framing. Many
influential readings of Aristotle’s political thought contrast the political world of speech and
rhetoric with that of domination and private economic exchange in the oikos, or household.7 This
is understandable: Aristotle opens the Politics (Pol. 1253a1-18) by rebuking Plato for having
failed to distinguish sufficiently between households and political associations. While
households are homogeneous and exist for the satisfaction of material needs, the polis is a
community of difference in which citizens debate about justice by means of speech. Rhetoric has
thus rightly been emphasized as a constitutive aspect of Aristotle’s conception of politics.
Exchange and currency, by contrast, are in these readings associated with households and
consequently marginalized. Aristotle suggests after all himself in the Politics that money arose
out of foreign trade (Pol. 1257a31-41; 1257b5-8). But already in the same passage he introduces
this view in indirect speech and immediately contrasts it with a second. “On the other hand, it is
also held that money itself is nonsense and wholly conventional, not natural at all.” (Pol.
Tellingly, when circulating outside of the Greek world coins often lost their conventional
domestic premium and instead traded at their metal value (Bresson 2016, 268).
6
Putnam (1993) not only used the monetary metaphor of “social capital” but also suggested a
link between networks of civic trust in Northern Italy and the invention of modern credit (128).
7
Arendt (1958, 28-37) offers a classic statement of this contrast between polis and oikos.
4
1257b10-12) It is to this second position that I turn here and which Aristotle elaborates in detail
in the Nicomachean Ethics when arguing that nomisma “is not by nature, but by convention” (EN
1133a30). As I show, though Aristotle indicts the pursuit of wealth for its own sake, currency
and monetary exchange constitute core aspects of his account of the just city.8 As analyzed by
Aristotle, exchange conducted in the coinage of the polis fosters social bonds of civic trust,
serves as a tool of political justice, and helps to cultivate virtuous citizenship. As such, currency
resembles and assists law and speech in sustaining civic trust and recognition.
Aristotelian Reciprocity
In order to reconstruct the political dimension of currency in Aristotle we first need to
appreciate the centrality of reciprocity in his account of political life and political justice.
Consider the discussion in Book Five of the Nicomachean Ethics, which culminates in the
statement that “a polis is maintained by doing things in return according to proportion [tō
antipoiein analogon].” (EN 1132b34) The point is repeated in the Politics when Aristotle writes
that “reciprocal equity preserves poleis, as we said earlier in the Ethics.” (Pol. 1261a30-32)
Despite the force of such statements, reciprocity has proven elusive in most accounts of the
Aristotelian polis. There have long been disputes over whether reciprocity forms part of
Aristotle’s account of justice at all or is an unnecessary digression into commerce. But as the
cross-reference in the Politics already indicates, reciprocity forms an integral part of Aristotle’s
account of ethics and politics. It was certainly no irrelevant commercial digression. In the
Politics the reference to reciprocal equality even introduces the principle of sharing political
offices (1261a33-35). In the Ethics, the discussion of reciprocity appears similarly in a crucial
8
Nussbaum (1990) and Swanson and Corbin (1992) have both challenged – from different
directions – the exclusion of the private and commercial exchange from readings of Aristotelian
political life.
5
place at the heart of Aristotle’s account of justice. The discussion concludes with the statement
that “we have now said what it is that is unjust and just.” (EN 1133b30) The bond of reciprocity
touched on central questions of political life.
When Aristotle turns to reciprocity (to antipeponthos) he first brings up a view he
associates with the Pythagoreans. “Some people think reciprocity is just without qualification
[haplōs dikaiōn].” (NE 1132b21-22) This is sometimes interpreted as “simple reciprocity is
justice,” suggesting that the Pythagoreans regard justice as a simple kind of reciprocity
(Rackham 1934, 279).9 Others, more plausibly, interpret it as “reciprocity is simply justice,”
suggesting the Pythagoreans took justice to be exhausted by reciprocity (Scaltsas 1995). Part of
this ambiguity may be intentional, for Aristotle will go on to reject both formulations while
making room for a new notion of proportional reciprocity. Aristotle argues that justice cannot be
reduced to reciprocity and that reciprocity does not simply coincide with distributive or
corrective justice. But he also stresses that the kind of reciprocity he will discuss is not the
simple reciprocity of retribution but a more complex form of reciprocity “based on analogy not
equality [kat’ analogian mē kat’ isotēta]” (NE 1132b34). It is proportional reciprocity, or more
literally reciprocity by analogy, that Aristotle has in mind.
Though textually reciprocity lies at the heart of Aristotle’s treatment of justice, the
relationship between reciprocity and justice has often perplexed readers. Earlier in Book Five,
Aristotle distinguished between two specific kinds of particular justice: distributive and
corrective. Where distributive justice (to dianemētikon dikaion) is concerned with the
distribution of honor, wealth (chrēmatōn), and “anything else that can be divided among
members of a community who share in a political system” (NE l130b32-33), corrective justice
9
This is, for example, how Rackham translates it (Aristotle 1934, 279).
6
relates to the “corrective principle in transactions [to en tois synallagmasi diorthōtikon]” (NE
1131a1). Corrective justice divides into two further parts as it applies to voluntary or involuntary
transactions. Some have consequently argued, not without reason, that reciprocity is that part of
corrective justice that has to do with voluntary actions (Burnet 1900, 203). Others, by contrast,
have detected in the turn to reciprocity the introduction of a third kind of justice – either a more
primitive form (Strauss 1987, 128), a separate ethical account of fair exchange (Judson 1997), or
an aporetic proto-economic digression (Irwin 1988, 625; Young 2006, 187).10 The rise of modern
economics, in particular, has aided versions of this third reading. As a result, Aristotle’s
discussion of reciprocity and exchange is today often framed as an awkward proto-economic
theory of exchange value. Read as such, the passage has left generations of interpreters
frustrated. Joseph Schumpeter (2006), for example, commended Aristotle’s “analytic
performance” but nonetheless concluded that the passage amounted to little more than
“decorous, pedestrian, slightly mediocre, and more than slightly pompous common sense” (54,
57).11
There is a way to respect Aristotle’s classification of two kinds of particular justice
without having to navigate awkwardly around his account of reciprocity. The turn to reciprocity
reflects not so much a textual break as a shift in perspective. Aristotelian reciprocity is not a
separate kind of justice but a precondition and constituent aspect of political justice in general
(Gauthier and Jolif 1970, 371; Ritchie 1894; Tessitore 1996). Reciprocity is not all there is to
justice but it holds a foundational position at the heart of political justice that facilitates
distributive and corrective justice by affirming relations of mutuality. Reciprocity, Aristotle
10
For an excellent overview of the protracted interpretative disputes concerning the passage, see
Gauthier and Jolif (1970, 369-380).
11
Another interpretative challenge has been Marx’s (1976 [1867], 151) incisive critique of the
passage as falling short of providing a labor theory of value (see Meikle 1995).
7
explains, is central to the sustenance of communities based on exchange. “In exchange
communities [koinōniais tais allaktikais], this way of being just, reciprocity based on analogy
not equality, holds people together.” (NE 1132b33-34) Far from relegating reciprocity thereby to
commercial associations outside politics, Aristotle considers the polis to be one such community
based on acts of reciprocal exchange, indeed its highest form (Pol. 1252a1-7; NE 1160a9-32).
The kinds of exchanges Aristotle has in mind are not exclusively commercial ones but
encompass diverse forms of interaction between citizens.12
A number of recent readers of Aristotle have persuasively begun to correct for the neglect
of Aristotelian reciprocity. “Most contemporary legal and political philosophers,” laments Jill
Frank (2005, 82, 99), “neglect his account of reciprocal justice entirely and few Aristotle
scholars take it very seriously. … That is unfortunate, for … Aristotle’s expectations of
reciprocal justice are high.”13 Danielle Allen (2004) has similarly placed reciprocity at the center
of her reading of Aristotle, arguing that Aristotelian citizenship revolves around “a developed
discourse of reciprocity.” (135) But where these scholars have focused on law and rhetoric in
fostering relations of reciprocity, I turn to the significance of currency.
If habitual acts of reciprocity are important for sustaining civic ties between citizens,
speech is surely a crucial tool. But it is not the only one. The possibility of civic
commensurability and the maintenance of political justice in the city relies also on acts of
symbolic, civic, and material reciprocity conducted via currency. Nomisma, Aristotle explains,
12
As Finley (1970, 14) notes, when Aristotle discusses reciprocity in the Nicomachean Ethics he
does not use any of the conventional Greek terms for trade – as he does elsewhere – but instead
speaks abstractly of mutual exchanges (allaxis) and agreements (synallagma).
13
The most focused defense of the political character of Aristotelian reciprocity has been
advanced by Gabriel Danzig (2000), who concludes that when Aristotle speaks of reciprocity “he
refers to it not as an economic discussion, nor as an ethical one, but as a political one.” (412) See
also the recent work of Inamura (2011; 2015).
8
“makes things commensurate [summetros] as a measure [metron] does, and equates them [isazō];
for there would be no association [koinonia] without exchange [allagē], no exchange [allagē]
without equality [isotēs], no equality [isotēs] without commensuration [summetria]” (NE
1133b16-19). I will return below to the complex theoretical questions raised by this claim. For
now, let me just highlight that it is not just the mediation of law and the exchange of words but
also the circulation of nomisma that was an important aspect of political reciprocity and justice in
the ancient polis.
Coinage in the Ancient Greek World
The classical Greek world featured a striking abundance and diversity of coinage. The
earliest known coins in the Western world were minted in Lydia, in present day Turkey, some
time in the mid to late seventh century BCE – roughly contemporary with Solon, whose mythical
visit to Croesus, then king of Lydia, formed part of ancient Athenian lore (Herodotus 2007, 1922).14 Over the following centuries, coinage spread rapidly throughout the Greek world. By the
fourth century BCE, hundreds of Greek poleis were minting their own currency.15 In Athens,
uncoined metal had ceased to be legal tender in the agora and almost all payments were made in
local coinage, as well as a small number of approved coins from other poleis (Bresson 2016,
269).
14
Bresson (2016, 264) gives an estimate of 650-625 BCE for the Lydian invention of coinage,
which thus occurred during Solon’s lifetime or shortly beforehand. Coined money was invented
unrelatedly and almost simultaneously also in India and China (Schaps 2004, 232-235; Schaps
2007).
15
Of the 1035 poleis catalogued by Hansen and Nielsen (2005, 148), a local mint and coinage is
attested for 444. Ober (2015, 39) estimates that at least a third of all Greek poleis minted their
own coins by 323 BCE. Moreover, from the fifth to the fourth century BCE the number of
discovered coinage hoards more than doubled and their content tripled (Ober 2015, 83).
9
While the Greek passion for coins is well known, its meaning and significance remains
disputed. Confronted with the extremely fragmentary monetary map of the classical Greek
world, economic historians have puzzled over the obvious “inefficiencies” and the nuisance of
constant foreign currency exchange as symbolized by the omnipresent money-changers dwelling
at the margins of the agora. Bewilderment over hundreds of Greek city-states issuing their own
coinage only grows once we appreciate that both domestic and external trade had for centuries
been conducted perfectly well with older forms of money such as uncoined metals based on
weight (Meadows and Shipton 2001). What those puzzled by the proliferation of coinage had
missed, Moses Finley (1999) famously argued, was that ancient Greek coins were “essentially a
political phenomenon” that marked off the Greek world from the surrounding kingdoms and
empires. Instead of seeing the fragmented Hellenic monetary map as a nuisance, the Greek poleis
proudly celebrated their local coinages and established ferocious penalties for counterfeiting,
which was considered not merely a commercial offense but a form of treason, punishable by
death. Finley succeeded in shifting attention to ancient coinage as a specifically political
phenomenon; yet he left its precise political role somewhat vague.
Over the past two decades, scholars followed up on Finley’s pointer and explored in detail
the link between coinage and the classical Greek polis, illustrating the social, political, and
philosophical significance of coinage beyond commercial exchange (Schaps 2004; Bresson
2016). They have emphasized the symbolic dimension of exchange (von Reden 1995), drawn
attention to the contentious political struggles behind the spread of coinage (Kurke 1999), and
traced its profound philosophical implications (Seaford 2004). Despite their differences in
emphasis, it is now clear that the adoption of coins bearing the stamp of individual city-states
10
was closely related to a number of crucial intellectual, social, and political changes in the
transition from the archaic Greek world to that of the classical polis.16
The first hint of how to substantiate this link between currency and the polis is embedded
in the Greek word for coinage: nomisma. The word derives from nomizein, to acknowledge or to
sanction something by established belief or custom. Nomisma, a plural noun, means “what is
sanctioned,” and it could indicate anything customarily and collectively affirmed. The earliest
surviving occurrence attributes such an act of collective sanctioning to divine inspiration: “truly
she [Athena?] was bringing together a scattered army, inspiring them with nomisma” (Alkaios,
as quoted in Seaford 2004, 143). The next extant usage concerns the standard Greek practice of
shrieking during battle, describing it as the “Hellenic nomisma of sacrificial cry” (Aeschylus
2009, 181 [Aesch. Sept. 269]). The meaning of nomisma as currency developed from this usage,
though the original connotation was never fully displaced and often gave rise to witticisms
(Aristophanes 1986, 40-1 [Ar. Clouds 247]).17 Nomisma referred both to custom, rule, and law,
as well as coined money. This first meaning of the term as a collective form of affirmation
already gestures towards the conception of money as a political institution of acknowledgement
that I want to recover and situate in the rest of this article.
16
There is at the same time an important imperial ambivalence to currency. As the Athenian
polis acquired an empire in the course of the fifth century BCE, it gradually enforced its coinage
as a tool of imperial government. As a tool for rule abroad, coinage – like law – was susceptible
to lose its character as a collectively-acknowledged institution of self-government. See Figueira
(1998); Schaps (2004, 142); and Vickers (1996). The wide circulation of Athenian owls across
the eastern Mediterranean survived the Athenian empire into the fourth century BCE (Ober 2008,
229).
17
This double meaning of nomisma comes out in numerous other places in Greek culture,
including for example in relation to the Cynics, in particular Diogenes of Sinope, who, according
to Diogenes Laertius (1925, 23 [DL VI.21]), was said to have received the Delphic maxim
“parakharattein to nomisma”: deface the currency, but also violate the customs. See also
Schofield (1999, 58).
11
Political use matched the etymology of nomisma. As von Reden (1995) has shown by
carefully re-embeddeding ancient exchange and coinage into the broader frame of symbolic
“transactional orders” in the ancient polis, ancient monetary exchange had a wide range of
symbolic functions beyond economic logic, depending on the context in which it was employed.
Most relevant for us, coinage was linked to the political development of the polis and illustrates a
broad shift in the construction of authority, away from divine justice and toward a form of
political authority that was malleable and exercised on behalf of or by the community. “The
recognition of coinage as a recompense,” she argues, “meant the acknowledgement of the polis
as an institution that controlled justice and prosperity. … The introduction of coinage indicates a
shift of authority over social justice from the gods to the polis” (von Reden 1995, 175).
Leslie Kurke has gone even further, describing coinage as a tool for the spread of a
specifically egalitarian political ideology. Coinage, Kurke (1999) writes,
represents a tremendous threat to a stable hierarchy of aristocrats and others, in
which the aristocrats maintain a monopoly on precious metals and other prestige
goods. With the introduction of coinage looms the prospect of indiscriminate
distribution, exchange between strangers that subverts the ranked spheres of
exchange-goods operative in a gift-exchange culture. … As stamped civic token,
coinage challenges the naturalized claim to power of the aristocratic elite. (46-47)
As Kurke argues, coinage issued by the polis constituted an important political force for the
assertion of the city’s authority over questions of value.18 Seaford (1994, 191-206), too, has
connected the rise of coinage to the development of new and more abstract forms of reciprocity
through which the classical polis institutionalized the giving and receiving of honor and
resources.19 The parallel historical development of coinage and the ancient polis is thus seen to
18
Trevett (2001) has taken up this link between coinage and democracy most explicitly.
19
More recently, Seaford (2004) has linked it to the birth of both pre-Socratic philosophy and
Athenian tragedy. Monetization, according to Seaford (2002), meant “the metaphysical
12
mark a shift in the conception and practices of reciprocity from tributary payments in kind and
Homeric gift exchange to monetized forms of redistribution and exchange conducted in the
currency of the polis (Bresson 2016, 266-8).
Classical Athens was no longer a ‘face to face’ society and had left behind the archaic
practices of gift exchange depicted by Homer.20 While the one hundred and forty or so Athenian
demes often continued to be tightly knit communities, the polis itself was a considerably larger
and more complex kind of community that existed first and foremost as a “civic imaginary”
(Castoriadis 1996; Hansen 1999). The “ideology of reciprocity,” which Millett (1991) has
described as the cement of classical Athenian society, retained traces of its archaic origin but in
the polis it was reworked into something more abstract that encapsulated the entire citizen body.
In Athens, these developments were specifically associated with the rise of the democratic polis.
Pericles, for example, not only extended public payment for offices, such as for jurors, but was
said to be “completely beyond gift-giving [adorotatos],” a practice deemed too close to archaic
loyalties for the new democratic sensibilities of the Athenian polis (Thucydides 1998, 107 [Thuc.
2.65.8-9]; Aristotle 1935, 80 [Ath. Pol. 27.3-4]). It is this abstraction and politicization of
reciprocity in the form of coinage that forms the context for Aristotle’s account of reciprocal
justice.
A parallel literature based on the insights of New Institutional Economics has meanwhile
argued that the main effect of coinage consisted in lower transaction costs (Ober 2008; Ober
sublimation of the impersonal, homogenous, abstract, transcendent, seemingly self-sufficient
power of money.” (163)
20
Ever since Marcel Mauss’s ([1924] 2002) influential essay on the gift, it has been tempting to
detect in Aristotle’s references to reciprocity the remnants of a gift society. But as Mauss’s own
subtitle – The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies – attests, gift exchange was
not located in the classical polis but in the archaic past “before contracts, before money, minted
and inscribed.” (5)
13
2015, 12).21 By eliminating the costly need for weighing uncoined metals and by employing coin
inspectors who monitored the quality and authenticity of coins the polis lowered transaction
costs, forestalled potential disputes, and underwrote an unprecedented expansion of economic
wealth in the Greek world (Ober 215; Bresson 2016, 271). But the significance of coinage
exceeded its effect on economic expansion, just as the role of the polis in issuing coinage
extended beyond the facilitation of trade. If the recent emphasis on coinage has rightly restored
an image of Greek city-states as fundamentally built around the agora (as already observed by
Herodotus 2007, 83; cited in Bresson 2016, 268), it would be misleading to reduce the agora to a
purely commercial space. It was as much a space of conversations and non-commercial exchange
as of trade. The exchange of words and coins mirrored one another.22
In Athens, the political centrality of coinage was a lived experience. Coinage was
intimately tied to practices of citizenship and the implementation of political justice. In the case
of distributive justice, the assessment of excess and deficiency was dependent on a politicized
measure in the form of coinage through which the political community made wealth visible and
quantifiable. The redistribution of wealth from the rich to the poor was mediated by currency and
occurred through the financing of public goods, communal services, and festivities intended to
display and inspire public-spiritedness. These contributions to collectively provided feasts in
Athens, such as the one alluded to in the Politics (Pol. 1281a40-b10), were typically not donated
in kind but rather as coins (Cammack 2013, 183).23 The liturgical taxes for public festivals and
21
Others have gone even further in emphasizing the economic motivations behind ancient Greek
coinage (Martin 1985). More plausibly, political and economic motivations were entwined (van
Alfen 2012; Bresson 2016).
22
The term itself derived from the Greek word for speaking in public (agoreuō).
23
Ober (2013, 111n16), by contrast, maintains that Athenian collective meals resembled a
potluck with contributions in kind.
14
the fleet were furthermore often of a considerable size, easily reaching several thousand
drachmas and came in addition to a property tax (eisphora) levied on citizens above a certain
level of property (Hansen 1999, 100-111). The use of currency redistributed wealth but it also
institutionalized and affirmed practices of reciprocity mediated by the polis. The result was a
culture of interlocking monetary reciprocity.
Nomisma was not only tied to distributive justice but also partook in corrective justice.
The ability of citizen courts to deal out justice depended crucially on commensurability and
currency. Along with the institutional changes of positive reciprocity described above, the
paradigm of how to relate to enemies was also complicated and politicized in the transition from
the archaic to the classical Greek world. In classical Athens, punishment of wrongdoing had been
moved from kinship structures to political institutions of justice. As the medium of corrective
justice, currency had an important role to play in this process, as can be seen most explicitly in
the Solonian introduction of legal fines to be paid in the city’s coinage.24
The close link between currency and political development was in Athens furthermore
prominently on display in the gradual introduction of monetary payments for public service in
the assembly and the jury courts – often associated with Pericles. Jury service was by metonymy
referred to as “the triobol,” after the three obols awarded for it (Aristophanes 1986, 262-3 [Ar.
Knights 255]; as quoted in Trevett 2001, 25). According to the Aristotelian Athenian
Constitution, reward in coinage for participation in the shared practice of ruling formed a crucial
part of the shift from aristocratic to democratic values (Aristotle 1935, 116 [Ath. Pol. 41.3]).
Among the institutions listed in the Politics as distinctly democratic in character, Aristotle
24
On the recurring centrality of monetary fines, see Aristotle 1935, 18, 20, 30, 92, 126, 146, 156,
170 [Ath. Pol. 3.6, 4.3, 8.4, 30.6, 45.1, 54.2, 56.7, 63.3]. The Solonian innovation of fines thus
went hand in hand with the rise of coinage in general and constituted an important dimension of
the politicization of money.
15
mentions “having pay provided, preferably for everyone, for the assembly, courts, and public
offices, or failing that, for service in the offices, courts, council, and assemblies that are in
authority” (Pol. 1317b33-5; see also NE 1134b8). This meant that the lower classes of citizens
could afford to attend the courts and the assembly since the compensation was generous enough
to more than compensate for a day’s labor lost.
The monetary value of compensation was further amplified symbolically by expressing
the civic honor associated with public service. Olympic victors, poets, and actors all received
generous monetary awards and medals resembling coins in recognition of their achievements
(Plutarch 1914, 466 [Plut. Solon 23.3]). Payment for jury duty was frequently compared to the
award of medals, emphasizing the element of civic honor associated with the monetary reward.
In an age before print, circulating coins were symbols of the political administration of justice
that inscribed the polis into social memory. If Benedict Anderson (1983) linked the rise of
modern imagined communities to technologies of print and reproduction, we can see in ancient
coins a medium for the construction of the social and symbolic imaginary that was the polis.
Whether it was the exchange of goods, the contribution of public funds in exchange for honor, or
the reciprocal sharing of political rule, all were conceived as acts of reciprocal exchange made
possible by currency.
Both institutionally and conceptually, justice in the polis was thus tied to numismatic
reciprocity. The examples Aristotle offers for practices of political justice in the Nicomachean
Ethics all revolve around the conventional law of the polis (nomos) and its currency (nomisma).
As von Reden (1995, 128) has put it, the way the Athenians used nomisma “was strictly parallel
to the way they used the laws.” Nomos and nomisma were no longer immutably given by the
gods but instead formed the subject of constant public debate in the assembly, the theater, and
16
the agora. The project of nomisma has in this sense distinctly juridical and rhetorical aspects and
forms part of the very discourse of the polis as a self-governing political community.
The Political Role of Currency in Aristotle
If we lose sight of this political dimension of coinage Aristotle’s discussion of reciprocity
and monetary exchange easily harbors the potential for confusion. The Greek term Aristotle
employs for his discussion of reciprocity, to antipeponthos, typically connoted the negative
reciprocity of retribution (Thucydides 1998, 159, 325 [Thuc. 3.61, 6.35]). But we already saw
that Aristotle uses the concept in the sense of proportional reciprocity or, more literally,
reciprocity according to analogy (to antipeponthos kat’ analogian).25 Whereas archaic
reciprocity meant retribution, the Aristotelian reciprocity of the classical polis suggests abstractly
analogous acts of exchange conducted in coinage. It is in this light that currency, along with
rhetoric and law, emerges as a constitutive element of the polis. More specifically, as I will argue
in this section, according to Aristotle’s account, currency enabled three essentially political
functions. 1) As a medium of civic commensurability, currency fostered and sustained habits of
political reciprocity among citizens that were reflected in new forms of impersonal trust. 2) As a
measure of political justice, currency was the medium through which distributive and corrective
justice were assessed and administered. 3) By embedding commercial life into politics and by
providing a monetary dimension to political judgment, currency enabled a range of voluntary
activities and helped to cultivate virtues of citizenship.
25
To illustrate his qualification, Aristotle provides the example of a citizen who has been
wounded by an official but is nonetheless not entitled to retribution (EN 1132b29-31).
17
Medium of Civic Commensurability
Reciprocity requires comparison and comparison requires commensurability. If things and
people are by nature different, as they were for Aristotle, their differences need to be bridged in
order to allow for reciprocity. This is where analogy enters. The concept of analogy (analogia) is
mathematical in origin and it enables Aristotle to reason that A is to B, as C is to D (Topics
186a6).26 Analogy is Aristotle’s method of discovering likeness in difference. In his biology, it
allows him to conclude that feathers are to a bird, as scales are to a fish (Historia Animalium,
486b21). It structures Aristotle’s conceptualization of metaphor as itself an act of transference
and exchange (Poetics 1457b1-25; also Rhetoric 1405a, 1410b-1411a.). Reasoning by analogy
involves finding a higher relation that bridges difference.27
Commensurability is thus the necessary starting point for exchange and reciprocity. “All
items for exchange must be comparable in some way.” (NE 1133a19) “Everything needs to be
measured by some one measure, as we said before.” (NE 1133a27) Aristotle considers two
possibilities. “In truth [alētheia],” he points out, “the measure is use [chreia].” (NE 1133a2729)28 If you happen to need what I offer and I need what you offer, our respective uses are
commensurable. But we can hardly count on this coincidence. More often than not our uses will
not be perfectly compatible. What we need is a tool that can achieve commensurability on a
higher plane. “Currency [nomisma] came along to do exactly this, and in a way it becomes an
26
Not only analogy is mathematical in origin, so is reciprocity. One of the few ancient texts that
employs to antipeponthos not as retribution but as proportional reciprocity is Euclid’s Elements.
Indeed, the English term “reciprocall” appears to have been coined to translate antipeponthos in
1570 by the first translator of Euclid into English, Henry Billingsley (Theocarakis 2008, 33).
27
For other passages on the problem of incommensurability see Categories 11a15-6; EN
1112a23; Met. 983a16; Phys. 222a5; De Generatione Animalium 742b28.
28
Rackham translates alētheia as “in the strict sense,” Irwin as “in reality.” I have preferred the
more literal “in truth.” I translate chreia as “use” to reflect that it is not a quality of the parties of
exchange but describes the relation between thing and person (Gallagher 2012, 673).
18
intermediate, since it measures all things [panta gar metrei], and so measures excess and
deficiency.” (NE 1133a21-23) As Aristotle explains, “by convention [kata sunthēkēn] nomisma
has come to serve as a pledge [hupallagma] for use [chreia]. And this is why nomisma is called
nomisma, because it exists not by nature [phusis] but by the current law [nomos], and it is within
our power to alter it and to make it useless.” (NE 1133a30) Currency is a conventional stand-in
for use that enables reciprocal exchange. It achieves commensurability not “in truth” but “by
stipulation [hupotheseōs].” (NE 1133b19-21)29
This framing of money as a solution to incommensurability has often been read as an
instance – indeed the founding instance – of the problem of the double coincidence of wants
problem. Money arises on this account as a solution to the inconveniences of barter. This is
certainly how Adam Smith read and used Aristotle to construct an entire conjectural history of
money as emerging out of barter (Smith 1976 [1776] I.iv.2). In part Aristotle may have had in
mind the outlines of such an account. But the very fact that he framed his analysis in terms of “to
antipeponthos,” which originally signified violent retribution, suggests that he was aware of the
conflictual underpinnings of early exchange (Aglietta and Orléan 1982). Currency pacifies from
this perspective previously violent relations of retribution and equalizes previously hierarchical
relations. For in enabling reciprocity and peaceful patterns of exchange currency renders
commensurable not only the goods exchanged but also the parties of exchange. Acts of exchange
in the agora were in a profound sense an exchange between equals (Bresson 2016, 268). As
Aristotle insists, “what counts as equal for the people involved will be the same as for the things
involved, since the relation between the people will be the same as the relation between the
29
While some have seen in this resort to nomos an evasive transposition of the problem of
commensurability (Marx 1976 [1867], 151; Meikle 1995), others have stressed the open-ended
political nature of this reliance on conventionality (Castoriadis 1978). For a subtle reconciliation,
see Chakrabarty (2000, 55).
19
things involved.” (NE 1131a21). Monetary exchange not only rendered objects commensurate
but affirmed a conventional relation of equality between the parties of exchange.
Commentators have long debated whether and how the relative standing of the parties of
exchange is somehow reflected in the terms of exchange.30 Once we appreciate that reciprocal
exchange occurs at the level of nomos and is based on proportional equality, it is however
possible for fair equality to be achieved even where the terms of exchange vary according to the
underlying worth (axia) of the parties of exchange. While this runs counter to modern
conceptions of how price systems work all it suggests is that, according to Aristotle, ancient
monetary exchange involved an element of honor that reflected the relative social standing of the
parties of exchange.31 In the special case of two parties with equal standing – for example two
citizens in a democratic polis – there is no divergence in honor. But if the social standing differs
between the parties of exchange monetary exchange is complemented by an exchange of honor.
As Gallagher (2012) has pointed out, when Aristotle discusses friendship among unequals in the
Eudemian Ethics, fair equality requires acts of exchange that involve both money and honor. The
superior party will receive less (or give more) in monetary terms to reflect their greater worth.
But that loss will be made up in honor. “Friendship must be equalized [anisasai] and analogy
[analogon] secured by some other means,” Aristotle explains, “and this means is honor.” (EE
30
Meikle (1995, 135-146), in particular, has forcefully argued that the parties of exchange are
equal from the outset and therefore do not need to be equalized. Gauthier and Jolif (1970)
provide a good overview of the debate and its stakes.
31
This was also how Polanyi (1957, 88) read the passage by stressing the importance of the
relative worth or status of the parties of exchange.
20
1242b18-21)32 Exchange produces fair equality if the balance of money and honor reflects the
relative worth of the exchanging parties.33
Measure of Political Justice
But to appreciate the wider political significance of monetary reciprocity it is necessary
to read nomisma in the light of Aristotle’s account of political justice, which is after all its
immediate textual context in Book Five.34 Political justice, Aristotle explains, “belongs to those
who share in common a life aimed at self-sufficiency, who are free [eleutherōn] and equal [isōn]
either proportionately [kat’ analogian] or arithmetically [kat’ arithmon].” (NE 1134a26-28)
While household justice is based on hierarchy, political justice rests on an attempt to reconcile
difference with civic equality and shared mutuality (NE 1134b10-15). As Allen (2000, 286)
notes, Aristotelian political justice is thus itself an example of comparing incommensurables and
discovering similitude in difference. “The just [to dikaion],” Aristotle tells us, “is some kind of
analogy [analogon]” (NE 1131a29-30).
Aristotle’s oscillating references to proportional and arithmetic equality – what Vlastos
(1984, 42) called his “acrobatic linguistic posture” – have nonetheless often frustrated
32
Aristotle describes this reciprocal equalization here as a “diagonal conjunction [diametron
suzeuxis],” the exact expression he uses in the Nicomachean Ethics (1133a7-14) to describe the
relation between farmer and physician. See Gallagher (2012, 690).
33
This reading thus accommodates Meikle’s (1995) insistence on the arithmetic equality of the
parties of exchange as a special case. While reciprocity is based on fair equality it collapses into
arithmetic equality if the parties share the same worth, as is the case in a democratic regime.
34
When I refer to political justice in this article I have in mind what Aristotle calls “to politikon
dikaion.” For his distinction between “what is just” (tō dikaiōn), as established in Athens by
assembly and the popular courts, and the character trait of righteousness (dikaiosynē)
championed by Plato, see Cammack (2015).
21
commentators.35 Yet if we understand equality (to ison) here not as arithmetic equality but as
proportional or fair equality – as Allen, Irwin, and Lord propose – the puzzle disappears. Once
we conceive of political justice as aiming to achieve or preserve a status of fair equality, it
becomes clear why Aristotle repeatedly describes justice as a form of analogy and a kind of
mean. “Doing justice,” he writes, “is intermediate between doing injustice and suffering
injustice, since doing injustice is having too much and suffering injustice is having too little.”
(NE 1133b30-4) Aristotle evidently conceives of political justice as a state of balance. As he puts
it, “the just [to dikaion] is equality [ison], as seems true to everyone even without argument. And
since equality [to ison] is a mean [meson], the just [to dikaion] is some sort of mean [meson].”
(NE 1131a13-4) But to find that mean, excesses and insufficiencies have to be measured
somehow. To find likeness in difference and to compare like to unlike, political justice requires
elaborate tools of analogy and reciprocity.36
Danielle Allen in particular has persuasively drawn attention to the political centrality of
analogy and reciprocity by illustrating how the metaphorical use of speech can generate civic
trust and affirm relations of civic equality among citizens (Allen 2004). But besides law and
speech this was also the task of currency. Tellingly, the examples Aristotle provides for political
justice all involve quantities, fines, and prices (cf. NE 1134b19-20). As we already saw, both
metaphorical speech and currency are defined by Aristotle as tools of analogy that can bridge
35
The discussion of proportional reciprocity in the Ethics (NE 1132b34) is for example
sometimes contrasted with his brief reference to reciprocal equality (to ison to antipeponthos) in
the Politics (1261a30-32). Some translators have accordingly even dismissed the addition of “to
ison” in the Politics as an interpolation. See, for example, Ross’s (1957) translation and
commentary of the Politics.
36
This means furthermore that political justice does not reflect universal rules but varies between
different polities, as do systems of measurement and currencies (NE 1131a24-29; 1135a1-6).
Aristotle’s metaphors of measurement are thus doubly apt. For political justice not only requires
the use of measurements but varies itself like a measure.
22
difference. In the context of the polis, the management of difference meant the construction of
civic relations of trust and reciprocity between citizens who came from different demes and thus
encountered each other as strangers despite sharing in the same constitution.
Exchange in words and coins was the glue that brought citizens into contact with each
other, allowed for their recognition of shared interests, and sustained their civic bond – most
obviously in the agora, the public gathering space for the exchange of money and words. As
Bresson (2016, 268) puts it elegantly, “[e]xchange constituted the very definition of political
speech.” Exchanges between citizens solidified a mutual trust that their relation was one of civic
equality, not domination. Moreover, the trust fostered by monetary reciprocity was no longer
personal trust in the other party of exchange but an impersonal trust mediated by the polis.
Instead, civic trust relied on the fair administration of political justice that ensured that citizens
did not exploit each other. The second political role of currency consists in this Aristotelian
conception of nomisma as a measure of political justice. “In a way nomisma becomes an
intermediate, since it measures everything, and so measures excess and deficiency.” (NE
1133a22-23)37 Insofar as the polis employs nomisma to correct for excess and deficiency, it turns
money into a currency of justice.
Virtuous Activities
Besides currency’s role as a tool of civic commensurability and political justice there is a
third way in which nomisma exercised an important political function in Aristotle’s rendering of
the polis. Currency allowed for the cultivation of virtues of citizenship by encouraging a range of
voluntary activities that furthered civic-mindedness and checked the limitless accumulation of
wealth. To be sure, reining in unmoderated desires (pleonexia) is primarily a question of a well37
Will (1954) spelled out nomisma’s role as a medium of distributive justice most explicitly.
23
habituated virtuous character and disposition. But since in Aristotle’s account virtuous habits
require a political frame the purpose of the polis is to enable a virtuous life based on proper
habituation. And numerous activities of virtuous citizenship were directly or indirectly linked to
currency. This was true most obviously for the various forms of reciprocal monetary exchange,
ranging from the encounter of citizens in the agora satisfying their material needs to the honorific
award of coins for outstanding achievements or attendance of the assembly and law courts. But it
also found expression in a number of other voluntary activities associated with the polis.38
Not only were most Aristotelian prohairetic activities only possible within a political
community but many related directly or indirectly to the administration of the city or even the
administration of the city’s currency. Decisions in law courts often contained an important
monetary dimension that required judgment of the necessary fine. The inspection of contracts
and transactions not only ensured fair exchange but also countered the temptation to equate
material wealth with true wealth.39 It reminded citizens of the actual purpose of exchange: “to
satisfy each other’s necessary needs [chreian]” and “to achieve self-sufficiency, which is thought
to be what leads people to join together in one constitution.” (Pol. 1321b15-7) Tellingly, when
the Athenian visitor in Plato’s Laws emphasizes the political importance of market stewards, he
plays on the shared linguistic origin of currency (nomisma) and regulations (nomima) (Plato,
Laws 916d-918a).40 The city’s currency and its laws here once more mirror and complement
each other in their joint service to political justice.
38
Frank (2005, 92) highlights some of the possibilities, such as filling public offices and
fulfilling public services that involved judgment and deliberation.
39
This takes us back to Pol. 1257b7 where Aristotle warns against the confused equation of
wealth (chrēmata) with currency (nomisma) and need (chreia).
40
Aristotle highlights the offices of market care and the inspection of transactions similarly as
“first among the necessary offices” (Pol. 1321b13; see also Aristotle 1935, 138 [Ath. Pol. 51.1]).
24
Combining the Two Sides of the Coin
The argument presented so far might appear to run counter to Aristotle’s well-known
critique of wealth accumulation (Pol. 1256b39-1258b7). As I want to clarify in this section, the
opposite is the case. To emphasize the political significance of currency does not do away with
Aristotle’s critique of accumulation but instead forms an underappreciated corollary. I already
noted above how the political dimension of currency in Aristotle’s account is easily obscured if
we render reciprocity (to antipeponthos) too narrowly as retribution or understand it merely as
commercial exchange. But the argument is also rendered invisible if Aristotle’s critique of
unnatural wealth accumulation is interpreted too broadly as a critique of all monetary exchange.
Instead, it is important to distinguish his critique of accumulation from his simultaneous reliance
on currency as a political institution.
Crucially, Aristotle structures his critique of unnatural wealth-accumulation
(chrēmatistikē) not around a discussion of currency (nomisma) but instead around an
investigation of the pitfalls of acquiring material wealth in general (chrēmata). Where he does
engage with nomisma in these passages it is precisely to show the confusion involved in desiring
a token for its own sake. This conceptual distinction between currency and wealth is far from
unique to Aristotle but can be traced through many ancient texts. The Athenian visitor in Plato’s
Laws (870a), for example, voices his worry about the accumulation of wealth (chrēmatōn). In his
poems, Solon similarly scathingly criticized not money but the excessive and insatiable desires
for material riches that threatened to undermine the city (Solon 1982, 118; Seaford 2004, 206;
von Reden 1995, 182). What is striking about these and other instances is that even though many
25
translations of the passages speak of money, the underlying Greek term is always chrēmata, not
nomisma.41
Currency, to be sure, is itself a form of wealth. Not only were most ancient Greek coins
made of precious metal but even where they traded at a conventional value based on their stamp
they obviously possessed purchasing power. In as far as nomisma is a form of material wealth, it
is thus itself a potential tool of acquisitiveness. Not unreasonably, some commentators have
consequently wondered whether coinage somehow worsened the corrupting effect of wealth
accumulation (see, for example, Frank 2005, 90). But tellingly Aristotle never blames nomisma
for the corruption associated with wealth-accumulation. What matters instead is the use to which
coins are put: do they enable the procurement of goods necessary for the good life and sustain
relations of reciprocity in the city? Or do they serve the accumulation of wealth for its own sake?
Monetary exchange conducted in coinage and for the right purpose fulfills a crucial role in the
political community.
My point is thus not to deny or diminish Aristotle’s critique about wealth accumulation
but to conceptually distinguish it from the political purposes of coinage and to suggest that
checking wealth-accumulation might even have to rely on currency. The problem of excessive
desires was not introduced by coinage but preceded it.42 What was new about coinage was that it
constituted a political attempt to control some of the effects of trade and wealth. In the form of
coinage money now bore the sign of the polis, reminding citizens of their civic ties and
obligations (Bresson 2016, 270). Nomisma is not at the root of the problem of excessive wealth
41
Saunders (Plato 1997, 1528) and Schofield (2006, 259), for example, speak of money in
translating the above passage from Plato’s Laws.
42
Trade had been widespread long before the invention of coinage. Indeed, even after the
widespread adoption of coinage foreign trade outside of the Greek world continued to be mostly
conducted in unstamped silver.
26
but forms an attempt to delimit potentially limitless accumulation and to bind commerce to the
polity and its laws. With the introduction of its own currency the polis attempted to gain control
over the effects of wealth and trade. Now the polis could impose taxes, change the standard of
value, measure wealth, ask for redistributions, and punish transgressions.
Instead of an argument of how the abstraction of money deepened habits of corrupted
acquisitiveness – an argument too familiar to us from early-modern authors such as John Locke –
Aristotle stresses that unnatural wealth accumulation originates in a flawed character disposition
(diathesis) marked by an excessive enchantment with material wealth and a tendency to chase
the fleeting promises of limitless gratification. “The reason they are so disposed [diatheseōs],” he
explains, “is that they are preoccupied with living, not with living well. … they spend all their
time acquiring material wealth [chrēmatismos].” (Pol. 1258a11-4) It is tempting to see money as
having worsened the reign of unmoderated desires. But the Greeks rarely, if ever, expressed the
worry of commercial corruption in terms of a historical story pivoting around the invention of
money.43 Instead, they framed it in terms of the consequences of a badly habituated character and
the moral and psychological failure of having chosen the wrong kind of life. Emphasizing
currency’s political role points us in this sense back to Aristotle’s original description of
currency as a substitute for use, not wealth (Pol. 1257b15-18) However imperfectly, as a
political institution currency contributes to this enterprise. Despite being entangled in the
confusions of wealth accumulation, currency is intended to abstractly express needs and serve
them as a measure of deficiency and excess in the just political community, as well as a tool of
reciprocity and trust that relates citizens to each other.
43
Pol. 1257b1-2 comes closest to such a narrative in Aristotle. But the use of nomisma here (as
well as in NE 1133b28) arguably constitutes an anachronism, perhaps simply resulting from the
lack of a Greek term for pre-coinage money.
27
The Politics of Money
As I have argued, the spread of coinage forms a neglected background to Aristotle’s
account of reciprocity and exchange in the just polis. Money coined by the polis asserted the
authority of the community over questions of value and politicized commercial exchange and the
accumulation of wealth by forcing them to be conducted in the conventional token of the
political community. Whereas wealth-accumulation is limitless (apeiron), Aristotle notes,
nomisma can serve as “its limiting factor” (peras) (Pol. 1257b24; see also Seaford 2004, 279).
Bearing the stamp of the polis, coinage inserted the polis into previously bilateral transactions.
By rewarding the participation of citizens in public offices, distributing wealth and honor, and
punishing wrongdoings through fines, coinage helped to sustain civic ties between citizens. As a
political institution, currency was a tool of reciprocity that related citizens to each other and
nourished the trust necessary for shared life in a just political community.
The political significance of currency was deeply rooted across the ancient Greek world.
The more familiar ancient suspicion of acquisitiveness – Socrates’ defense in the Apology (19e20c) was after all that he had never charged for his teachings – easily obscures that ancient
political thought at the same time extensively acknowledged coinage as a central political
institution. The guardians of Plato’s Republic may have been banned from handling precious
metals (Rep. 416e-417a) but the citizens of Kallipolis relied on currency as an institution
essential for civic co-existence. Even the city of pigs already used nomisma as a token
(sumbolon) for exchange (Rep. 371b).44 Ever since its introduction into the classical Greek world
coinage was not only seen as a fraught vehicle of acquisitiveness but also as an institution of
44
On Plato’s position see Picard (2001), Seaford (2004, 250), and Bresson (2012).
28
societal value closely associated with the political community. Understood and used the right
way, monetary exchange formed a core aspect of the just polis.
This re-framing not only affects interpretations of ancient political thought but also
encourages us to interrogate the pliability of the boundary between political and economic
thought today. After all, most political thinkers throughout history regarded currency as a central
political institution – “of the same nature as law,” as Jean Bodin ([1576] 1992, 78) put it. For
Hobbes, money and the modern state even shared a fictional character based on collective
acknowledgment (Hobbes 2008, 180-181; Hobbes 1991 [1651], 127; see also Runciman 2003).
While modernity may have depoliticized the appearance of money, the dual rise of public credit
and fiat money have only deepened the political significance of currency at the heart of the
modern state.
In tranquil times, money can appear to be little more than an economic means of
exchange and accumulation. In periods of crisis, however, the politics of money becomes visible
again and reminds us that currency is also a political institution. The financial crisis constituted a
reminder of this inescapability of the politics of money. But it also once more revealed money’s
conventionality and malleability. The seeming alchemy of fiat money that had been successfully
repressed since the 1970s has since stirred up a certain wariness. This understandable impulse
should make us pause. Instead of being unsettled by the conventional character of currency, we
should acknowledge its underdetermined political possibilities. Instead of opposing money to
politics, Aristotle invites us think of the politics of money as a question of justice.
29
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