The New Household Economy

In the revival of scholarly interest in Marx's relationship to one of the greatest of his teachers, Aristotle, a crucial aspect has been undervalued: Marx's indebtedness to ancient political economy. While Marx employed the methods and key concepts of the economic science of his day in analyzing capitalism, he embedded that explanation in a higher-order theory of the economy. This theory, derived from the Aristotelian account of the household economy, seeks to situate the economy in an overarching account of the community, its purposiveness, and the place within it of activity, time, and domination. Marx sought thereby to illuminate the historical uniqueness of capitalism and, relatedly, to show the bounded character of the economic science (including his own) appropriate to the understanding of it. Central elements of the Aristotelian critique of an economy given over to Midas-like acquisition also find their way into Marx's evaluation of capitalism, and the ideal of the ancient oikos forms one of the core parts of Marx's theory of communism as the new household economy.