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Looking at it from another side: is Achilles possible side by side with powder and lead? Or is the Iliad at all compatible with the printing press and steam press? Does not singing and reciting and the muses necessarily go out of existence with the appearance of the printer's bar, and do not, therefore, disappear the prerequisites of epic poetry?
But the difficulty is not in grasping the idea that Greek art and epos are bound up with certain forms of social development. It rather lies in understanding why they still constitute with us a source of aesthetic enjoyment and in certain respects prePg 312vail as the standard and model beyond attainment.
A man can not become a child again unless he becomes childish. But does he not enjoy the artless ways of the child and must he not strive to reproduce its truth on a higher plane? Is not the character of every epoch revived perfectly true to nature in child nature? Why should the social childhood of mankind, where it had obtained its most beautiful development, not exert an eternal charm as an age that will never return? There are ill-bred children and precocious children. Many of the ancient nations belong to the latter class. The Greeks were normal children. The charm their art has for us does not conflict with the primitive character of the social order from which it had sprung. It is rather the product of the latter, and is rather due to the fact that the unripe social conditions under which the art arose and under which alone it could appear can never return.
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[1] Cf. Seligman, "The Economic Interpretation of History." MacMillan. 1902.
[2] Aristotle, d. Rep. L. l, c. 9 (edit. I Bekkeri Oxonii, 1837)
" ... , ' ', . h h h h, ' . ."
("Of everything which we possess there are two uses:—one is the proper, and the other the improper or secondary use of it. For example, a shoe is used for wear, and is used for exchange; both are uses of the shoe. He who gives a shoe in exchange for money or food to him who wants one, does indeed use the shoe as a shoe, but this is not its proper or primary purpose, for a shoe is not made to be an object of barter. The same may be said of all possessions." The Politics of Aristotle, translated into English by B. Jowett, Oxford, 1885, v. I., p. 15.)
[3] That is the reason why German compilers are so fond of dwelling on use-value, calling it a "good." See e. g. L. Stein, "System der Staatswissenschaften," v. I., chapter on "goods" (Gtter). For intelligent information on "goods" one must turn to treatises on commodities.
[4] A ridiculous presumption has gained currency of late to the effect that common property in its primitive form is specifically a Slavonian, or even exclusively Russian form. It is the primitive form which we can prove to have existed among Romans, Teutons, and Celts; and of which numerous examples are still to be found in India, though in a partly ruined state. A closer study of the Asiatic, especially of Indian forms of communal ownership would show how from the different forms of primitive communism different forms of its dissolution have been developed. Thus e. g. the various original types of Roman and Teutonic private property can be traced back to various forms of Indian communism.
[5] "La Ricchezza una ragione tra due persone." ("Value is a relation between two persons") Galiani, "Della Moneta," p. 220 in vol. II. of Custodi's collection of "Scrittori classici Italiani di Economia Politica. Parte Moderna," Milano, 1803.
[6] "In its natural state, matter ... is always destitute of value." McCulloch, "A Discourse on the Rise, Progress, Peculiar Objects, and Importance of Political Economy," 2nd edition, Edinburgh, 1825, pg. 48. It is evident how even a McCulloch stands above the fetishism of German "thinkers", who declare "matter" and half a dozen other foreign things to be elements of value. Cf. e. g. L. Stein, l. c. v. I., p. 110.
[7] Berkeley, The Querist, London, 1750.
[8] Thomas Cooper, Lectures on the Elements of Political Economy, London, 1831, p. 99.
[9] F. List could never grasp the difference between labor as a source of use-value and labor as the creator of certain social form of wealth or exchange value, because comprehension was altogether foreign to his practical mind; he therefore saw in the modern English economists mere plagiarists of Moses, the Egyptian.
[10] It can be readily understood what kind of "service" is rendered by the category "service" to economists of the type of J. B. Say and F. Bastiat, whose pondering sagacity, as Malthus has justly remarked, always abstracts from the specially definite forms of economic relations.
[11] "Egli proprio ancora delle misure d'aver si fatta relazione colle cose misurate, che in certo modo la misurata divien misura della misurante." Montanari, Della Moneta, p. 48 in v. III of Custodi's "Scrittori classici Italiani di Economia Politica. Parte Antica." ("It is the property of measure to be in such a relation to the things measured, that in a certain way the thing measured becomes the measure of the measuring thing.")
[12] It is in that sense that Aristotle (see the passage quoted at the beginning of this chapter) conceives exchange value.
[13] This expression is used by Genovesi.
[14] Aristotle makes the same remark with reference to the private family as the primitive community. But the primitive form of family is the tribal family, from the historical dissolution of which the private family develops. ( ' ) (namely ) "And in the first community, which is the family, this art is obviously of no use." Jowett's transl. l. c.)
[15] "Money is, in fact, only the instrument for carrying on buying and selling (but, if you please, what do you understand by buying and selling?) and the consideration of it no more forms a part of the science of political economy, than the consideration of ships, or steam engines, or of any other instrument employed to facilitate the production and distribution of wealth." Th. Hodgskin, Popular Political Economy, etc. London, 1827, p. 178, 179.
