[go: up one dir, main page]
IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/cambje/v44y2020i6p1429-1434..html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Aristotle’s geometrical accounting

Author

Listed:
  • M G Hayes
Abstract
This paper comments on Ambrosi’s ‘Aristotle’s geometrical accounting’ (Cambridge Journal of Economics 2018, 42, 543–576). While supporting Ambrosi’s case that Aristotle may well have used geometry to demonstrate accounting equivalence, the paper takes issue with Ambrosi’s specific approach to interpreting Aristotle’s ‘merit or worth’ in terms of income. It is entirely reasonable to understand worth in terms of income. However, Ambrosi implies that worth is determined by market prices; this is inconsistent with Aristotle’s treatment of distributive justice. Rather Aristotle states that relative worth is determined prior to market exchange. In other words, Aristotle seeks to identify the just price to which market prices may or may not correspond. Ambrosi’s own geometrical method is extended to illustrate this point, to provide a geometrical alternative to Ambrosi’s algebraic derivation of the key proposition ‘as builder to shoemaker, so shoes to houses’, and to resolve what Aristotle means by ‘one should not introduce them as terms in a figure of proportion when they are already making the exchange (since otherwise one of the two extremes will have both of the excess amounts) but when they are still in possession of their own products’. Aristotle deserves recognition as the first Western economist and as a Classical economist to boot, in the sense of holding that distribution is determined prior to exchange.

Suggested Citation

  • M G Hayes, 2020. "Aristotle’s geometrical accounting," Cambridge Journal of Economics, Cambridge Political Economy Society, vol. 44(6), pages 1429-1434.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:cambje:v:44:y:2020:i:6:p:1429-1434.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/cje/beaa025
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Nicomachean Ethics; Just price;

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:cambje:v:44:y:2020:i:6:p:1429-1434.. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/cje .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.