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125-553: From its founding, the purpose of the Association has been to further the education of scholars and the public in economic affairs. Toward this end, it seeks to stimulate interest in and disseminate results of recent research in theory and applied economics. The membership of the SEA includes a diverse set of scholars, with a great range in their substantive interests and in their methods of inquiry. The Southern Economic Journal (SEJ)

250-527: A genos , "family"; the Italics, a gens . Corresponding to Greek phratry , a group of families, was the Italic curia . Corresponding to Greek phyle , a tribe of multiple phratries, was the tribus . The comparison of IE cultures is a solid technique, but it is not enough to develop a solid model of "the ancient city", which must take historical disparities into consideration. From the analogy Coulanges weaves

375-473: A sovereign state . As a strict rule, the definition fails on its exceptions. A polis may not be urban at all, as was pointed out by Thucydides regarding the "polis of the Lacedaemonians", that it was "composed of villages after the old fashion of Hellas". Moreover, around the five villages of Lacedaemon, which had been placed in formerly Achaean land, were the villages of the former Achaeans, called

500-484: A city nor an acropolis, but all the historiographers referred to it as a polis. The rule of the city-state persisted until late in the 20th century, when the accumulation of mass data and sponsored databases made possible searches and comparisons of multiple sources not previously possible, a few of which are mentioned in this article. Hansen reports that the Copenhagen Centre found it necessary to "dissociate

625-590: A community politically or to enlarge the buildings in which it resides. Finally in the Classical Period and later, the -z-/-s- extension began to be used, as evidenced in Thucydides, Xenophon, and Plutarch: sunoik-izein, "combine or join into one city", with its nouns sunoik-isis and sunoik-ismos, "founding a city", from which the English scholarly term synoecism derives. All poleis looked back to

750-702: A definition of economics as a study of human behaviour, subject to and constrained by scarcity, which forces people to choose, allocate scarce resources to competing ends, and economise (seeking the greatest welfare while avoiding the wasting of scarce resources). According to Robbins: "Economics is the science which studies human behavior as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses". Robbins' definition eventually became widely accepted by mainstream economists, and found its way into current textbooks. Although far from unanimous, most mainstream economists would accept some version of Robbins' definition, even though many have raised serious objections to

875-489: A different polis. These are three. A polis has a particular location, population, and constitution ( politeia ). For example, if a polis moves en masse, receives a different form of government, or an influx of new population, it is not the same polis. Aristotle expresses two main definitions of polis, neither of which is possible as stated. In the second (see below for the first) a polis is "a collection of citizens...." (Book III I 2). If they already are citizens, then there

1000-451: A distinct field. The book focused on determinants of national income in the short run when prices are relatively inflexible. Keynes attempted to explain in broad theoretical detail why high labour-market unemployment might not be self-correcting due to low " effective demand " and why even price flexibility and monetary policy might be unavailing. The term "revolutionary" has been applied to the book in its impact on economic analysis. During

1125-514: A federation with binding membership, etc. The Perioeci were included in this category. When the models are set aside as primary sources (which they never were) it is clear that historiography must be founded on what the authors and inscriptions say. Moreover, there is a time window for the active polis. The fact that polis was used in the Middle Ages to translate civitas does not make these civitates into poleis. The Copenhagen Study uses quite

1250-521: A few evidential indications of a probable polis, in addition to the manuscripts and inscriptions, some of which are victory in the Panhellenic Games, participation in the games, having an official agent, or proxenos, in another polis, presence of civic subdivisions, presence of citizens and a Constitution (Laws). Modern theorists of the polis are theorizing under a major disadvantage: their topic has not been current for thousands of years. It

1375-420: A lower relative cost of production, rather relying only on its own production. It has been termed a "fundamental analytical explanation" for gains from trade . Coming at the end of the classical tradition, John Stuart Mill (1848) parted company with the earlier classical economists on the inevitability of the distribution of income produced by the market system. Mill pointed to a distinct difference between

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1500-449: A more comprehensive theory of costs on the supply side. In the 20th century, neoclassical theorists departed from an earlier idea that suggested measuring total utility for a society, opting instead for ordinal utility , which posits behaviour-based relations across individuals. In microeconomics , neoclassical economics represents incentives and costs as playing a pervasive role in shaping decision making . An immediate example of this

1625-467: A more important role in mainstream economic theory. Also, heterogeneity among the economic agents, e.g. differences in income, plays an increasing role in recent economic research. Other schools or trends of thought referring to a particular style of economics practised at and disseminated from well-defined groups of academicians that have become known worldwide, include the Freiburg School ,

1750-613: A precedent of jumping over the wall in mockery of it. There were no families, no phratries, no tribes, except among the already settled Latins, Greeks, and Etruscans. The warriors acquired a social structure by kidnapping the nearby Italic Sabines (" the Rape of the Sabine Women ") and settling the matter by agreeing on a synoecism with the Sabines also, who were Latins. Alba Longa was ignored, later subdued. The first four tribes were not

1875-518: A priori assumptions as though they were substantiated facts and were not the pure speculations they actually are. One of the most influential of these translative models was the French La Cite antique , translated again into English "the ancient city", by Coulanges. Only to read the title gives credibility to the idea that there is a model type inclusive of all ancient cities, and that the author need only present it without proving it. This type

2000-597: A proportion of the value their work had created. Marxian economics was further developed by Karl Kautsky (1854–1938)'s The Economic Doctrines of Karl Marx and The Class Struggle (Erfurt Program) , Rudolf Hilferding 's (1877–1941) Finance Capital , Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924)'s The Development of Capitalism in Russia and Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism , and Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919)'s The Accumulation of Capital . At its inception as

2125-409: A rapidly growing population against a limited amount of land meant diminishing returns to labour. The result, he claimed, was chronically low wages, which prevented the standard of living for most of the population from rising above the subsistence level. Economist Julian Simon has criticised Malthus's conclusions. While Adam Smith emphasised production and income, David Ricardo (1817) focused on

2250-469: A set of stable preferences, a definite overall guiding objective, and the capability of making a choice. There exists an economic problem, subject to study by economic science, when a decision (choice) is made by one or more players to attain the best possible outcome. Keynesian economics derives from John Maynard Keynes , in particular his book The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936), which ushered in contemporary macroeconomics as

2375-500: A single site, and the single city belongs to its citizens in common." Aristotle's description fits the landscape archaeology of the poleis in the Copenhagen Study well. The study defines settlement patterns of first-, second-, and third-order. The third, dispersed , is individual oikiai distributed more or less evenly throughout the countryside. The other two orders are nucleated, or clustered. 2nd-order settlements are

2500-409: A single tax on income of land owners. In reaction against copious mercantilist trade regulations, the physiocrats advocated a policy of laissez-faire , which called for minimal government intervention in the economy. Adam Smith (1723–1790) was an early economic theorist. Smith was harshly critical of the mercantilists but described the physiocratic system "with all its imperfections" as "perhaps

2625-452: A social science, economics was defined and discussed at length as the study of production, distribution, and consumption of wealth by Jean-Baptiste Say in his Treatise on Political Economy or, The Production, Distribution, and Consumption of Wealth (1803). These three items were considered only in relation to the increase or diminution of wealth, and not in reference to their processes of execution. Say's definition has survived in part up to

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2750-435: A sought after end). Some subsequent comments criticised the definition as overly broad in failing to limit its subject matter to analysis of markets. From the 1960s, however, such comments abated as the economic theory of maximizing behaviour and rational-choice modelling expanded the domain of the subject to areas previously treated in other fields. There are other criticisms as well, such as in scarcity not accounting for

2875-446: A synoecism under any name as their source of politeia . Not all settlements were poleis; for example, an emporion, or "market reserved for foreign trade", might be part of a polis or out on its own. In any particular synoecism recorded by either ancient or modern epigraphists a major problem has been to fit the model credibly to the instance. For example, Thucydides refers to Spartan lack of urbanity as "not synoecised", where synoecism

3000-442: A synthesis emerged by the 2000s, often given the name the new neoclassical synthesis . It integrated the rational expectations and optimizing framework of the new classical theory with a new Keynesian role for nominal rigidities and other market imperfections like imperfect information in goods, labour and credit markets. The monetarist importance of monetary policy in stabilizing the economy and in particular controlling inflation

3125-422: A tale of imaginary history. Families, he asserts, originally lived dispersed and alone (a presumption of Aristotle as well). When the population grew to a certain point, families joined into phratries. Further growth caused phratries to join into tribes, and then tribes into a city. In the city the ancient tribes remained sacrosanct. The city was actually a confederacy of ancient tribes. Coulange's tale, based on

3250-503: Is a publication of the Southern Economic Association. The journal began its publication in 1933 and it is the 8th oldest American academic journal in the economic profession. This article about an economics organization is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Economics Economics ( / ˌ ɛ k ə ˈ n ɒ m ɪ k s , ˌ iː k ə -/ ) is a social science that studies

3375-421: Is a term for the "way (nomos) to run a household (oikos)", or in other words the know-how of an οἰκονομικός ( oikonomikos ), or "household or homestead manager". Derived terms such as "economy" can therefore often mean "frugal" or "thrifty". By extension then, "political economy" was the way to manage a polis or state. There are a variety of modern definitions of economics ; some reflect evolving views of

3500-429: Is actually a lessening of unity and would destroy the state. The individual is actually most united and effective; the polis the least. To take away the property and therefore the powers of the individual diminishes the state to nothing, as it is composed of citizens, and those citizens have been rendered null and void by the removal of their effectiveness. As an example Aristotle gives a plot of land, which owned by one man

3625-438: Is also applied to such diverse subjects as crime , education , the family , feminism , law , philosophy , politics , religion , social institutions , war , science , and the environment . The earlier term for the discipline was "political economy", but since the late 19th century, it has commonly been called "economics". The term is ultimately derived from Ancient Greek οἰκονομία ( oikonomia ) which

3750-640: Is based on the ancient practice of translating polis in Greek literature to civitas (early form of city) in Latin literature and vice versa. Coulanges' confidence that the Greek and Italic cities were the same model was based on the then newly discovered Indo-European language : "Go back as far as we may in the history of the Indo-European race, of which the Greeks and Italians are branches,...." The Greeks had

3875-414: Is carefully tended, but owned by the whole community belongs to no one and is untended. The ideal state therefore is impossible, a mere logical construct accounting for some of the factors, but failing of others, which Aristotle's examples suffice to demonstrate. For example, in some hypothetical place of no polis, a buyer would apply to an individual builder for a house. In an ideal polis, he would apply to

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4000-574: Is highly critical. The Theory of the State is not so much political by today's definition. The politics are covered by the New Plan. The topic of the Old Plan is rather society , and is generally presented today in sociology and cultural anthropology . At the end of Book III, however, Aristotle encounters certain problems of definition that he cannot reconcile through theorization and has to abandon

4125-434: Is no need for anyone to collect to create a polis, as it already exists. If they are not citizens then they cannot be defined as a polis and cannot act as such. Aristotle's only consistent meaning is that at the moment of collecting together a population creates a polis of which they are now citizens. This moment of creation, however long it might be, is a logical necessity; otherwise, the citizenship recedes indefinitely into

4250-409: Is not left to the moderns to redefine polis as though it were a living institution. All that remains to ask is how the ancients defined it. It is not to be redefined now; for example, a polis is not a list of architectural features based on ruins. Any community might have those. Moderns can only ask, what did the ancient Greeks think a polis is. Whatever they thought must per force be so, as they invented

4375-445: Is not whether poleis can be found to fit a particular model (some usually can), but whether the model covers all the poleis, which, apparently, no model ever has, even the ancient ones. The re-defining process continues. The Copenhagen study rejects either model and proposes instead the microstate. Some few scholars have become totally cynical, rejecting the idea that any solution has been or can be found. This argument places polis in

4500-413: Is promoting it. By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it

4625-598: Is the consumer theory of individual demand, which isolates how prices (as costs) and income affect quantity demanded. In macroeconomics it is reflected in an early and lasting neoclassical synthesis with Keynesian macroeconomics. Neoclassical economics is occasionally referred as orthodox economics whether by its critics or sympathisers. Modern mainstream economics builds on neoclassical economics but with many refinements that either supplement or generalise earlier analysis, such as econometrics , game theory , analysis of market failure and imperfect competition , and

4750-406: Is the creation of common living quarters (see above). Here apparently it means only the building of a central urban area. The reader of Plutarch knows that another synoecism existed, one instituted by Lycurgus, founder of the military state. The single overall synoecism is apparently double, one for the facilities, missing in this story, and one for the constitution. He uses the same word to describe

4875-440: Is to know what information to select for a model and what to neglect as probably irrelevant. Classical studies of the last few hundred years have been relatively stable in their views of the polis, relying basically on just a few models: the concept of a city-state, and Fustel de Coulange's model of the ancient city. However, no model ever seems to resolve all the paradoxes or provide for every newly considered instance. The question

5000-540: The Perioeci ("dwellers round"). They had been left as supposedly free poleis by the invaders, but they were subject to and served the interests of the Dorian poleis. They were not city-states, failing the criterion of sovereignty. Lacedaemon by the city-state rule thus falls short of being a polis. The earlier Achaean acropolis stood at the edge of the valley and was decrepit and totally unused. Lacedaemon had neither

5125-780: The School of Lausanne , the Stockholm school and the Chicago school of economics . During the 1970s and 1980s mainstream economics was sometimes separated into the Saltwater approach of those universities along the Eastern and Western coasts of the US, and the Freshwater, or Chicago school approach. Within macroeconomics there is, in general order of their historical appearance in

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5250-433: The macroeconomics of high unemployment. Gary Becker , a contributor to the expansion of economics into new areas, described the approach he favoured as "combin[ing the] assumptions of maximizing behaviour, stable preferences , and market equilibrium , used relentlessly and unflinchingly." One commentary characterises the remark as making economics an approach rather than a subject matter but with great specificity as to

5375-467: The neoclassical model of economic growth for analysing long-run variables affecting national income . Neoclassical economics studies the behaviour of individuals , households , and organisations (called economic actors, players, or agents), when they manage or use scarce resources, which have alternative uses, to achieve desired ends. Agents are assumed to act rationally, have multiple desirable ends in sight, limited resources to obtain these ends,

5500-818: The production , distribution , and consumption of goods and services . Economics focuses on the behaviour and interactions of economic agents and how economies work. Microeconomics analyses what is viewed as basic elements within economies , including individual agents and markets , their interactions, and the outcomes of interactions. Individual agents may include, for example, households, firms, buyers, and sellers. Macroeconomics analyses economies as systems where production, distribution, consumption, savings , and investment expenditure interact, and factors affecting it: factors of production , such as labour , capital , land , and enterprise , inflation , economic growth , and public policies that have impact on these elements . It also seeks to analyse and describe

5625-415: The societal to the microeconomic level: Economics is a study of man in the ordinary business of life. It enquires how he gets his income and how he uses it. Thus, it is on the one side, the study of wealth and on the other and more important side, a part of the study of man. Lionel Robbins (1932) developed implications of what has been termed "[p]erhaps the most commonly accepted current definition of

5750-400: The "choice process and the type of social interaction that [such] analysis involves." The same source reviews a range of definitions included in principles of economics textbooks and concludes that the lack of agreement need not affect the subject-matter that the texts treat. Among economists more generally, it argues that a particular definition presented may reflect the direction toward which

5875-486: The 1970s and 1980s, when several major central banks followed a monetarist-inspired policy, but was later abandoned because the results were unsatisfactory. A more fundamental challenge to the prevailing Keynesian paradigm came in the 1970s from new classical economists like Robert Lucas , Thomas Sargent and Edward Prescott . They introduced the notion of rational expectations in economics, which had profound implications for many economic discussions, among which were

6000-622: The Aegean for a few thousand years prior to the Dorian invasions , forming an "aggregate, the pre-Doric city". This type of city is not to be regarded as "the Hellenic type of the polis". The Greeks set adrift by the Dorian invasions countered by joining ( synoecism ) to form the Hellenic poleis. The polis can thus be dated to this defensive resettlement period (the Dark Age). Quite a few poleis fit

6125-463: The Ancient Greek term that specifically meant the totality of urban buildings and spaces was asty ( ἄστυ ), rather than polis. The ancient word polis had socio-political connotations not possessed by the modern. For example, today's πόλη is located within a χώρα ( khôra ), "country", which is a πατρίδα (patrida) or "native land" for its citizens. In ancient Greece, the polis was

6250-792: The Copenhagen Polis Centre from 1993 to 2003 classified about 1,500 settlements of the Archaic and Classical ancient-Greek-speaking population as poleis. These ranged from the Caucasus to southern Spain, and from southern Russia to northern Egypt, spread over the shores of the Mediterranean and Black Seas. They have been termed a network of micro-states. Many of the settlements still exist; e.g., Marseille , Syracuse , Alexandria , but they are no longer Greek or micro-states, belonging to other countries. The ancient Greek world

6375-419: The Greek conception ... but this was rather owing to their less vivid mental powers than to the absence of the phenomenon." Polis is thus often translated as ' city-state '. The model, however, fares no better than any other. City-states no doubt existed, but so also did many poleis that were not city-states. The minimum semantic load of this hyphenated neologism is that the referent must be a city and must be

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6500-528: The Greek mainland. Each gave an ethnic or "racial" name to its population and poleis. Acarnania , for example was the location of the Acarnanian people and poleis. A colony from there would then be considered Acarnanian, no matter how far away from Acarnania it was. Colonization was thus the main method of spreading Greek poleis and culture. Ancient Greeks did not reserve the term polis solely for Greek-speaking settlements. For example, Aristotle's study of

6625-415: The Hellenic poleis and was continuous with the pre-Doric city phase, then pre-Doric Athens must have been a Hellenic polis even then. The model fails in its chief instance. A second approach to the modelling of the polis is not to use the word polis at all, but to translate it into the language of the historiographer. The model is thus inherent in the translation, which has the disadvantage of incorporating

6750-454: The Newer were united with a political synoecism. The first sentence of Politics asserts that a polis is a community ( koinonia ). This is Aristotle's first definition of polis (for the second, see above). The community is compared to a game of chess. The man without community is like an isolated piece (I.9). Other animals form communities, but those of men are more advantageous because men have

6875-513: The Trojan War and had placed a polis (Livy's urbs) on one of the hills named Pallantium , later becoming Palatine . He had actually raised the Trojan boys and supported them now. When the band of marauders became populous enough Romulus got them to agree to a synoecism of settlements in the hills to form a new city, Rome, to be walled in immediately. Remus had to be sacrificed because he had set

7000-407: The analysis of wealth: how wealth is created (production), distributed, and consumed; and how wealth can grow. But he said that economics can be used to study other things, such as war, that are outside its usual focus. This is because war has as the goal winning it (as a sought after end ), generates both cost and benefits; and, resources (human life and other costs) are used to attain the goal. If

7125-479: The area of inquiry or object of inquiry rather than the methodology. In the biology department, it is not said that all biology should be studied with DNA analysis. People study living organisms in many different ways, so some people will perform DNA analysis, others might analyse anatomy, and still others might build game theoretic models of animal behaviour. But they are all called biology because they all study living organisms. According to Ha Joon Chang, this view that

7250-420: The argument there is "For it is by proportionate requital that the city holds together .... and if they cannot do so there is no exchange, but it is by exchange that they hold together." In short Aristotle had stated two systems of property, one in which the polis holds everything, distributing it equally, and one in which some property is held in common but the rest is privately owned. As the former only leads to

7375-443: The author believes economics is evolving, or should evolve. Many economists including nobel prize winners James M. Buchanan and Ronald Coase reject the method-based definition of Robbins and continue to prefer definitions like those of Say, in terms of its subject matter. Ha-Joon Chang has for example argued that the definition of Robbins would make economics very peculiar because all other sciences define themselves in terms of

7500-400: The citizens and simultaneously a collection of some of the citizens. Similarly property shared by all cannot be shared by men who do not own it. These fictions led to endless conflict between and within poleis as the participants fought for citizenship they did not have and shares they did not own. A village (kome) is a community of several families (I.2). Aristotle suggests that they came from

7625-517: The colonies. Physiocrats , a group of 18th-century French thinkers and writers, developed the idea of the economy as a circular flow of income and output. Physiocrats believed that only agricultural production generated a clear surplus over cost, so that agriculture was the basis of all wealth. Thus, they opposed the mercantilist policy of promoting manufacturing and trade at the expense of agriculture, including import tariffs. Physiocrats advocated replacing administratively costly tax collections with

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7750-449: The concept of polis from the concepts of independence and autonomia". They were able to define a class of "dependent poleis" to consist of 15 types, all of which the ancient sources call poleis, but were not entirely sovereign, such as cities that had been independent, but were later synoecized into a larger polis, new colonies of other poleis, forts, ports, or trading posts some distance removed from their mother poleis, poleis that had joined

7875-488: The design of modern monetary policy and are now standard workhorses in most central banks. After the 2007–2008 financial crisis , macroeconomic research has put greater emphasis on understanding and integrating the financial system into models of the general economy and shedding light on the ways in which problems in the financial sector can turn into major macroeconomic recessions. In this and other research branches, inspiration from behavioural economics has started playing

8000-506: The distribution of income among landowners, workers, and capitalists. Ricardo saw an inherent conflict between landowners on the one hand and labour and capital on the other. He posited that the growth of population and capital, pressing against a fixed supply of land, pushes up rents and holds down wages and profits. Ricardo was also the first to state and prove the principle of comparative advantage , according to which each country should specialise in producing and exporting goods in that it has

8125-469: The economy can and should be studied in only one way (for example by studying only rational choices), and going even one step further and basically redefining economics as a theory of everything, is peculiar. Questions regarding distribution of resources are found throughout the writings of the Boeotian poet Hesiod and several economic historians have described Hesiod as the "first economist". However,

8250-751: The first large-scale macroeconometric model , applying the Keynesian thinking systematically to the US economy . Immediately after World War II, Keynesian was the dominant economic view of the United States establishment and its allies, Marxian economics was the dominant economic view of the Soviet Union nomenklatura and its allies. Monetarism appeared in the 1950s and 1960s, its intellectual leader being Milton Friedman . Monetarists contended that monetary policy and other monetary shocks, as represented by

8375-540: The following decades, many economists followed Keynes' ideas and expanded on his works. John Hicks and Alvin Hansen developed the IS–LM model which was a simple formalisation of some of Keynes' insights on the economy's short-run equilibrium. Franco Modigliani and James Tobin developed important theories of private consumption and investment , respectively, two major components of aggregate demand . Lawrence Klein built

8500-404: The fragmentary history of priesthoods, does not much resemble the history of cities such as it survives. For example, there was no familial and tribal development of Rome. Livy (Book I), the grandest of the historians of early Rome, portrays a city formed under competitive duress by a collaboration of warriors, some of whom were from among the neighboring Etruscans , led by Romulus and Remus ,

8625-509: The global economy . Other broad distinctions within economics include those between positive economics , describing "what is", and normative economics , advocating "what ought to be"; between economic theory and applied economics ; between rational and behavioural economics ; and between mainstream economics and heterodox economics . Economic analysis can be applied throughout society, including business , finance , cybersecurity , health care , engineering and government . It

8750-424: The growth in the money stock, was an important cause of economic fluctuations, and consequently that monetary policy was more important than fiscal policy for purposes of stabilisation . Friedman was also skeptical about the ability of central banks to conduct a sensible active monetary policy in practice, advocating instead using simple rules such as a steady rate of money growth. Monetarism rose to prominence in

8875-433: The holding relationship implies. In Book II Aristotle begins to face the problem. The "polis men", politai , translated as 'citizens', must logically hold everything there is to hold, nothing, or some things but not others (II.I.2). In this sociological context politai can only be all the householders sharing in the polis, free or slave, male or female, child or adult. The sum total of all the specific holdings mentioned in

9000-422: The ideal state incapable of sustaining itself. Aristotle says, "A collection of persons all alike does not constitute a state." He means that such a collection is not self-sufficient (II.1.4). He alleges the opposite: "components which are to make up a unity must differ in kind .... Hence reciprocal equality is the preservative of states, as has been said before in (Nichomachean) Ethics (1132b, 1133a)." In summary

9125-463: The importance of various market failures for the functioning of the economy, as had Keynes. Not least, they proposed various reasons that potentially explained the empirically observed features of price and wage rigidity , usually made to be endogenous features of the models, rather than simply assumed as in older Keynesian-style ones. After decades of often heated discussions between Keynesians, monetarists, new classical and new Keynesian economists,

9250-454: The individual. Families are bound by three relationships: husband to wife, owner to slave, and father to children. Thus slaves and women are members of the polis. The proper function of a family is the acquisition and management of wealth . The oikia is the primary land-holder. The koinonia, then, applied to property, including people. As such it is just as impossible as the collection of citizens mentioned previously, which cannot be both all

9375-467: The komai, while the 1st order is the poleis. Approaching the polis from the outside of an aerial photograph one would pass successivle orders 3, 2, and 1. By the end of Book I of Politics Aristotle (or one of the other unknown authors) finishes defining the polis according to one scheme and spends the next two books trying to tie up loose ends. It is generally agreed that the work is an accumulation of surviving treatises written at different times, and that

9500-479: The language of the historiographer. For example, Eric Voegelin wrote a work in English entitled "The World of the Polis". In works such as this the author intends to define polis himself; i.e., to present a model of society from one or more of a list of ancient Greek cities (poleis) culled from ancient Greek literature and inscriptions. For example, Voegelin describes a model in which "town settlements" existed in

9625-440: The legal incorporation of the settlements around Athens into the city by King Theseus , although no special building was required. The central polis already existed. In this story also there is a duality of synoecism with an absent change of physical facilities. Apparently a synoecism can be of different types, the selection of which depends on the requirements of the sunoikisteres. Lippman applies two concepts previously current,

9750-501: The literature; classical economics , neoclassical economics , Keynesian economics , the neoclassical synthesis , monetarism , new classical economics , New Keynesian economics and the new neoclassical synthesis . Polis Polis ( pl. : poleis) means 'city' in Ancient Greek . The Modern Greek word πόλη ( polē ) is a direct descendant of the ancient word and roughly means 'city' or an urban place. However,

9875-488: The main logical break is the end of Book III. Books I, II, and III, dubbed "Theory of the State" by Rackham in the Loeb Edition , each represents an incomplete trial of the "Old Plan". Books !V, V, and VI, "Practical Politics", are the "New Plan". Books VII and VIII, "Ideal Politics", contains Aristotle's replacement of Plato's ideology, openly called "communist" by modern translators and theoreticians, of which Aristotle

10000-417: The makeup of an ideal polis. In The Republic , Socrates is concerned with the two underlying principles of any society: mutual needs and differences in aptitude. Starting from these two principles, Socrates deals with the economic structure of an ideal polis. According to Plato there are five main economic classes of any polis: producers, merchants, sailors/shipowners, retail traders and wage earners. Along with

10125-453: The many one-castle principates that abounded at the time. The name was applied to the polis by Herder in 1765. Fowler anglicised it: "It is, then, a city-state that we have to deal with in Greek and Roman history; a state in which the whole life and energy of the people, political, intellectual, religious, is focused at one point, and that point a city." He applied the word polis to it, explaining that, "The Latin race, indeed, never realised

10250-449: The market's two roles: allocation of resources and distribution of income. The market might be efficient in allocating resources but not in distributing income, he wrote, making it necessary for society to intervene. Value theory was important in classical theory. Smith wrote that the "real price of every thing ... is the toil and trouble of acquiring it". Smith maintained that, with rent and profit, other costs besides wages also enter

10375-400: The model, no doubt, which was widely promulgated in the 20th century. Classical Athens , however, is a paradox in this model, to which Voegelin has no answer. He says, "in the most important instance, that of Athens, the continuity between the Aegean settlement and the later polis seems to have been unbroken." It seems a matter of simple logic that if Athens was a Hellenic polis in the time of

10500-437: The most famous passages in all economics," Smith represents every individual as trying to employ any capital they might command for their own advantage, not that of the society, and for the sake of profit, which is necessary at some level for employing capital in domestic industry, and positively related to the value of produce. In this: He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he

10625-434: The native land; there was no other. It had a constitution and demanded the supreme loyalty of its citizens. χώρα was only the countryside, not a country. Ancient Greece was not a sovereign country, but was a territory occupied by Hellenes , people who claimed as their native language some dialect of Ancient Greek. Poleis did not only exist within the area of the modern Republic of Greece . A collaborative study carried by

10750-503: The pessimistic analysis of Malthus (1798). John Stuart Mill (1844) delimited the subject matter further: The science which traces the laws of such of the phenomena of society as arise from the combined operations of mankind for the production of wealth, in so far as those phenomena are not modified by the pursuit of any other object. Alfred Marshall provided a still widely cited definition in his textbook Principles of Economics (1890) that extended analysis beyond wealth and from

10875-466: The polis extends as far back as the beginning of Greek literature, when the works of Homer and Hesiod in places attempt to portray an ideal state. The study took a great leap forward when Plato and the academy in general undertook to define what is meant by the good, or ideal, polis. Plato analyzes the polis in the Republic , the Greek title of which, Πολιτεία ( politeia ), itself derives from

11000-551: The polis names also Carthage , comparing its constitution to that of Sparta. Carthage was a Phoenician -speaking city. Many nominally Greek colonies also included municipalities of non-Greek speakers, such as Syracuse. The word polis is used in the first known work of Greek literature, the Iliad , a maximum of 350 times. The few hundred ancient Greek classical works on line at the Perseus Digital Library use

11125-531: The political synoecism and the physical synoecism, to events at the polis of Pleuron (Aetolia) described by Strabo . Pleuron, in danger of being sacked by the Macedonians, was officially moved up the slope of a nearby mountain, walled in, and named Newer Pleuron. This act was a physical synoecism. After the Macedonian threat vanished the former location was reinhabited and called Old Pleuron. The old and

11250-448: The power of speech as well as a sense of right and wrong, and can communicate judgements of good or bad to the community (I.10). A second metaphor compares a community to a human body: no part can function without the whole functioning (I.11). Men belong to communities because they have an instinct to do so (I.12). The polis is a hierarchy of community. At the most subordinate level is the family ( oikia ), which has priority of loyalty over

11375-487: The present, modified by substituting the word "wealth" for "goods and services" meaning that wealth may include non-material objects as well. One hundred and thirty years later, Lionel Robbins noticed that this definition no longer sufficed, because many economists were making theoretical and philosophical inroads in other areas of human activity. In his Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science , he proposed

11500-409: The price of a commodity. Other classical economists presented variations on Smith, termed the ' labour theory of value '. Classical economics focused on the tendency of any market economy to settle in a final stationary state made up of a constant stock of physical wealth (capital) and a constant population size . Marxist (later, Marxian) economics descends from classical economics and it derives from

11625-429: The purest approximation to the truth that has yet been published" on the subject. The publication of Adam Smith 's The Wealth of Nations in 1776, has been described as "the effective birth of economics as a separate discipline." The book identified land, labour, and capital as the three factors of production and the major contributors to a nation's wealth, as distinct from the physiocratic idea that only agriculture

11750-504: The relinquishing of property to form the polis is advantageous, and the maximum advantage is maximum possession of common property by a polis. The principle of advantage is unity. The more united, the more advantageous (compare the action of a lever, which concentrates advantage). The ideal commun-ity would be commun-ism, the possession of all property by the community. Personal property, such as wives and children, are included (II.1). Aristotle argues that this eminent domain of all property

11875-410: The result of any previous social evolution. They were the first municipal division of the city manufactured for the purpose. They were no sort of confederacy. Rome initially was ruled by Etruscan kings. Coulanges work was followed by the innovation of the English city-state by W. Warde Fowler in 1893. The Germans had already invented the word in their own language: Stadtstaat, "city-state", referring to

12000-427: The same category of Plato's indefinable abstracts, such as freedom and justice. However, there is a practical freedom and a practical justice, although not theoretically definable, and the ancient authors must mean something consistent when they use the word polis . The problem is to find it. In modern historiography of the ancient world πόλις is often transliterated to polis without any attempt to translate it into

12125-478: The same or similar. It is a figure of speech, the most general instance being sunoik-eioun, "to be associated with", its noun being sunoik-eiosis, the act of association. A second verb, sunoik-ein, "to live together," can mean individuals, as in marriage, or conjointly, as in a community. The community meaning appears in Herodotus. A closely related meaning, "to colonize jointly with", is found there also, and in

12250-412: The scope and method of economics, emanating from that definition. A body of theory later termed "neoclassical economics" formed from about 1870 to 1910. The term "economics" was popularised by such neoclassical economists as Alfred Marshall and Mary Paley Marshall as a concise synonym for "economic science" and a substitute for the earlier " political economy ". This corresponded to the influence on

12375-486: The so-called Lucas critique and the presentation of real business cycle models . During the 1980s, a group of researchers appeared being called New Keynesian economists , including among others George Akerlof , Janet Yellen , Gregory Mankiw and Olivier Blanchard . They adopted the principle of rational expectations and other monetarist or new classical ideas such as building upon models employing micro foundations and optimizing behaviour, but simultaneously emphasised

12500-480: The society in which they lived, the polis. Plato was more interested in the ideal; Aristotle, the real. Both had a certain view of what the polis was; that is, a conceptual model. All models must be tested, by definition. Aristotle, of course, could send direct observers. The only way to know a polis now is through study of the ancient literature (philology), and to some extent archaeology. There are thousands of pages of writing and certainly thousands of sites. The problem

12625-399: The sociology in favor of the New Plan, conclusions resulting from research on real constitutions. The difficulties with the Old Plan begin with the meaning of koinonizein, "to hold in common". Typically the authors of the Old Plan use the verb in such expressions as "those holding in common", "A holding in common", "the partnership", and the like, without specifying who is holding what or what

12750-444: The source of the word economy. Joseph Schumpeter described 16th and 17th century scholastic writers, including Tomás de Mercado , Luis de Molina , and Juan de Lugo , as "coming nearer than any other group to being the 'founders' of scientific economics" as to monetary , interest , and value theory within a natural-law perspective. Two groups, who later were called "mercantilists" and "physiocrats", more directly influenced

12875-420: The splitting (apoikia, "colonization") of families; that is, one village contains one or more extended families , or clans . A polis is a community of villages, but there must be enough of them to achieve or nearly achieve self-sufficiency. At this point of his theorization, Aristotle turns the "common" noun stem (koino-) into a verb, koinonizein, "to share" or "to own in common". He says: "A single city occupies

13000-406: The state or commonwealth with a revenue for the publick services. Jean-Baptiste Say (1803), distinguishing the subject matter from its public-policy uses, defined it as the science of production, distribution, and consumption of wealth . On the satirical side, Thomas Carlyle (1849) coined " the dismal science " as an epithet for classical economics , in this context, commonly linked to

13125-408: The state, which would send other members of the united polis to do the work. They would also be sent for any other task: plumbing, farming, herding, etc., as any task could be performed by any member. This view is contrary, as Aristotle points out, to the principle of division of labor . The output of one professional building crew far exceeds the efforts any number of amateur ideal statists, rendering

13250-408: The subject of mathematical methods used in the natural sciences . Neoclassical economics systematically integrated supply and demand as joint determinants of both price and quantity in market equilibrium, influencing the allocation of output and income distribution. It rejected the classical economics' labour theory of value in favour of a marginal utility theory of value on the demand side and

13375-402: The subject or different views among economists. Scottish philosopher Adam Smith (1776) defined what was then called political economy as "an inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations", in particular as: a branch of the science of a statesman or legislator [with the twofold objectives of providing] a plentiful revenue or subsistence for the people ... [and] to supply

13500-471: The subject": Economics is the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses. Robbins described the definition as not classificatory in "pick[ing] out certain kinds of behaviour" but rather analytical in "focus[ing] attention on a particular aspect of behaviour, the form imposed by the influence of scarcity ." He affirmed that previous economists have usually centred their studies on

13625-826: The subsequent development of the subject. Both groups were associated with the rise of economic nationalism and modern capitalism in Europe. Mercantilism was an economic doctrine that flourished from the 16th to 18th century in a prolific pamphlet literature, whether of merchants or statesmen. It held that a nation's wealth depended on its accumulation of gold and silver. Nations without access to mines could obtain gold and silver from trade only by selling goods abroad and restricting imports other than of gold and silver. The doctrine called for importing inexpensive raw materials to be used in manufacturing goods, which could be exported, and for state regulation to impose protective tariffs on foreign manufactured goods and prohibit manufacturing in

13750-488: The term. There were no doubt many ancient experts on the polis, but time has done its work. The one surviving expert, Aristotle, is thus an indispensable resource. A polis is identified as such by its standing as polis among the community of poleis. Poleis have ambassadors, can join or host the Hellenic Games, etc. According to Aristotle, their most essential characteristics are those that, if changed, would result in

13875-428: The treatise amount to the anthropological sense of property : land, animals, houses, wives, children, anything to which the right of access or disposition is reserved to the owner. This also happens to be Plato's concept of property, not an accident, as Aristotle was a renegade Platonist. The polis, then, is communal property. The theory of its tenancy is where Aristotle and Plato differ sharply. Plato had argued that

14000-521: The true descendants of the Trojans who with the aborigines had earlier formed the Latin people. They were not welcome among the Latins of Alba Longa, and so they had turned to raiding from their base in their seven hills. The myth supposes they had been nourished by a she-wolf and lived a wild life camping in the country. They were, however, supported by an ally. Evander had led a colony from Arcadia before

14125-463: The two principles and five economic classes, there are four virtues. The four virtues of a "just city" are wisdom, courage, moderation and justice. With all of these principles, classes and virtues, it was believed that a "just city" (polis) would exist. Breaking away from Plato and the academy, a professor there, Aristotle, founded his own school, the Lyceum, a university. One of its strongest curricula

14250-408: The unknown past. All current citizenships must have had their first moments, typically when the law-maker had gotten his laws ratified, or the colony had broken with the metropolis. The ancient writers referred to these initial moments under any of several words produced with the same prefix, sunoik- (Latinized synoec-), "same house", meaning objects that are from now on to be grouped together as being

14375-467: The war is not winnable or if the expected costs outweigh the benefits, the deciding actors (assuming they are rational) may never go to war (a decision ) but rather explore other alternatives. Economics cannot be defined as the science that studies wealth, war, crime, education, and any other field economic analysis can be applied to; but, as the science that studies a particular common aspect of each of those subjects (they all use scarce resources to attain

14500-401: The whole gamut of historical writers, Xenophon, Plato, Strabo, Plutarch; i.e., more or less continuously through all periods from Archaic to Roman. Associated nouns are sunoik-ia, sunoik-esion, sunoik-idion, sunoik-eses, sunoik-isis, a multiplication to be expected over centuries of a single language. These can all mean community in general, but they have two main secondary meanings, to institute

14625-463: The word Oikos , the Greek word from which the word economy derives, was used for issues regarding how to manage a household (which was understood to be the landowner, his family, and his slaves ) rather than to refer to some normative societal system of distribution of resources, which is a more recent phenomenon. Xenophon , the author of the Oeconomicus , is credited by philologues for being

14750-520: The word polis . The best form of government of the polis for Plato is the one that leads to the common good. The philosopher king is the best ruler because, as a philosopher, he is acquainted with the Form of the Good . In Plato's analogy of the ship of state , the philosopher king steers the polis, as if it were a ship, in the best direction. Books II–IV of The Republic are concerned with Plato addressing

14875-466: The word thousands of times. The most frequent use is Dionysius of Halicarnassus , an ancient historian, with a maximum of 2,943. A study of inscriptions found 1,450 that use polis prior to 300 BC, 425 Athenian and 1,025 from the rest of the range of poleis. There was no difference in meaning between literary and inscriptional usages. Polis became loaded with many incidental meanings. The major meanings are 'state' and 'community'. The theoretical study of

15000-460: The work of Karl Marx . The first volume of Marx's major work, Das Kapital , was published in 1867. Marx focused on the labour theory of value and theory of surplus value . Marx wrote that they were mechanisms used by capital to exploit labour. The labour theory of value held that the value of an exchanged commodity was determined by the labour that went into its production, and the theory of surplus value demonstrated how workers were only paid

15125-421: Was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. The Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus (1798) used the concept of diminishing returns to explain low living standards. Human population , he argued, tended to increase geometrically, outstripping the production of food, which increased arithmetically. The force of

15250-497: Was political science, which Aristotle invented. He dispatched students over the world of the polis to study the society and government of individual poleis, and bring the information back to document, placing the document in a political science section of the library. Only two documents have survived, Politics and Athenian Constitution . These are a part of any political science curriculum today. Both major ancient Greek philosophers were concerned with elucidating an existing aspect of

15375-892: Was productive. Smith discusses potential benefits of specialisation by division of labour , including increased labour productivity and gains from trade , whether between town and country or across countries. His "theorem" that "the division of labor is limited by the extent of the market" has been described as the "core of a theory of the functions of firm and industry " and a "fundamental principle of economic organization." To Smith has also been ascribed "the most important substantive proposition in all of economics" and foundation of resource-allocation theory—that, under competition , resource owners (of labour, land, and capital) seek their most profitable uses, resulting in an equal rate of return for all uses in equilibrium (adjusted for apparent differences arising from such factors as training and unemployment). In an argument that includes "one of

15500-437: Was recognised as well as the traditional Keynesian insistence that fiscal policy could also play an influential role in affecting aggregate demand . Methodologically, the synthesis led to a new class of applied models, known as dynamic stochastic general equilibrium or DSGE models, descending from real business cycles models, but extended with several new Keynesian and other features. These models proved useful and influential in

15625-468: Was split between homeland regions and colonies. A colony was generally sent out by a single polis to relieve the population or some social crisis or seek out more advantageous country. It was called a metropolis or "mother city". The Greeks were careful to identify the homeland region and the metropolis of a colony. Typically a metropolis could count on the socio-economic and military support of its colonies, but not always. The homeland regions were located on

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