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2
ARISTOTLE AND FOREIGN TRADE
Alain Bresson (translated by Edward M. Harris)
The issue at hand is by no means an insignificant one: it concerns the very
nature of the ancient economy, a subject that has divided the academic world
for almost a century. When one speaks of the ‘nature of the ancient economy,’
one refers not only to the type and quantity of concrete economic transactions
but also to the way in which the economy interacted with social and political
life. Moreover, it is almost misleading to speak of ‘controversies and divisions
in the academic world’ given the current state of affairs. In fact, except for a
few isolated voices, there is a set of ideas that now prevails almost without
opposition in the study of the ancient economy.^1 The most elaborate pre-
sentation of these ideas can be found in two works: The Ancient Economy of
M.I. Finley^2 and Economic and Social History of Ancient Greece of M.M. Austin
and P. Vidal-Naquet.^3 In this essay we will not review once again the old con-
troversies between primitivists and modernists, something that has been done
many times from the same point of view. The theories of Karl Polanyi, which
have been effectively applied by M.I. Finley and those influenced by him, are
supposed to have at last provided the right solution for these controversies.
In fact, it is not easy to take any position opposed to the ‘New Orthodoxy,’the term coined for this school of thought by K. Hopkins, who is him-
self one of its main representatives.^4 We should be grateful to M.I. Finley
for justly criticizing the crudest modernist views, which assumed that the
ancient economy functioned in exactly the same way as the modern econ-
omy does. Thus, for example, would anyone today dare to claim that ancient