50 ALAIN BRESSON (TRANSLATED By EDwARD M. HARRIS)
‘So they must make not only enough for their own use, but also enough
of the kind of things the other people need.’
‘They must.’
‘Then we need more farmers and other artisans for our state.’
‘We do.’^39Thus for Plato’s Socrates, it is fundamentally clear on the one hand that the
state cannot survive without foreign trade (this is obvious to him), and on the
other that in order to pay for imports one must assume an equal amount of
exports. If one examines the passage in greater detail, one also notices that
Plato accepts as quite natural the idea that one part of production should be
specifically adjusted, in nature, in quality and in volume, to the individual
needs of the countries that are one’s trading partners. Finally, it is clear to him
that some of the city’s workers are employed in financing exports by their
own labor, which is the natural corollary of the preceding argument. We have
already seen that the idea of paying for imports through exports is implicit in
Aristotle. On the other hand, the idea of adjusting a fraction of local produc-
tion for the need to export is not found in Aristotle, at least in the extant parts
of his works. This is without a doubt no accident: the normative vision hostile
to chrematistike is even more pronounced in Aristotle than it is in his master.
Plato is considered an idealist who cared little about the reality of daily life, but
this is only partly true. He presents his ideas as if they were self-evident truths,
which encourages us to think that his thought was inspired by what he could
observe on a daily basis in the most advanced cities of the Aegean world.
On a theoretical level, the idea of needs and surpluses (or ‘needs balancing
surpluses’) certainly prevailed. The view of the Old Oligarch that cities derived
their wealth from the natural resources of their territory, which differed from
place to place, and that of Plato, who goes so far as to stress the need to devote
a portion of domestic production to supply the needs of trading partners,
appear to be outliers. But these differences of degree in the detailed analysis of
the problem posed by foreign trade do not imply any differences about basic
premises. In all cases, the starting point for the analysis of all these authors
is always the same: the aim is to make up for what one inevitably lacks by
exports. The idea of the city’s self-sufficiency does not rule out any consider-
ation of foreign trade. On the contrary, the theory of self-sufficiency includes
by definition a consideration of imports and exports because ancient authors
knew very well that no city could provide for all its needs. Just as the man liv-
ing completely on his own is nothing but a savage in Aristotle’s eyes, similar
to the Cyclopes of the Odyssey who live apart from each other removed from
any social contact, in the same way a city cannot live in isolation, but needs to
interact with its neighbors to obtain what it lacks. For the individual as for the
city, it is need (χρεία) that creates bonds with others.