Aristotle today

Present-day market economists see only a part of Aristotle’s ambitious system of ideas when they concentrate on supply and demand to the exclusion of society, state intervention and the moral code. Aristotle was a methodological holist who situated economic activity, like Polanyi, in the context of a biological organism that had a law of motion of its own. This chapter draws parallels between Aristotle’s worldview and that of the historical and the institutional schools of economics. It argues that no single topic can be studied separately or divorced from the other topics that make up the purposiveness of the whole. It acknowledges the criticism that Aristotle may have sacrificed depth to breadth in his determination to integrate the disparate in a single wide-ranging account of the natural and the social order.