#third ways

(Wilhelm) Ropke rejected the materialism, utilitarianism and “economism” of the liberal or libertarian economists, persons who had forgotten “that people do not live by cheaper vacuum  cleaners alone but by other and higher things which may wither in the shadow of giant industries and monopolies.” He decried the “cult of personality” and the worship of an abstract “standard of living” as disorders of “spiritual perception.” In place of Homo Economicus, he posited Homo Religious, or man created in the image of God, as the proper foundation of economic theory.

Aristotle’s economic principles were justice (meaning fairness between persons of different status), self-sufficiency and “natural trade” (which he defined as exchanges that move an entity toward self-sufficiency). As (Karl) Polanyi interprets him, prices are justly set “if they conform to the standing of the participants in the community, thereby strengthening the goodwill on which the community rests.” Crafting related language of his own, Polanyi argues for the embedded economy, in which bonds of marriage, kinship and community would mediate basic economic exchanges towards social, as opposed to, commercial ends. Prices of commodities and labor would be adjusted according to the needs of families and neighborhoods, Trade, on both the household and national levels, would aim at self-sufficiency. For both Aristotle and Polanyi, the agrarian household with its family-centered economy stands as the perfect model.