Self-sufficiency and Civilization 99 



making, which operates with crops and beasts) that in matters of this 

 kind speculation is liberal (= worthy of a free man) but practice is not. 

 This seems to imply that to be engrossed in the detailed study of 

 various soils or breeds of beasts, with a view to their appropriate and 

 profitable management, is an illiberal and cramping pursuit. He 

 does not apply to it the term ftavavo-la, and the reason probably is 

 that the bodily defects of the sedentary artisan are not found in the 

 working farmer. But the concentration upon mean details of no 

 moral or political significance is common to both. That all unskilled 1 

 wage-earners fall under the same ban is a matter of course, hardly 

 worth mentioning. In short, all those who depend on the custom of 

 others for a living are subject to a sort of slavery in a greater or less 

 degree, and unfit to be citizens. 



The value attached to 'self-sufficiency' as evidence of freedom 

 and of not living * in relation to another ' (that is, in dependence 2 on 

 another,) is in striking contrast to views that have enjoyed a great 

 vogue in modern economic theory. Neither the man nor the state 

 can be completely 3 self-sufficing : that Aristotle, and Plato before 

 him, saw. Man, feeling his way upward through the household to 

 the state, needs help. He first finds 4 a, helper (I am omitting the sex- 

 union) in the ox, the forerunner of the slave, and still in primitive 

 rustic life the helper of the poor. Growing needs bring division of 

 labour and exchange by barter, and so on. As a political animal he 

 can never be quite independent as an individual, but it is the law of 

 his being that the expanding needs which draw him into association 

 with his fellows result in making him more of a man. Here lies a 

 pitfall. If through progress in civilization his daily life becomes so 

 entangled with those of other men that his freedom of action is 

 hampered thereby, surely he has lost something. His progress has 

 not been clear gain, and the balance may not be easy to strike. It is 

 therefore a problem, how to find a position in which man may profit 

 by the advantages of civilization without risking the loss of more 

 than he has gained. Aristotle does not state it in terms so brutally 

 frank. But the problem is there, and he does in effect attempt a 

 solution. The presence in sufficient numbers of slaves legally unfree, 

 and workers legally free but virtually under a defined or special kind 5 

 of servitude (a^eDptoyte^z/ Tiva &ov\eiav) y is the only means by which 

 a privileged class can get all the good that is to be got out of human 

 progress. His model citizens are an aristocracy of merited privilege, 

 so trained to virtue that to be governed by them will doubtless 



1 Pol I 1 1 3-5. 2 Rhetoric I 9 27 irpos d\\ov tfv, and Cope's note. 



3 Pol vi 8 3, vn 6 1-5. 4 Pol i i 5, 5 8, 9, cf Ethics vin 1 1 6. 



5 Poll 13 13, cf II 5 28. 



72 



