References
- Greene , K. 2000 . "Technological Innovation and Economic Progress in the Ancient World: M.I. Finley Re-considered," . Economic History Review , LIII (I) : 29 – 59 .
- Blanshard , A. 2001 . TLS , 4 May : 26
- Hopkins , K. "Introduction," ” . In Trade in the Ancient Economy Edited by: Gamsey , P. x – xi . . This book is a typical Finley product in which a still hesitating and cautious Hopkins tries to mitigate the overwhelming influence of the "charismatic" Finley (xiv). Eighteen years later a Finley sectarian like Paul Millett still thinks of it as "iconoclastic" that Hopkins dared to oppose Finley! See M., note 17, 39.
- Chaniotis , A. , ed. 1999 . From Minoan Farmers to Roman Traders. Sidelights on the Economy of Ancient Crete , 2 Stuttgart : Franz Steiner Verlag . John Bintliff about his colleague Donald Harris in the introduction to Of course, this does not refer only to Crete but to nearly all Mediterranean economies/villages which is not understood in the Internet too: see, for instance, www.reshafim.org.il/ad/egypt/economy
- Kirsten , E. and Kraiker , W. Winter 1967 . Griechenlandkunde. Ein Führer zu klassischen Stätten , fifth edition Vol. l , Winter , 5 – 25 . Heidelberg An early acknowledgement of these interrelations between Greek animal cultures, the availability of arable potentials, geomorphological constitutions and the untenable Finleythesis occurred in SLMO, 163-75. Certainly, there is a too small English abstract, but a large German one (640-53). One could conclude that H. misses elementary knowledge about this subject, but he tells the reader that "older studies" gave an over-simplified image of the situation because they did not give "attention to local geology, geomorphology or soil type" (131). It is, however, H. himself who did not spend a relevant word on these highly important sources of our knowledge of the above-mentioned interrelations (see his pages 136, 138)! He, furthermore, is wrong about "older studies." When I suppose that mine is not old enough, still the best and most extensive about the Mediterranean soils, etc., are the many works of A. Philippson, followed by those of E. Kirsten, which started to appear long before 1945! Even for learned tourists, the latter wrote about the data and interrelations H. railed to use in the two-volumes of (notwithstanding specific shortcomings of these works)
- Samuelson . Economics , 119
- Gordon , R. , ed. 1981 . Myth, Religion and Society , 153 Cambridge : Cambridge University Press . This is not an unknown procedure. Pierre Vidal-Naquet referred to "older studies" like those of Henri Jeanmaire (1913, 1939) who "discerns 'beneath the mask of Lycurgus' a society exactly comparable with African societies." See P.V-N.'s articles in also 181. Although H. mentions one of Jeanmaire's publications (1939) in his bibliography, I could not see where he used it which seems to be another missed chance.
- Wees , H. Van . 1992 . Status Warriors: War, Violence and Society in Homer and History See, for instance, This was in itself a copy of quite familiar German studies from before 1945. Apparently the author is an expert in copying "old stuff' as is shown again now he hides under the Hodkinson umbrella. His article in Sparta. New Perspectives
- Hodkinson , S. and Powell , A. about "Tyrtaeus' Eunomia: nothing to do with the Great Rhetra" . 1 – 43 . should be compared with
- Roos , A.G. 1932 . Lycurgus Groningen for quite the same thesis. But who knows "single Dutch" in Oxbridge?
- Bücher , K. 1924 . Grundriss der Sozialökonomik , Vol. I , 11 22 Tübingen : Mohr . Millett, Lending does not mention Rodbertus at all and misses accordingly most crucial features of the debate (in M., 39, note 15 he did but has not read Rodbertus yet). For Bücher and Schumpeter's use of the concept (the latter already more critical than the former) see
- Clauss , M. 1999 . Einführung in der alten Geschichte , München : Beck . Even today this concept of Oikenwirtschaft is used as such, for instance, in
- Booth , W. 1993 . Households. On the Moral Architecture of the Economy , Ithaca/London : Cornell University Press . In the USA the most extreme oikos-ideologists are
- Hanson , V. 1995 . The Other Greeks. The Family Farm and the Agrarian Roots of Western Civilization , New York : Free Press . ). For the latter see below
- Finley, The Ancient Economy, 154, writes, for example: "For analytical purposes, however, there was one common element that cut across the structural differences. The authority of the state was total, of the city-states as of the autocracies, and it extended to everyone who resided within the territorial borders." Apart from the rather non-sensical "for analytical purposes," one is confronted here with a very peculiar definition of "the state" which is in variance with common sociological or cultural anthropological knowledge about the so-called "primitive" or "pre-modern" societies. Historically spoken, it is simply untrue to talk about political life in Greek city-states or, for my part, in the Roman Republic in terms of totalitarian regimes. To start with, in a juridical sense, in particular Anglo-Saxon scholars must use their practical knowledge about differences between common and Roman law to differentiate in these matters.
- Sabine , G. H. "State," . Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences , XIV 329 the encyclopaedia of which Finley was a staff member in his formative years.
- 1999 . "Social Sciences in Germany, 1933-1945," . German History , 17 (2) : 81 To demonstrate this see my article:
- Gamsey , P. , eds. 1983 . Trade in the Ancient Economy , ix London : Chatto & Windus . In his introduction to
- Mattingly , D. and Salmon , J. , eds. 2001 . Economies beyond Agriculture in the Classical World , London : Roudedge . This article was sparked off thanks to the publication of two interesting books, i.e.
- Hodkinson , S. 2000 . Property and Wealth in Classical Sparta , London : Duckworth/Classical Press Wales .
- Pribram , K. 1983 . A History of Economic Reasoning , Baltimore/London : Johns Hopkins University Press . ). I used the unchanged (!) recent German translation,
- 1998 . Geschichte des ökonomischen Denkens , 15 Frankfurt a/M. : Suhrkamp . . One can quote similar opinions in Schumpeter's history of economic analysis or Eric Roll's history of economic thought, to mention the three best histories in this area.
- 1967 . A practitioner like Paul Samuelson, however, tells us on the first page of his famous Economics , New York : McGraw-Hill .
- Homblower , S. and Spawforth , A. , eds. 1996 . "Economic Theory," ” . In The Oxford Classical Dictionary , 502 503 Oxford : OUP . "… economics is not yet two centuries old … Adam Smith … 1776 … ." He should be the best person to stress that economics never starts with a theory. See also Martha Nussbaums strange (market as institution, etc.!) article (below OCD)
- Noordman , D. 1996 . Economie en filosofie in de Vroege Middeleeuwen, 750-1250 , Hilversum : Verloren . There was, for instance, a rather extensive economic literature long before the Aristotelean reception by Thomas of Aquinas c.s. This literature was not a moral-theological one, but a practical one from jurists, administrators and the like, who were influential in monarchical and church households. This literature was also more influenced by Roman authors (Seneca, Cicero, Palladius, a.o.) than by Greek ones. Last but not least, after Christian Aristotelism took the lead, the earlier dominant neo-Platonism started to feed oppositional spirits and created in this way its own long history. For all this see
- Macmullen , R. 1997 . Christianity & Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries , New Haven/London : Yale University Press . ) or the older
- Sivery , G. 1984 . L'économie du Royaume de France au siècle de Saint-Louis , Lille : Presses Universitaires de Lille .
- Little , L. 1978 . Religious Poverty and the Profit Economy in Medieval Europe , London : Paul Elek .
- Lopez , R. 1984 . The Commercial Revolution of the Middle Ages, 950-1350 , Cambridge : CUP .
- 1963 . Agrarian History of Western Europe AD 500-1850 , London : Arnold . The medievalist and agrarian historian Slicher van Bath, one of the authors in the Cambridge Economic History, wrote the world famous
- Bath , B.H. Slicher van and Oss , A.C. van , eds. 1978 . "Boerenvrijheid," ” . In Geschiedenis van maatschappij en cultuur 71 – 93 . Baam Ambo In his less well-known work exists a highly important empirical analysis of the "peasant freedom" in the early Middle Ages of North-West Europe, in which he signals a series of structural contradictions between peoples active in animal husbandry and those in cereal growing: (orig. 1948). In SLMO (written under Slicher van Bath's supervision) I expanded this analysis over more medieval regions and for reasons of comparison over the Greek regions in antiquity
- Hopkins , K. 1999 . The World Full of Gods , London : Weidenfeld .
- 1986 . Apart from SLMO there is also Kevin Greene's brilliant The Archaeology of the Roman Economy , Berkeley : University of California Press . As mentioned, 1986 was the year of Finley's death. ) with the clear conclusion: "Quite simply, I believe that the level of economic activity revealed by archaeological research makes the 'minimalist' approach of historians such as Finley untenable" (p. 170; see also 14-17). Since I do not have expert knowledge of the ancient Roman economy and society, I have to confine the following article mainly to Greek history.
- Millett , P. 1991 . Lending and Borrowing in Ancient Athens , 9 – 19 . Cambridge : CUP . If you ask your Google search machine today for "ancient economy" nearly no other literature than Finley's The Ancient Economy (first published in 1973) will be mentioned. You cannot blame the backward policies of publishers let alone Google for this, but in the first place Finley himself, who only once wrote an original piece of research about land and credit in ancient Athens (1951) and afterwards nothing but programmatic and ideological texts. Secondly, he was able to do this because there were nearly no classicists available to counter his views. Apparently it is true here, that in the kingdom of blind men the one-eyed man is king. For an overview of the debate from a Finley-follower, see ; and as an antidote my article: "Über die Faszination des 'Ganzen Hauses'."
- I. Morris, "Foreword," in: M. Finley, The Ancient Economy, XXXII. I choose this example on purpose because Morris is the one who will edit in the Cambridge Economic History Series this new fixation of Finley without any reliance on the many anti-Finley criticisms which are in his possession.
- Hodkinson , S. 1988 . "Animal Husbandry in the Greek Polis," ” . In Pastoral Economies in Classical Antiquity , Edited by: Whittaker , C. 57 Cambridge : Cambridge Philological Society .
- Ibid., 192.
- Ibid., 381.
- See for examples of these recent distortions apart from what follows Pribram, A History of Economic Reasoning, Vol. 1, 21-53; Hanson, The Other Greeks, 113-9; Booth, Households, 45-50; M. Nussbaum in OCD, 502-3. That my exercises about the Christian Aristotelean perception, the real oikos-polis contradictions in ancient Greek economies, the fallacies of the Finley view, etc. (see note 3) touched an open nerve of classical scholarship was proved by the reactions of the Dutch and Cambridge Finleyans. Their unbelievable hits below the belt even lead to an SLMO scandal and a court case, which was morally lost by them thanks to the interventions of numerous famous Dutch historians. However, H. Picket c.s. were not impressed enough. In the manuscript of TC, sent to him before publication, he could not find any relevant scholarly mistake. Notwithstanding this, he started a vendetta to avoid publication. He succeeded with the first publisher and railed later, whereupon they tried to commit "Rufmord" by Picket's pupils like H. Singor, H. Tuntler and H. van Wees by telling a remarkable series of lies in reviews without giving any opportunity of defence. A good example can be found in Van Wees' review of TC in the typical Finley journal The Classical Review (1997): 350. Of course, the editor was not willing to correct the blunt lies of the reviewer after the quite different originals were shown to him.
- Gawantka , W. 1985 . Die sogenannte Polis. Entstehung, Geschichte und Kritik … der griechische Staat, die griechische Staatsidee, die Polis , Wiesbaden : Steiner . How in the highly influential German historiography of the nineteenth century and in the Max Weber tradition this polis-game was played is told in
- Mayhall , L. Nym . 2001 . "Household and Market in Suffragette Discourse, 1903-14," . The European Legacy , 6 (2) : 189 – 201 . The highly interesting history of this model is yet to be written. For elements of it see already
- Lindenfeld , D. 1997 . The Practical Imagination. The German Sciences of State in the Nineteenth Century , Chicago : University of Chicago Press .
- Welskopf , E. C. , ed. 1974 . Hellenische Poleis. Krise, Wandlung, Wirkung , Berlin : Akademie Verlag . The most sophisticated way Marxists treated the AE-model can be found in the four volumes (2,300 pages together) of See, for instance, the editor's chapter, "Soziale Gruppen- und Typenbegriffe" (2, 141-76) or Peter Musiolek's chapter "konomische überlegungen der Philosophen und Publizisten im 4. Jahrhundert v.u.Z." (1,910), etc.
- Finley . “ The Andent City ” . In Economy and Society in Ancient Greece Edited by: Finley , M. 33 – 44 . . For a typical post-Finleyan discussion by his successors see
- Whittaker , C. 1995 . "Do Theories of the Ancient City Matter," ” . In Urban Society in Roman Italy , Edited by: Cornell , T. and Lomas , K. 9 – 22 . London : UCL Press . . Finley borrowed the concept from Max Weber and Werner Sombart, who derived it from their analyses of European capital cities in the sixteenth and seventeenth century! Finley, first, used the concept for the capital of capitals, Imperial Rome, and afterwards deemed it appropriate to use it for all ancient cities as an ideal type. See SLMO, 283-7; TC, 193-7.
- Sombart , W. 1919 . Der moderne Kapitalismus , Vol. l , 142 München/Leipzig : Duncker & Humblot .
- Weber , M. 1976 . Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft , 727 – 41 . Tübingen : Mohr .
- Westforschung , Deutsche . 2001 . Ideologie und Praxis 1918-2000 , 145 169 – 77 . Leipzig : Akademische Verlagsanstalt . By doing this the Finleyans come very close to the idea of the so-called "central places" of the Nazi-geographer W. Christaller, which was adopted after the Second World War in so many geographical and historical studies. A "central place" is essentially a service-city which is bound to a specific "hierarchy of places" each with their specific relation to their hinterland. For its use see, for instance, my review of de Polignac's Cults, Territory, and the Origins of the Greek City-State in The European Legacy 1 (1996): 1840 and my book:
- This notwithstanding the great Paul Samuelson told his readers: "You can make even a parrot into a learned political economist-all he must learn are the two words 'supply' and 'demand'," in Economics, 57.
- McClellan , Murray C. 1997 . "The Economy of Hellenistic Egypt and Syria. An Archeological Perspective," ” . In Ancient Economic Thought , Edited by: Price , B. Vol. 1 , 185 London : Routledge .
- Ibid., 12, note 6.
- Ibid., 8.
- Ibid., 11.
- Drinkwater , J.F. "The Gallo-Roman Woollen Industry and the Great Debate: the Igel Column Revisited," ” . Edited by: M. 297 – 309 .
- Ibid., 302.
- Ibid., 305.
- Millett , P. "Productive to Some Purpose? The Problem of Ancient Economic Growth," ” . Edited by: M. 19
- Samuelson . Economics , 707
- Millett . "Productive to Some Purpose?" . 38 , note 10.
- Hodkinson , S. and Powell , A. , eds. 1999 . Sparta. New Perspectives , X London : Duckworth/Classical Press of Wales .
- Gallant , T. 1991 . Risk and Survival in Ancient Greece , Cambridge : Cambridge University Press . Ibid., 381. He mostly uses the calculations of ) as a frame of reference which he sometimes manipulates, for instance, because "Gallant's evidence derives from classical Athens" (380). The main quality of Gallant is that he produces as many figures as possible for a traditional branch of historiography which considered "quantification" like "economy" something like perverse brainwaves of left-wingers. Bernhard Slicher van Bath, who is also known as one of the most important agricultural historians and as a cliometrician, always stresses that it is a typical layman's attitude using figures as abstractions isolated from historical, agricultural or whatever realities. First you have to know the agricultural etc. problems before starting to struggle with figures. If, as H. thinks for example, adult Spartiates consumed on average 6,420 calories daily, the reason for the decline of Spartan society is directly clear: they were soon too fat to walk half a mile, to consummate whatever marriage or to use a spear for other purposes than as a walking-stick. See also H.'s ridiculous discussion about the common mess dues (190-9) or the graphs concerning property concentration (400-5).
- Ibid., 382.
- Ibid., 134.
- Ibid., 142.
- Ibid., 144. Another aspect of this rather crucial settlement-question is, for instance, the problem of living dispersed in farms or concentrated in villages (see 120 and 146, note 11). The way he is treating this suggests that he does not understand the problem or that he is unwilling to loose a sacrosanct item in the Finleyan ideology because "their [helots in this case. H.D.] residential separation from the land went with their not being bound to the sou."
- Ibid., 133. H. forgot that he denied this expressis verbis at p. 217: "… the basic cereal was not the wheaten bread preferred by rich Greeks … ."
- Ibid., 144.
- Coldstream , J.N. 1979 . Geometric Greece , 162 London : Methuen .
- 1963 . Die Bergweh Griechenlands , 104 – 11 . Stuttgart : Fink . If he prefers to remain in the UK, H. should have consulted at least some of the very good mountain guides of Greece. I still use with much profit the now well-thumbed Orestis Colettis,
- See, for example, Hanson, The Other Greeks, 191 and, in particular, 27.
- Ibid., 26. Hanson, together with J. Heath, recently published Who Killed Homer? The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom, a pamphlet to save the nation for a decline of Greek studies. The Times Literary Supplement (14 January 2000) not only disagreed with the authors but called it "a mean and unpleasant book" (J. Davidson).