assistance generally he remarks: ‘The poor receive and need ever more and more, for such assistance is like water poured into a leaky vessel. Still, the true friend of the people should guard against extreme poverty, which lowers the character of the democracy.’ All schemes of predatory legislation Aristotle would (as we have seen) have sternly condemned. To the exercise of voluntary and friendly charity he attached a high value, but he insisted on the fundamental principle that a man’s work is worth (economically) what it will fetch, and that his salary or wages should be fixed not by his own desires but by the market value of his work. In a well-known chapter of the Ethics (V., 5) he discusses the function of money as a means of establishing what he calls proportional justice between different kinds of work, taking a builder and a shoe-maker as his examples, and he concludes: ‘In reality things which are not homogeneous cannot be measured, but they can be measured well enough for practical purposes by means of our need.’ Any system which aimed at equalizing the rewards of different kinds of work, or discouraging individual industry, efficiency, or inventiveness, he would have at once condemned as unnatural, and an impossible foundation for any enduring State.
What would he have said to the Socialist formula of ‘The Nationalization of all the means of Production and Distribution’?
In his Republic Plato had sketched an ideal communist State. Plato himself admitted that, human nature being what it is, such a State could never be more than an ideal, and in the ‘Laws’ he gives us a sketch of his ‘second-best’ State, from which the communistic features are omitted. In the second book of his Politics Aristotle subjects the communist ideal to a rigorous examination. He points out that diversity in its members—analogous to the diversity of parts in an organism—is of the essence of a State, and that the unification aimed at by communism would
