Marx and Aristotle on the Highest Good

Marx's criticism of Aristotle's theory of value is refuted. Aristotle's theory is explained. Marx is shown is be even more indebted to Aristotle than previously thought, but his argument for a strict commensurability of goods is shown to fail. Aristotle's solution to the problem of the incommensurability of goods, i. e., his proposal of "suffi cient" commensurability "with respect to need," is discussed as a possible solution and is shown to be representable mathematically. Aristotle's theory of value has greater explanatory power than Marx's.

Aristotle versus Marx: Modes of Use, Use Value or Useful Object?, 2014

In the first three pages of his Capital, without any warning to the reader, Marx introduces a modification of the traditional meaning of the term “use value”. For Locke, Quesnay, and Smith, “use value” was the ability of a thing to satisfy human needs, for Marx it becomes the thing itself. This change of meaning has not been properly perceived, and many authors continue to attribute to Marx the same conception of use value than his predecessors have. When Marx translates some passages of Aristotle’s Politics from English to German, his translation surprisingly attributes the term “use value” to Aristotle; worse, Marx does not attribute to Aristotle the predominant meaning of this term but the new meaning adopted by him. This note offers a brief history of the term “use value”, summarizes the significant change of meaning introduced by Marx, conjectures about the possible motivations of Marx to act this way, and finally documents the amazing translation of Marx.

2011

2012

Spencer Pack's new book can be understood as an architectural guidebook to three great buildings: the intellectual systems of Aristotle, Adam Smith, and Karl Marx. There is also an outlook on the contemporary landscape, as announced in the subtitle. For the most part, however, Pack analyses the writings of these three seminal figures, and he looks at them through the lens of three pairs of concepts: exchange value and money, capital and character, change and government. Spencer does not provide a detailed justification for his focus on these concepts or on these three thinkers—except that they are important figures in our intellectual tradition and stand in a kind of " dialogue " (p. xi). So the proof of the pudding is in the eating; but, to anticipate, the overall result justifies this choice of focus, as it illuminates central dimensions of the thought of Aristotle, Smith, and Marx, and leads to insightful comparisons. Starting out with Aristotle, Pack discusses his ...

Marx and Ethics: Self-determination as a Goal philosopher' in the same sense as Aristotle, Hume, Kant, Bentham were.

Working Paper Series, Department …, 2011

A number of Marxist scholars have tied aspects of Marx's thought to certain Aristotelian categories, yet remarkably little is said of Marx's dialectical materialism in this literature. Here we attempt to lay a foundation for such an effort, paying particular attention to the way in which Aristotle's mediated starting point resonates in Marx's method. While Hegel is able to grasp man's self-creation as a process, his dialectical method proceeds from an unmediated starting point, and impresses Idealism upon the Aristotelian categories. In rejecting the Idealist dimensions of Hegel's dialectic, Marx implicitly reclaims the materialist dimensions of Aristotle's system. It will be argued here that such an interpretation sheds important light on the nature of Marx's departure from Hegel, and on his method in Capital.

The Bloomsbury Companion to Marx (Bloomsbury, 2018)

The Handbook of Economics and Ethics, 2009

2021

This dissertation reorients political theory to the concepts of use and utility for a more critical and emancipatory perspective on contemporary communal life. The reorientation entails a recovery of Aristotle's and Marx's overlapping approaches to use, whose contemporary reception indexes the surprising alignment of critical political theory with economics. That alignment has come by treating utility in terms of the solipsistic use of objects, which distracts from the social fact, and political problem, of human use that concerned Aristotle and Marx. By refocusing theoretical attention on the use of humans, this dissertation divides the politics of use and utility into two broad types. The first is the "politics of determinate utility" where human use and utility are delimited because instrumentalized for the sake of a determinate end. Wherever people are denied the right to determine that end, a split between them and the power to coordinate the use of humans occurs, a split that erodes the human singularity and collectivity that sustain democratic politics. With Aristotle and Marx, the dissertation conjures a second more empowering and emancipatory type, which is the spectral "politics of indeterminate utility." This account of use centers on an ongoing process whereby singular individuals question and value human use as they work out common purpose within an expanded view of life. Here use is open, egalitarian, agonistic, androgynous, and quotidian and finds expression in a Marxian conception of free time-the time of indeterminate human use. By placing human usefulness back at the heart of political thinking, the dissertation makes a salient contribution to ongoing debates about democratic community and political action, the relationship between politics and economics, and critical theory and the contemporary value of ancient texts. Works by Aristotle