Scott Miekle, Aristotle's Economic Thought

Meikle, Scott. Aristotle’s Economic Thought. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997. Print.

My process for reading critical monographs starts with pulling up a book review for said monograph. In doing so, I feel less stressed to scramble and figure out what the heck is going on in said text and can instead focus on grasping the argument and basis thereof. For Meikle's monograph, I happened to pull up a book review written by Spencer Park, and was it ever a doozy.  Taking on Miekle's book with a frankness and style that I feel junior scholars would see as career suicide, Park's final statement I feel is the most telling; "It is unusual to see such a large discrepancy between what an author has demonstrated and what he thinks he has demonstrated" (368). In sum, Park argues that Miekle sets out to disprove/discredit theoretical approaches that apply anachronistic economic theory to Aristotle's text while himself predominantly using Marx to read Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics and Politics, itself (Marx) an anachronistic economic theory. Overall, Miekle's point is that Aristotle never really put forth economic theories and works diligently to disprove critical attempts to say Aristotle's texts in fact do. In this, much of what Park identifies as outright antagonism to modern economists can be seen in Miekle's text.

Moving outside of the cattiness and critical contention, Miekle's text is perhaps most useful for its readings of Aristotle's texts, focusing on those that scholars from antiquity forward have read for economic theory. Miekle's approach in many places reminds me of the kinds of moves a deconstructionist makes, close reading the primary text to identify ambiguities and contradictions contained therein. While I feel that Miekle, in the end, does much more tearing down than building up of ideas (which is generally a pet peeve of mine), his very close and attentive readings are, in the end, very strong close and attentive readings. For example, Miekle's first chapter does an excellent job of plotting what Aristotle's Ethics 5.5 says about use and exchange value, the critical work down thereupon, and the textual ambiguities that are tied up in Aristotle's text that have, in many cases, been simplified or ignored by later scholars. Miekle's explanations of these concepts are well structured, and do a strong job of exploring these issues. As such, the beginning sections of each of Miekle's chapters are very helpful in understanding Aristotle's economic texts more effectively. In addition to the Ethics itself I've read several critical readings of that text, and Miekle's still added much vital context to the text itself and how modern scholars have interpreted it.

The latter portions of these chapters, however, suffer from Miekle's obvious attempts to push his own agenda about economic theory. Focusing predominantly on countering critical discussion of Aristotle, Miekle relentlessly attempts to dismiss and debase any perspective that attempts to draw out economic theory from Aristotle's texts. In many ways, these portions come across something like this: