The Revolutionary Face of Money: Platos Perspective on the Market and Justice

Abstract

Book II talks about the idea of the market coined into western thought. But looking closely into it, one could argue that it is not all about the theorization of the civic market along. Still, the revolutionary face of money could be entangled in it together. Earlier on, Plato had discussed the topic of justice, and a quarrel had evolved out of it. The argument had developed into money and its relationship to human and divine debts, friendships, and individual gains. It is for this reason that the conversation between Cephalus and Socrates defines the meaning of wealth. Socrates clearly states that 'as a moneymaker, I was a sort of mean between my grandfathers. My grandfather, whose namesake I am, inherited pretty nearly as much substance as I now possess, and he increased it many times over(330 b). The Republic's fundamental goal was to persuade people to develop a better, new understanding of money and perceive it as an instrument of positive reciprocity. Through this kind of understanding, money would become a part of political justice and not a whole bit of it as people deemed. In the new understanding, Plato wanted people to know that money was not entirely the solution to all their problems, especially as far as justice was concerned, but not to ignore the fact that it was part of the solution. Republicans aimed at formulating a theory of the market while at the same time circumscribing the market and its logic within tof the society in a manner to achieve justice. In this context, Plato equated the analogical relationship of the people and the city to that of a healthy soul. In the comparison, Plato cited that a healthy soul comprised reason, spiritedness, and an appetite. As Socrates stated, "it would be ridiculous if someone should think that the spiritedness didn't come into the cities from those private men who are just the ones credited with having this character…The love of money, which one could affirm, is to be found not least among the Phoenicians (435e). Similarly, according to Plato, a city was composed of three classes: philosopher rulers, guardians, and moneymakers. Cephalus told Sophocles that "is that to me you didn't seem overly fond of money. For the most part, those who do not make money themselves are that way those who do make it are twice as attached to it as the others. Moneymakers too are serious about money as their product and are serious about it" (330C). Therefore, Plato called for the subordination of market norms to the imperatives of justice in their city. Plato wanted his subjects to understand money better and view it as an instrument of distributive and corrective justice. In the conversation, Plato's theorization of the market was a reply to the crisis of Athenian society. The situation was related to the rise and rapid spread of coined money in the Greek world. The problem was deemed as the ascendance of polis implied a new notion of justice that was centered on public institutions that were exercising a monopoly on arbitration in the name of the whole community. In other words, those as mentioned above were a representation of a departure from the old forms of reciprocity. These were centered on ritualized exchanges of gifts that tendered to occur between prominent persons or clans. At the same time, another crisis that Plato was talking about was the rise of a monetized market economy. This foreshadowed a shift from the communalistic practices of what was by then referred to as the generalized exchange. The exchange was a characteristic of palatial economies, and impersonal norms of commodity exchange further categorized it. In the real sense, a persistent theme of epic and...