‘Managers would not need subordinates and masters would not need slaves’: Aristotle’s Oikia and Oikonomia Reconsidered

Abstract

The paper argues that in order to refute the conservative reception of Aristotle’s reading of Politics it is essential to reinterpret Aristotle’s account of politics vis-à-vis his account of oikonomia. The relationships of oikia are, therefore, discussed so as to argue that, given Aristotle’s account of nature in the Physics, Aristotle’s claims on the ‘natural’ superiority of men over women and on the existence of ‘natural’ slaves are philosophically inconsistent with his teleology. It concludes that in order to provide a progressive reading of Aristotle’s practical philosophy we should stress the importance of Aristotle’s critique of chrēmatistikē as kapilikē and reject Aristotle’s ‘natural’ inequalities within the household.