Abstract
The continuous increase of revenue and holdings have a history that extends to Early Modern ideas about housekeeping and profitseeking. However, its motivation and legitimation was just a much founded in religious and moral authority as it was in economic thinking. This chapter looks a Leon Battista Alberti’s third book of the family and his motives for seeking continuous profit. It aims to highlight some of the early economic ideas which may have laid the foundation for later conceptualizations of economic growth.
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Notes
- 1.
I follow Robert Nisbet in his advocation that there was indeed ideas of progress in Greek Antiquity and that it is not only a modern idea as argued by J.B. Bury and others. See (Nisbet 1994, 10–13).
- 2.
The canon of progress in Antiquity which Nisbet studies are: Hesiod, Xenophanes, Aeschylus, Protagoras, Thucydides, Plato and Aristotle. Growth takes different forms and shapes in Greek philosophy. With Aristotle we have the sharp distinction between chremastitics and oikonomia, where the moral authority of the former was strictly dependent on the way in which profit was made. Profit from moneylending, the taking of interest, were not only morally wrong it was also unnatural (Aristotle 1944, 51). Also see (Singer 1958) for an analysis of the Aristotelian concept of oikonomia.
- 3.
“Our only use of wealth must be to make us free” (Alberti 1969, 148).
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Bek-Thomsen, J. (2017). Profits and Morals in Leon Battista Alberti’s I libri della famiglia . In: Bek-Thomsen, J., Christiansen, C., Gaarsmand Jacobsen, S., Thorup, M. (eds) History of Economic Rationalities. Ethical Economy, vol 54. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52815-1_5
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