Papers by Nicholas Theocarakis
Pre-publication, 2024
Setting the terms of discourse in an asymmetric negotiation does not have to assume the bluntness... more Setting the terms of discourse in an asymmetric negotiation does not have to assume the bluntness of the Athenians in the Melian dialogue. Even a country's financial destruction can be disguised as a legitimate narrative that takes the moral high ground. Indeed, the language of European solidarity was used in the negotiations for the “bailout” of bankrupt Greece at the level of heads of state and finance ministers. The human face of the EU would show itself in order to save the prodigal son from a fate worse than death. The proverbial ants, however, had to teach the grasshoppers a lesson, i.e., that they cannot flout the economic laws of the only existing alternative and the will of the EU. The salvation of Greece had to be done in terms that were fair – even forgiving – but firm.
The discussion at the level of the principals of the Troika and the representatives of the Greek State (The Brussels Group) were of a different nature. The self-proclaimed apolitical bureaucratic men doing the actual negotiations and dictating terms were using a language very different in tone and content. Discussions about economics were not done in the received jargon of the mainstream economics profession but in a bureaucratic lingo that distorted the meaning of words but pretended that those who mastered it knew what they were talking about and that those to whom these solipsistic utterances were addressed to, would better obey the will of their benevolent proconsuls. Drawing on my own experience as head of the Greek side of the Brussels Group, this paper attempts to elucidate this arbitrary change of the signification of things using Hobbes's translation of Thucydides.
The discussion at the level of the principals of the Troika and the representatives of the Greek State (The Brussels Group) were of a different nature. The self-proclaimed apolitical bureaucratic men doing the actual negotiations and dictating terms were using a language very different in tone and content. Discussions about economics were not done in the received jargon of the mainstream economics profession but in a bureaucratic lingo that distorted the meaning of words but pretended that those who mastered it knew what they were talking about and that those to whom these solipsistic utterances were addressed to, would better obey the will of their benevolent proconsuls. Drawing on my own experience as head of the Greek side of the Brussels Group, this paper attempts to elucidate this arbitrary change of the signification of things using Hobbes's translation of Thucydides.
Nicomachean Ethics Political Economy: The Trajectory of the Problem of Value
History of Economic Ideas, 2006
The paper examines the influence of the analysis of economic exchange in Aristotle’s Nicomachean ... more The paper examines the influence of the analysis of economic exchange in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, v, on subsequent economic theorizing. The approach is textual and selective. It traces the use of the relevant passage of NE v on Scholastic economic thought, the early mercantilists, natural law philosophy, the Scottish Enlightenment, Galiani, Turgot, Smith and Karl Marx. It ends with the abandonment of Aristotelian equivalence of exchange in neoclassical economics.
Condorcet’s Secret : on the signifi cance of classical political economics today
Review of Luigino Bruni, Civil Happiness: Economics and Human Flourishing in Historical Perspective
Social Science Research Network, 2007
ABSTRACT
Review of Richard van den Berg (ed.), At the Origins of Mathematical Economics: The Economics of A.N. Isnard (1748-1803)
Social Science Research Network, 2006
ABSTRACT
Economic Thought, Mar 25, 2014
Mainstream views concerning the uselessness or usefulness of HET are illustrated. These rely on a... more Mainstream views concerning the uselessness or usefulness of HET are illustrated. These rely on a hidden assumption: a 'cumulative view' according to which the provisional point of arrival of contemporary economics incorporates all previous contributions in an improved way. Critiques of positivism led philosophy of science to recognise the existence of different approachesin economics, as in other sciences. Conceptualisation, recognised by Schumpeter as the first stage in economic theorising, is the stage in which the different visions of the world underlying the different approaches, take shapeand are better recognised. In this, HET plays an essential role. As an illustration, the differences between the classical and marginalist conceptualisations of the economy are illustrated. Thus HET is essential in both undergraduate and graduate economic curricula, as a decisive help towards a better understanding and evaluation of formalised theories/models in the first case, and as an education to the philological method of research, essential in the first stage of theorising, in the case of graduate curricula.
Modern Political Economics
Routledge eBooks, Mar 29, 2012
Richard van den Berg (ed.), At the Origins of Mathematical Economics: The Economics of A. N. Isnard (1748-1803), London and New York, Routledge, 2006 (Routledge Studies in the History of Economics, 76), pp. xviii+461
History of Economic Ideas, 2006
International Review of Economics, Dec 8, 2007
In modern discussions of reciprocity the concept is distinguished from that of self-interested ex... more In modern discussions of reciprocity the concept is distinguished from that of self-interested exchange. In the problem of value in exchange, however, as set up in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics the concept of reciprocity (antipeponthos) as equivalent exchange was central in commercial transactions. The paper discusses (1) the concept of antipeponthos in Aristotle, (2) how issues of trust and inequality of services provided were dealt in Aristotle and (3) the trajectory of the concept of equivalent exchange from Aristotle to Turgot.
Metamorphoses: The Concept of Labour in the History of Political Economy
Economic and Labour Relations Review, Jul 1, 2010
The emergence of an understanding of labour as the basis of value is traced from ancient Greek au... more The emergence of an understanding of labour as the basis of value is traced from ancient Greek authors to classical political economy and Karl Marx, and the subsequent eclipse of the theory in neoclassical economics is then charted. While the ancient Greeks did not have a concept of labour as a measure of value, in Scholastic authors the notion was fixed that labour and cost of production determine value. Labour assumed a central role in Adam Smith, but it was with David Ricardo that a fully blown labour theory of value was achieved. Marx gave the concept its philosophical dimension, tying it to a critique of classical political economy. The labour theory of value came under attack in neoclassical formulations which in the end effected the analytical disappearance of labour in several ways. Labour became just another factor of production, with marginal productivity regulating its price. Then factors of production and final goods became analytically equivalent as sources of subjective utility, especially in the context of general equilibrium theory. In disutility models of labour supply, labour was substituted by its absence, ‘leisure’. Finally, attempts were made to explain the employment relationship as an application of agency theory, moving away from the pure commodity model of labour. Nevertheless, all these theories failed to account for what became the Achilles' heel of neoclassicism — namely the indeterminacy of the labour contract.
The Dissemination of Economic Thought in South-Eastern Europe in the Nineteenth Century
This highly illuminating book marks a significant stage in our growing understanding of how the d... more This highly illuminating book marks a significant stage in our growing understanding of how the development of national traditions of economic thought has been affected by both internal and external factors.
Social Science Research Network, 2011
This paper examines the reception of Adam Smith ideas in Greece from their first appearance in co... more This paper examines the reception of Adam Smith ideas in Greece from their first appearance in commercial handbooks of preindependence Greece to the academic treatment of Smith in the first half of the twentieth century. It discusses how Smith was perceived in the translators' comments in the first books on political economy and the views on Smith of the major academic economists of the nineteenth and twentieth century. The paper examines the use of Smith in arguments over economic policy in the nineteenth century and provides a description of all available translations of Smith's works into Greek.
Disparaging liberal economics in nineteenth-century Greece: The case of “The economist's duck”
European Journal of The History of Economic Thought, Oct 15, 2015
Abstract In 1866, a Greek author under the nom-de-plume “Fouram” wrote a short stage comedy entit... more Abstract In 1866, a Greek author under the nom-de-plume “Fouram” wrote a short stage comedy entitled “The Economist's Duck.” In this rather crude and artless play, a liberal economist, a follower of Adam Smith and J.-B. Say, is lampooned as attempting to show how his duck can subsist without food. The duck naturally dies and the economist – and his profession – is denounced as a fraud. We have located the play, translated, and published it. We use it to shed light on the public perception of economics in nineteenth-century Greece and relate it to research on the appearance, perception, and criticism of economists and economics.
Social Science Research Network, 2014
The initial incentive for this paper was the debt crisis in the periphery of the Eurozone and esp... more The initial incentive for this paper was the debt crisis in the periphery of the Eurozone and especially in Greece with disastrous results. La Década Perdida in Latin America in the 1980s had similarities and lessons to be learnt. 1 As a historian of economic thought I went back to look on the origins of the analysis of public debt. Some of the ground I will cover is well trodden, sometimes part of the potted histories that preceded textbooks on public finance, at a time when scholars thought necessary to present their arguments after a brief recapitulation of the arguments that preceded their own, or in some other caseslike James Buchananin order to make a point that new theories have an oldalbeit fallaciouspedigree. 2 I have used this material and re-visited the old places reaching to a period where such recapitulations were no longer thought necessary. I will not review Marxian theories of public debt in this paper. Nevertheless, I cannot resist the temptation to quote from the first volume of Das Kapital, Marx's characterization of public debt as an instrument of the so-called primitive accumulation: 1 See for example Joseph E. Stiglitz and Daniel Heymann (eds), Life after Debt: The Origins and Resolutions of Debt Crises, IEA Conference Volume No. 152, Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 2 Cases of such recaps are, e.g., Bastable, Leroy-Beaulieu and Wagner. Shutaro T. Matsushita, in his doctoral dissertation The Economic Effects of Public Debts, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1929) precedes his analysis with a long chapter on the history of the concept. James Buchanan in the Public Principles of Public Debt (Homewood, Ill.: R. D. Irwin, 1958), pp. 16 et seq., reviews several theories in order to show that the (then)-new orthodoxy‖ was in fact quite old. It was a time when Joseph Shield Nicholson (1920) and R.O. Roberts (1942) could write in mainstream journals articles on the views of Adam Smith and David Ricardo on public debt in order to derive useful conclusions for economic policy.
History of Economic Ideas, 2006
The paper examines the influence of the analysis of economic exchange in Aristotle’s
Nicomachean... more The paper examines the influence of the analysis of economic exchange in Aristotle’s
Nicomachean Ethics, v, on subsequent economic theorizing. The approach is textual and selective. It traces the use of the relevant passage of NE v on Scholastic economic thought, the early mercantilists, natural law philosophy, the Scottish Enlightenment,
Galiani, Turgot, Smith and Karl Marx. It ends with the abandonment of Aristotelian equivalence of exchange in neoclassical economics.
Nicomachean Ethics, v, on subsequent economic theorizing. The approach is textual and selective. It traces the use of the relevant passage of NE v on Scholastic economic thought, the early mercantilists, natural law philosophy, the Scottish Enlightenment,
Galiani, Turgot, Smith and Karl Marx. It ends with the abandonment of Aristotelian equivalence of exchange in neoclassical economics.
A commentary on Alessandro Roncaglia's paper
I say, in common with the rest of the Greeks, that the Athenians are wise. Now I observe, when we... more I say, in common with the rest of the Greeks, that the Athenians are wise. Now I observe, when we are collected for the Assembly, and the city has to deal with an affair of building, we send for builders to advise us on what is proposed to be built; and when it is a case of laying down a ship, we send for shipwrights; and so in all other matters which are considered learnable and teachable: but if anyone else, whom the people do not regard as a craftsman, attempts to advise them, no matter how handsome and wealthy and well-born he may be, not one of these things induces them to accept him; they merely laugh him to scorn and shout him down, until either the speaker retires from his attempt, overborne by the clamour, or the tipstaves pull him from his place or turn him out altogether by order of the chair. Such is their procedure in matters which they consider professional. But when they have to deliberate on something connected with the administration of the State, the man who rises ...
Richard van den Berg (ed.), At the Origins of Mathematical Economics: The Economics of A. N. Isnard (1748-1803), London and New York, Routledge, 2006 (Routledge Studies in the History of Economics, 76), pp. xviii+461