Aristotle's View On Private Property

Aristotle was a Greek philosopher and one of the greatest intellectual figures of Western history. The views of Aristotle are particularly significant as the structure of his thought process had an enormous influence on the economic and social attitudes of people within the high to late Middle Ages. To Aristotle, ownership was the foundation of a stable social order as the satisfaction derived from the accumulation of items owned and from the sharing of private property acts as a positive trigger to good government.
Land or belongings owned by a person or group that is kept for their exclusive use is private property. To Aristotle, property is a part of the household, and the right to acquire property is a part of managing the household as …show more content…
This is because we desire happiness and we pursue other goods for the sake of happiness; if we have achieved happiness, then our lives are complete and lacking in nothing as happiness suffices to make our lives good lives. Aristotle’s views are coloured by his belief in telos; he believes that the telos of all men is to achieve happiness, and they can only achieve this as citizens as men are ‘political animals’. Because men are essentially social, community life is crucially important for Aristotle, including participation in politics. Citizens must participate in civic life in order to realize their true natures and their freedom and they must own private property in order to learn values that are necessary for community life and to achieve happiness which will motivate them to achieve higher goals. This is why Aristotle’s democracy consists of property-owning gentlemen. A key idea here is moral economy. Aristotle saw the economic life of society as embedded in, and intimately bound up with the various associations to which people belonged, moving up from the household, and the moral purposes of those associations. This all culminated in the state since economic life in the polis was designed to support its political life, and was regulated by political and moral purposes. The natural purpose of money was to facilitate exchange, rather than to make a profit on itself, and this idea links back to the common good. Aristotle believes it is necessary to prioritize social community though using private property in moral ways in order to achieve good government. Furthermore, Aristotle’s assumption is that economic hardship cannot always be avoided, even among those who start off with abundant resources and have