Autumn: The Division of Labor and Economic Justice

The agricultural revolution and its food surpluses made possible a specialization of labor and organization of handicraft workshops. Documentation of these processes appears with the innovation of written record-keeping late in the fourth millennium BC, when commercial enterprise was set aside in the Sumerian temples. The first hierarchies of economic authority developed in these public utilities. Merchants and handicraft labor were organized into public guilds.

Standing above the family groupings and tribal memberships, the temples reinvested their revenues in large engineering projects such as monumental public buildings and transport canals. This accumulation of public capital stood in sharp contrast to the normal use of wealth left in private hands, which typically was dissipated in the form of conspicuous consumption.

Classical society became economically polarized, heterogeneous, and “individualistic” to an unprecedented degree. In place of what had been more or less open tribes and other subdivisions arose closed aristocracies. “Race” differences separated victorious from conquered populations.

In place of public institutions set corporately apart to conduct commercial enterprise as a public utility, the classical state emerged alongside private ownership of enterprise and transport. Civic officials in classical times no longer functioned as an autonomous sector, but were members of their community at large. A single body of law was created in place of one set of regulations for the public sector alongside the traditional oral law and “feud justice” that governed the communal groupings at large. This unification of the law left no central authority to oppose wealthy “big-men,” to cancel agrarian debts or free persons who had fallen into debt-slavery or sold themselves into servitude under conditions of economic duress. Property became alienable on an irrevocable basis, as did human freedom.

Autumn Table of Contents

The Observatory » Human Bridges » The Creation of Order

This book was produced by Human Bridges.