Vol. 76/No. 4 January 30, 2012
Below is an excerpt from Origins of Materialism by George Novack, one of Pathfinder’s Books of the Month for January. Pathfinder publishes a number of titles on history and philosophy by Novack, a leader of the Socialist Workers Party. The excerpt describes the rise of philosophy and science, flowing out of revolutionary advances in modes of production and the social relations accompanying them. Tracing the history of materialism to its origin in the bustling maritime cities of ancient Greece, Novack explains how it emerged as the distinctive outlook of historically new and dynamic forces in the Greek city-states. Copyright © 1965 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.
BY GEORGE NOVACK
The revolution in human knowledge from which philosophy issued is bound up with that period in ancient history when the most advanced sectors of humanity passed from the Bronze Age over to the Iron Age and slavery developed from its patriarchal beginnings to a higher form based upon a more extensive division of social labor and an unprecedented expansion of trade. It was the ultimate product of a series of revolutionary changes in the lives of the peoples of the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East….
Once the processes of smelting the ore were mastered, iron was far more plentiful, cheap, and easily workable.
This democratic material provided more efficient tools for the craftsman, stronger parts for the shipbuilder, better implements for the farmers and gave a powerful impetus to the productive forces in industry and agriculture.
The immense enlargement in the body of workers accustomed to using metal tools, following the discovery of smelting and forging iron around 1200 B.C., spurred the invention of new types of metal tools….
Manufacturing, trade emerge
Agriculture had been virtually the sole mode of producing subsistence and wealth in the Bronze Age economies. Now manufacturing and trade acquired considerable, and in some key places decisive, importance for the first time. The progress and achievements of the Greek city-states were bound up with the development of their external trade.Commercial, shipping, manufacturing and colonizing enterprises brought them into connection with the most remote regions as well as with the most highly civilized states.
Their diversified internal life was the offshoot of their participation in a market area which stretched from one end of the Mediterranean to the other and from Egypt to the Black Sea and which included the kingdoms of Mesopotamia.
Three epoch-making inventions, metallic money, alphabetic writing and weights and measures, made their appearance at this point. All were the result of the requirements of mercantile activities. Metallic money was invented at the beginning of the 8th Century on the boundaries of the Greek and Eastern worlds. The earliest coins facilitated the exchange relations of Lydia with the Greek ports.
Alphabetic writing was developed and diffused for the sake of keeping commercial accounts. Stable systems of weights and measures were devised and established to promote the ready exchange of commodities.
Such innovations and economic changes created new social forces which in time effected a thorough reconstruction of social relations. Hereditary land-owning oligarchs living on self-contained estates became transformed into landed proprietors having extensive commercial connections with nearby or foreign markets….
However, the biggest shifts in the social structure took place not in the countryside but in the ports. Cities emerged in which agricultural interests were no longer supreme but became subordinate to commercial and manufacturing interests.
In these places independent merchant aristocracies, whose wealth was derived not from catering to monarchs, nobles and priests but from far-flung markets rose up alongside increasingly independent craftsmen and seafarers.
These newly enriched merchants, shipowners, financiers and manufacturers challenged the domination of the old landed and military aristocracies and toppled the representatives of the archaic order one by one….
The new conditions of urban life upset deep-rooted moral ideas and values. Hitherto birth and family connections had been the basis of status. Now citizens came to be judged and esteemed not for birth and pedigree alone but for their wealth and income. “Money makes the man.”
The upper circles of the Ionian seaports displayed a practical worldly wisdom worthy of Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard. In his only surviving verse the Ionian poet Pythermus asserted: “There’s nothing else that matters—only money.”
Birth of philosophy
The supreme outcome of all these revolutionary changes was the production of new forms of general consciousness. Magic was the characteristic worldview of tribalism; religion of the earliest kingdoms and city-states. Now something genuinely new emerged in the practice and minds of men: the first shoots of philosophy and science.These could not have appeared until the historical soil for their growth and cultivation had been prepared and enriched by the elements we have described: the introduction of iron, metallic money, alphabetic writing, weights and measures; a new type of slave production; the shattering of the remaining institutions of tribal society and the breakup of agriculturally based theocratic despotisms; the ascent of trade, manufacturing and colonizing to new levels; the birth of powerful new progressive social forces in the maritime city-states of Greece which carried class antagonisms to a new pitch of intensity and created new types of legal, political and cultural institutions.
Such were the indispensable historical preconditions for the formation of philosophy.
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