ANCIENT GREEK EXPERIENCE OF POLITICAL AND LEGAL REGULATION OF OIKONOMIA AS A BALANCE OF INDIVIDUAL AND GENERAL

Abstract

The paper examines the political and legal means and ethical principles of harmonizing the interests of the individual and the general in the economic activity of ancient Greek society in the 8th–4th centuries BC. Explore the reform of the economic sphere, reveal the meaning of oikonomia, its structural components in the imagination and state legal practice of the ancient Greeks, highlight the shortcomings of legal regulation in matters of capital accumulation to level out the contradictions of the individual and the general. The ancient Greeks were aware of the antagonism between the individual and the general, understood the dynamic essence of their relationship and formed ethical and legal means of harmonizing the manifested contradiction. As a result of the pan-Athenian agreement, polic was determined as the dominant sphere, where oikonomia acted as a separate subject of citizen activity and consisted of three meanings: a) archaic form of blood-family economic activity, closed in itself, despotic in its essence and therefore destructive for the general; b) a household that naturally provides everything necessary for a patriarchal family and provides the opportunity for its owner to become a “master of industrial relations management.” Individual management experience ensures freedom for each citizen and can promote the interests of the general; c) chremastics is an element of оікіа. This type of activity, under the influence of egocentrism and an anti-human position, naturally threatens the common because it destroys the solidarity and democratic foundations of the policy. Therefore, certain types of chremastics (usury) were prohibited, and the type of activity itself was placed under ethical and legal control – in the form of voluntary charity. This policy was not effective and the way of managing authority was replaced by the state-legal way of managing domestic policy. Since the formation of the professional state apparatus and the formation of the Athenian Empire, oikonomia and chremastics have been transformed from a multiple phenomenon of the internal life of policy into a political lever of the external activities of the state. Athens was transformed into a large archaic оікіа – the majority of citizens and the state itself were enriched unlimitedly. Chremastics have become the dominant activity and value of the public sphere in Athens. This became one of the levers of a new imbalance of individual and general interests, the decline of ancient Greek civilization.