Global Journal of Human Social Science, E: Economics, Volume 22 Issue 2

state becomes the separation of morality and economics for the individual in Bernard Mandeville (1670-1733), who grew up in the Netherlands. His addressee is not the prince but the individual. He thus shares Bayle's and Montesquieu's opinion that what is morally questionable can be socially beneficial. He therefore rejects frugality as the principle of keeping away from everything superfluous, since it leads to primitiveness. The absence of luxury in Sparta was only the flip side of the depressing military service. Spartans were characterized only by a lack of needs; the amenities of civilized countries were unknown to them, as were the arts. What happens to a prosperous country from which rapacity, greed and luxury are banished is illustrated by Mandeville in his Bee Fable , published in 1705 and variously expanded. While the state thrived on the vices of individuals, the situation changes after Jupiter makes pride, luxury, and crime disappear: The social productive force slackens, numerous professions become superfluous, and unemployed bees leave the state. 84 While mercantilism and cameralism were still compatible with the literature of the domestic fathers when they saw the prince as a domestic father, at the end of the 17th century a mechanistic world view based on the natural sciences emerged through Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. The natural sciences, with their use of experience and experimentation and with their mathematical representation of interrelationships, brought about the end of the old economics. In Locke's view, the pursuit of gain drives the acquisition of individual wealth, which in turn benefits the good of the whole. As monarchies receded, the pattern of patriarchal hierarchical domestic order also disappeared in favor of equality for people, especially housewives, and with the rise of outside provision via the market, the paradigm of self-sufficiency was lost. Urbanization, industrialization, unemployment after overproduction and long working hours became widespread. Entrepreneurs became the upper middle class. Utilitarianism leads to value relativism when it defines use or gratification without considering whether utility is life-enhancing or life-destroying. Asceticism and It was the vices of the individual that maintained societal prosperity. Thus, Mandeville reverses Virgil's bee-state, mentioned at the beginning, which was sustained by virtues. The excursion into 18th-century France and England showed how the tradition of antiquity and early modern domestic literature was ended by replacing measure with excess, necessities with luxuries, and moral standards with immoral vices. This freed the view of objects from moral implications. The environment could unobjectionably serve profit maximization. The view of economic events focused on the market and could disregard the people involved. moderation limit desires and thus slow economic The house was seen as the image of the state, but since the 18th century it dissolved and became the intimate privacy of the family, which, in contrast to the pre-modern community of production of the whole house, was only a community of consumption and where the separation of home and workplace became common. In paternalistic analogy the house father stood to the country father and up to God father. The house father was the bearer of autochthonous power as the lord of the whole house. As is well known, even today a judicial search warrant is required before the state and the police are allowed to enter the protected space of the house . 89 The economics of the 19th and 20th century replaced the concept of happiness with that of utility and is oriented more to the increase of the gross domestic product than to responsibility toward future © 2022 Global Journals Volume XXII Issue II Version I 51 ( ) Global Journal of Human Social Science - Year 2022 E Economy between Necessity and Luxury. Business Ethics from Antiquity to Early Modern Times 84 Cf. Dorit Grugel-Pannier, Luxus, p. 198-200, 214, 216, 242-243 85 Cf. Erich Egner, Der Verlust der alten Ökonomik. Seine Hintergründe und Wirkungen, Berlin Duncker & Humblot, 1985, p. 180 (Xenophon, Erinnerungen an Sokrates, 1. v., 6, 2,3,10, Memorabilien, Tusculum, München 1977 2 ; Seneca Aus den Briefen an Lucius , in: Antike Weisheit, Tusculum , E. Heimeran ed., München 1939, p. 31, 35). 86 William Kapp, Das Problem der Enthumanisierung der‚ reinen Theorie‘ und der gesellschaftlichen Realität, Kyklos XX, 1967, p. 307, 328-329 87 Sombart, Die drei Nationalökonomien, München 1930, p. 174-176 88 Henri Bergson, Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion, Paris 1932, p. 316 89 Paul Münch, Lebenformen in der frühen Neuzeit, Ullstein, Berlin 1992, p. 168, 172, 181-188 progress. Poverty appears to be surmountable through abundance on the market, so that abundance becomes an economic policy goal and an equally autonomous homo oeconomicus with unrestrained acquisitiveness and striving for wealth corresponds to the autonomous market. It becomes apparent that all virtues handed down in former economics no longer play a role. Forgotten is the saying attributed by Xenophon to Socrates: "You seem to me to believe that happiness consists in indulgence and living well, but I believe that it is divine to need nothing, but that the closest thing to the divine is to need as little as possible." Forgotten also the sentence of Seneca: "If you want to make someone rich, you must not increase his wealth, but decrease his desires." Or, "one is rich not by what he possesses, but more by what he knows with dignity to do without." 85 What would be needed is a transition from a growth- oriented economy to one of economic equilibrium, without loss of humanity . 86 According to Sombart, economic science should be cultural, social and human science at the same time . 87 Household science, in the face of ecological damage, should be concerned with the ought, should be teleological. For Henri Bergson (1859-1941), the pursuit of comfort and luxury in the 20th century characteristically replaced the demand for asceticism in the Middle Ages . 88 He calls for a return to simplicity.