If one reads Aristotle on politics merely to find out what Aristotle thought, one does a disservice to Aristotle; one should read Aristotle’s Politics to learn about politics.#
Persuasion should be an integral part of our understanding of the market process because the preferences of suppliers and consumers are not data – merely the Latin term for ‘givens’ – to be fed into a vast calculating mechanism, thereby yielding a fully determinate result that was implicit in the initial conditions. Instead, the market exchange process is better illumined in the light cast by rhetoric, the art of persuasion (a constant and recurrent theme in Gadamer’s work). There was no ‘given’ demand for portable computers, digital laser-guided music systems, video games, pet rocks, or genetic engineering, to take but a few recent examples, before they were developed by inventor-entrepreneurs who ‘created’ (i.e. persuaded) the demand for them.#
The process of civilization is, to a very large extent, precisely one of learning to ‘demand’ new things for which previous generations had no demand.#