[11] “Egli è proprio ancora delle misure d’aver si fatta relazione colle cose misurate, che in certo modo la misurata divien misura della misurante.” Montanari, Della Moneta, p. 48 in v. III of Custodi’s “Scrittori classici Italiani di Economia Politica. Parte Antica.” (“It is the property of measure to be in such a relation to the things measured, that in a certain way the thing measured becomes the measure of the measuring thing.”) [12] It is in that sense that Aristotle (see the passage quoted at the beginning of this chapter) conceives exchange value. [13] This expression is used by Genovesi. [14] Aristotle makes the same remark with reference to the private family as the primitive community. But the primitive form of family is the tribal family, from the historical dissolution of which the private family develops. ἐν μὲν οὔν τῃ πρώτο κοινωνίᾳ (τοῦτο δ’ ἐστὶν οἰκίἀ) φανερὸν ὅτι οὐδέν ἐστιν ἔργον αὐτῆς (namely της ἀλλαγῆς) “And in the first community, which is the family, this art is obviously of no use.” Jowett’s transl. l. c. [15] “Money is, in fact, only the instrument for carrying on buying and selling (but, if you please, what do you understand by buying and selling?) and the consideration of it no more forms a part of the science of political economy, than the consideration of ships, or steam engines, or of any other instrument employed to facilitate the production and distribution of wealth.” Th. Hodgskin, Popular Political Economy, etc. London, 1827, p. 178, 179. [16] A comparative study of the writings and characters of Petty and Boisguillebert, outside of the light which it would throw upon the difference of French and English society at the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth centuries, would disclose the origin of the national contrast between English and French Political Economy. The same contrast reasserts itself in Ricardo and Sismondi.