Aristotle argues further that equalization of property would be powerless to prevent anything more than the merely petty crimes, for the grossest ones are the result of inordinate desire, rather than of inability to provide life’s necessities.[803] Moreover, there are many other natural inequalities of life what would remain to arouse discontent.[804] This is a sensible observation that has often been overlooked by modern radical socialists, though its author might have objected further that such personal diversities would also render an abiding equality of property impossible. His previous argument, however, that immorality and crimes are the result of inordinate desire, rather than of economic need, might be answered today by the results of investigations upon the relation of wages to morality. The doctrine of communistic equality, as preached by some theorists in fifth- and fourth-century Greece, and as satirized by Aristophanes,[805] had no appeal for Aristotle. It was, to him, merely a thinly veiled individualism. He saw through the selfish partisanship of both oligarchs and democrats, and recognized that all men are poor judges in matters that concern themselves.[806] The excessive individualism of the radical democrat of his day, which permitted the majority to confiscate the property of the minority in the name of a false equality, was as hateful to him as it was to Plato.[807] As seen above, he insisted that economic or political equality should not be demanded, except on the basis of equality of service.[808] Exploitation by the radical democracy was, in his eyes, as bad as the rule of a tyrant,[809] and the ruthless individualism of the classes was no better.[810] Like Plato, he would oppose to both of these the common interest, and would unite both masses and classes in the aim to realize the highest moral life for the individual through the state.[811] He refuted the Sophist’s theory of social contract and of justice as a mere convention.[812] As Stewart has observed he realized that “more powerful causes than the mere perception of material advantage brought men into social union and keep them in it.”[813] Each citizen, he held, is not his own master, but all belong to the state. Each is a member (μόριον) of the social body, and the concern of each is naturally relative to the good of the whole.[814]