ABSTRACT
This chapter continues the journey of understanding how Aristotelian ideas around the telos and eudaimonistic ethics have moved from the core to the periphery of social life. While the previous chapter focused on important developments in religion, this chapter turns its attention to the political, economic, and cultural sphere. It explores how legal and economic changes in the Middle Ages separated economy and household and the individual from their social roles, thereby creating cultural and economic conditions in which individualism could reign supreme and a Neo-Aristotelian ethics would be increasingly out of place. It considers how such changes shaped the thought of prominent political and philosophical figures, their assumptions about human nature, and how this culminated in philosophical arguments that were ultimately moral justifications for capitalism, precursors to the assumption of harmlessness, and forerunners to a liberal individualism that would come to preclude any robust and shared understanding of harm.
