 As with many sciences, Aristotle laid much of the groundwork for economic thought, and his legacy, with the medieval scholastics, with the early modern philosophers and last but not least with Karl Marx, was profound and far-reaching (see Meikle 1995). Aristotle’s unit of analysis was the oikos, or household, from which the word economy is derived, but he also issued important insights on money and prices, as well as property and slavery. Above all, he argued that commercial pursuits were, for the most part, unethical, because they distorted means and ends. He thus drove a wedge between material betterment and the pursuit of virtue. Economic pursuits must always be subsumed to the good life, or sustained happiness (eudaimonia). Usury was particularly problematic because it violated the natural order, obtaining a yield from an object, money, that was inanimate (Aristotle Politics 1258b).