In Greece it was of course chiefly the Spartans, the people who resisted the commercial revolution most strongly, who did not recognise individual property but allowed and even encouraged theft. To our time they have remained the prototype of savages who rejected civilisation (for representative 18th-century views on them compare Dr. Samuel Johnson in Boswell’s Life or Friedrich Schiller’s essay Über die Gesetzgebung des Lykurgos und Solon). Yet already in Plato and Aristotle, however, we find a nostalgic longing for return to Spartan practice, and this longing persists to the present. It is a
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