Aladdin and Value
I found a free copy of The Arabian Nights on a stoop yesterday, so I spent the morning reading its version of the Aladdin story to my daughter. It’s a “junior” version of the story that was published by Grosset & Dunlap in 1946, but it appears to hew closer to earlier versions of the story than do the more popular and contemporary versions we see in the movies and such. In any event, it’s an interesting snapshot of its moment, whatever moment that may be.
Two things of note about this version of the Aladdin story.
First, it’s very much about the value form. Aladdin begins the story as a total naif about value: the genie gives him a silver plate, which he foolishly sells to a peddler, who’s a “rogue,” for 1/60th of its value. A good part of the story is about Aladdin’s gradual enlightenment as to the nature of value: understanding, for example, that he could and should sell the silver plate for its full value or that a set of glass baubles he possesses are in fact rare jewels. Not only that, but his gradual enlightenment about value constitutes his maturation as a man, his assumption of responsibility, his greater internal depth and awareness of himself as a person. And of the world, too. In fact, the narrative talks about his education at the hands of a group of honest merchants, and it mentions that this is his introduction to “the world.”
Second, though my daughter and I are almost finished with the story—it’s damn long, so what I’m about to say may be proven wrong in the last 15 pages or so—we haven’t yet encountered the proverbial “three wishes” from the genie. Aladdin’s wishes seem to be unlimited. In popular versions of the story, it’s the scarcity of the wishes that lead him to an appreciation of their value; he comes to appreciate how important—and well chosen—his wishes must be via a growing awareness of their finiteness. But in this earlier version of the story, at least so far, it seems as if his appreciation of value comes via his education from the merchants and his love for the princess, whose name in this version is Buddir al-Buddoor. Scarcity plays almost no role at all.
Two quick thoughts in response.
First, the story provides a good illustration of Ellen Meiksins Wood’s point that there were markets before there was capitalism, that capitalism is not reducible to markets or exchange.
Second, while the value form (in the economic sense) may have played a larger cultural role in pre-capitalist societies, its function as a moral tutor was not as dependent on scarcity as someone like Mises would have us believe. In fact, scarcity—at least as we encounter it in the story, in the form of Aladdin’s initial poverty—breeds a kind of ignorance or indifference about value (his thrifty and careful mother is, admittedly, a counterpoint to that claim, but that only goes to show that scarcity in and of itself need not provide us anything in the way of a particular model). It’s only when Aladdin possesses something—and is educated about what his possession might mean for his flourishing, which again has little to do with its scarcity—that Aladdin comes to appreciate its value. Which again might lead us to wonder how important scarcity, as opposed to abundance and prosperity, is to the moral justification of capitalism as opposed to other modes of exchange.