So now I have your attention, let me clarify. I do not propose to defend extremism of the kind we hear about daily—the violent, law-breaking, society-upending kind. I am thinking more of “Aristotelian extremism”—not the so-called “revolutionary Aristotelianism” of a school of sophists who see in Aristotle a proto-Marxist, but the extremism present in Aristotle’s theory of the virtues. It can, I suspect, tell us something important about economics, the market, and even social change. In his famous Nicomachean Ethics (Book 2, chapter 9) Aristotle claims that to hit upon virtuous behaviour, sometimes a person needs to “aim off”—to behave in a…