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Abstract
Diogenes of Sinope, famously the progenitor of the Cynic philosophical mode, distinctly volunteered a life of poverty inseparable from his overall praxis. Cynic scholarship has long viewed Cynic poverty and its qualities as integral to the constitution of Cynicism, but has, by and large, taken for granted the purposes and meanings of this voluntary poverty. For reasons stemming from both the interpretation of poverty as a secondary manifestation of the Cynic ideal of self-sufficiency, and from the reduction of poverty to a mere exercise—among other theoretical and interpretive misunderstandings and oversights—the identification and isolation of Cynic poverty as a distinct category of means and ends has so far elided scrutiny. In order to isolate poverty as an object of analysis essential to Cynicism, numerous historical detractive counterclaims asserting that Cynic poverty is an optional lifestyle are analyzed in order to identify where, in all actuality, Cynicism integrally situates poverty in its body of philosophy both theoretically and functionally. In identifying a Diogenic Cynic voluntary poverty as a normative economics, Cynicism is newly interpreted as an economic philosophy that counters the socio-economic apparatus of the Greek polis for purposes of pursuing natural truths beyond and opposite the social density of material and ideological cultural conventions.