Aristotle

In the most general term, banausoi is the label for people who earn their living by plying a "craft" that involves the use of the hands. Banausos, however, is not merely a descriptive term, since it invariably marks a person as mercantile and servile. Thus Aristotle places the "banausic" arts in the category of "wealthgetting that involves exchange" and identifies them as a form of "labour for hire". In text from the classical period, the word banausia and its cognate is virtually monopolized by Xenophon, Plato and Aristotle; this language is never used in oratory or comedy (whose authors tend to reflect democratic sentiments).
First of all, aristocratic writers use the term to define a group of people as "by nature" inferior and unfit for participation in politics.

Nay, in ancient times, and among some nations the artisan class (banausoi) were slaves or foreigners, and therefore the majority of them are so now. The best form of state will not admit them to citizenship; but if they are admitted, then our definition of the virtue of a citizen will not apply to every citizen nor to every free man as such, but only to those who are freed from necessary services. The necessary people are either slaves who minister to the wants of individuals, or mechanics and laborers who are the servants of the community (Aristotle, Politics, III,5 - Jowett).

Xenophon too, claims that banausoi should not participate in politics, since they lack the leisure required for participating in civic affairs in a responsible and beneficial manner:

A good suggestion, Critobulus, for the base mechanic (banausic) arts, so called, have got a bad name; and what is more, are held in ill repute by civilised communities, and not unreasonably… Hand in hand with physical enervation follows enfeeblement of soul: while the demand which these base mechanic arts makes on the time of those employed in them leaves them no leisure to devote to the claims of friendship and the state. How can such folk be other than sorry friends and ill defenders of the fatherland? So much so that in some states, especially those reputed to be warlike, no citizen is allowed to exercise any mechanical craft at all (Oec. IV,2 - Dakyns).

Clearly then, banausia is a loaded and highly derogatory term. Note in particular Aristotle's claim that many banausoi were nouveaux riches, i.e. wealthy members of non-aristocratic class (Politics, III,5)… A passage in Nicomachean Ethics offers clear evidence of this point:

The man who goes to excess and is vulgar (banausos) exceeds, as has been said, by spending beyond what is right. For on small objects of expenditure he spends much and displays a tasteless showiness; e.g. he gives a club dinner on the scale of a wedding banquet, and when he provides the chorus for a comedy he brings them on to the stage in purple, as they do at Megara. And all such things he will do not for honour's sake but to show off his wealth, and because he thinks he is admired for these things, and where he ought to spend much he spends little and where little, much (NE IV,2 - Ross).

In this period, then, we find a rhetoric and ideology which set the "truly free" individual in opposition to men who were free in a merely legal and civic sense. The free or "liberal" man, in short, is leisured, educated, independent, and "truly" fit for rule, whereas the "banausic" or "illiberal" individual is slavish, servile, wage-earning, uneducated and unfit for rule…
I have discussed this ideological and political program because it provides the context for the fourth-century discussions of the "free" activity of theoria.

Andrea Nightingale

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Different activities, different pleasures; which activities then? The activities of the good man... What is best in us is reason and the characteristic activity of reason is theoria, that speculative reasoning which deals with unchanging truths. Such speculation can be a continuous and pleasant - it is, Aristotle says brusquely, "the pleasantest" - form of activity. It is a self-sufficient occupation...
Thus, surprisingly, the end of human life is metaphysical contemplation of truth. External goods are necessary only to a limited extent, and the wealth required is only moderate. Thus the whole of human life reaches its highest point in the activity of a speculative philosopher with a reasonable income. The banality of the conclusion could not be more apparent. Why then it is reached? One clue is in Aristotle’s concept of self-sufficiency…
Aristotle’s audience, then, is explicitly a small leisured minority. We are no longer faced with a telos for human life as such, but with a telos for one kind of life which presupposes a certain kind of hierarchical social order and which presupposes also a view of the universe in which the realm of timeless truth is metaphysically superior to the human world of change and sense experience and ordinary rationality. All Aristotle’s conceptual brilliance in the course of the argument declines at the end to an apology for this extraordinarily parochial form of human existence...
In fact, Aristotle is much more of a quietist in relation to political activity. Provided only that there is a room for the contemplative elite, the Nicomachean Ethics does not provide for a condemnation or an endorsement of any social structure… In fact, by his own practice as the tutor of the young Alexander, and by his advocacy of the life of contemplation, Aristotle, as Kelsen pointed out, sided with the powers, which were about to destroy the polis as a political entity. For the exaltation of the contemplative life is an exaltation of it as a form of life for those men who have hitherto composed the political elite. It provides a rationale for their withdrawal to the status of citizen, “good citizens” in Aristotle’s sense, but not rulers… As Kelsen puts it, “the glorification of the contemplative life, which has renounced all activity and more especially all political activity, has at all times constituted a typical element of political morality set up by the ideologies of absolute monarchy. For the essential tendency of this form of state consists in excluding the subjects from all share in public affairs” (International Journal of Ethics, XLVIII, 1).

Alasdair MacIntyre

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Andrea W. Nightingale. The rhetoric of philosophic "freedom". In: Spectacles of Truth in Classical Greek Philosophy. Cambridge UP, 2004-2006.

Alasdair MacIntyre. Aristotle's 'Ethics'; Postscript to Greek ethics. In: A Short History of Ethics. A history of moral philosophy from the Homeric Age to the twentieth century. Routledge 1967-2006.