The Free-Market Economics of the Late Scholastics

By Tom Woods

 

Since the mid-20th century, historians of economic thought have directed more and more attention to the contributions and influence of the Late Scholastics — Catholic theologians, often Spanish, of the 16th and 17th centuries. In his History of Economic Analysis (1954), Joseph Schumpeter paid special tribute to the importance of the Late Scholastics. "It is they," he wrote, "who come nearer than does any other group to having been the 'founders' of scientific economics."

 

Raymond de Roover expanded on Schumpeter's observation, writing a series of pathbreaking articles for academic journals on the subject of these neglected figures. De Roover punctured substantial holes in the received view of late-medieval and early-modern economic thought, particularly when it came to the subject of the just price. Prior to de Roover's work, the Scholastic conception of the "just price" had been grotesquely misinterpreted; the Scholastics were said to have believed that certain objective criteria could help determine a good's "just price." To the contrary, de Roover showed, for the Scholastics the just price was the market price, the price arrived at by the interaction of buyers and sellers on the market. (This statement was subject to a proviso: if the state should impose a price, the state-imposed price would be considered the just one. Even here, though, some of the Scholastics remained skeptical of nonmarket prices and of the state's ability to ascertain and impose an objectively just price.) Previous work in this area, de Roover showed, had placed altogether too much emphasis on the idiosyncratic views of the relatively unimportant Heinrich von Langenstein at the expense of the broader consensus of the Scholastics and canonists.

 

The view of medieval economic thought held by 19th- and 20th-century romantics and corporatists, in which theologians encouraged the setting of "just prices" by the public authority and recommended the guild system as a vehicle for promoting justice for buyers and sellers alike, did not survive de Roover's reevaluation. On the latter point, it turns out that… (Read more)

 

Source: Mises.org