The Scholastics were constrained in their development of economics by considerations of deference to authority and by the relatively slow development of the external economic conditions upon which to reflect. FULL ARTICLE by Gerard Casey
Source link: http://archive.mises.org/14858/the-major-contributions-of-the-scholastics-to-economics/
The Major Contributions of the Scholastics to Economics
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Very insightful! Thanks! I prefer to place more emphasis on the contributions of the scholastics to the foundation of capitalism than to science. Their emphasis on the sanctity of property and the just price being found only in a free market gave the Dutch the intellectual and moral foundations to create the institutions that became capitalism. And though they don’t seem to have stated it specifically, there seems to be the correct assumption among the scholastics that free markets instantiated property and without free markets property doesn’t exist. That seems to be implied in their opposition to state price fixing and state enforced monopolies.
Great review of the Scholastics’s contribution to economics, but I would have liked to see more emphasis on the relationship between the School of Salamanca and economists such as Richard Cantillon and Adam Smith. It seems as if you were going to do just this in the introduction, but you fall short. To what degree were the Scholastics influential on the mercantilists (chiefly, William Petty), and then on Cantillon and Smith? What was the probability that either of these men had read any manuscript by the Scholastics prior to writing their own treatise on economic theory?
I am not arguing that their contributions were negligible on the whole. I am questioning their relevance in the “re-birth”, so to speak, of sound economics in the 18th Century. Perhaps someone can shed some light.
It seems the consensus is that the scholastic insights into economic thinking were not very relevant in the formation of the Austrian school. Grice-Hutchinson’s scholarship is more a rediscovery of a forgotten school than a direct link to modern sound economics – something my reading of Woods’ scholarship and Rothbard’s “History of Economic Thought” supports.
The primary value of these sorts of examinations, in my opinion, is to show how the principles of reason within the Scholastic milieu had arrived to essentially the same conclusions as those sound 18th century economists despite being separated by considerable space and time. I don’t think they are wholly separated since both schools sprung up from essentially the same soil.
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