Saint
Thomas Aquinas was probably the biggest intellect of the middle ages, and
developed a philosophy which combined the philosophy of Aristotle with the
teachings of the Catholic Church. With this combination, a lot of what we find
in Aquinas mirrors the writings of Aristotle, both the good and the bad. For
example, Aquinas states in his famous Summa
Theologica that the price of goods
does not depend on their nature but on their usefulness to man.[i]
Here Aquinas is following Aristotle in recognizing that it is consumer demand
that determines the value of a good instead of the amount of labor or resources
used to make a good as later scholars of political economy will suggest.
Perhaps his biggest contribution to the history of economic thought, although
he strays from it later in the same section, was when he states that “buying
and selling seem to be established for the common advantage of both parties.”[ii]
This of course is breaking away from Aristotle, at least for a sentence, and
suggesting that in an exchange, there are in fact reverse inequalities of
values. Immediately after he states this correct analysis however he defaults
back to the position of Aristotle and claims that in order for an exchange to
take place, the values of goods being exchanged must be equated. Although it is
speculation, Aquinas’ brief inquiry into a mutual beneficial exchange could
have led later Scholastic writers to follow this line of thought, which
eventually led them to justify usury because of their understanding of time
preference. If they understood that a voluntary exchange is mutually
beneficial, it is not a far leap to begin searching for why individuals would
participate in usury unless both parties were benefiting.
Aquinas,
unlike the later Scholastics, did not make this connection, and for that reason
followed Aristotle and the teachings of the church in condemning usury, however
he goes further and suggests that usury is unjust since money is in fact
consumed during an exchange. He argues that money’s use is equivalent to its
ownership, thus when one charges interest one is in fact double charging, which
he argues is unjust. While this is a thesis he alone developed, I believe the
reasoning for it came from Aristotle’s separation of primary and secondary
uses. Money’s primary use is ownership, while its use for display is a
secondary use. Here the primary use gets destroyed when an exchange takes place
since one does not own the money afterwards and the exchange of further money
results in a double charge.
While
it is quite clear today that the work of Aquinas was in no way up to par with even
that of the Scholastics, he did make two major contributions to the study of
economics. By sticking to the subjective theory of value as Aristotle had put
forward, and by being one of the first writers to suggest that a voluntary
exchange implies mutual benefits for both parties, Aquinas laid the ground work
for the Scholastics to later build on.
[i]
The second section of “By sins committed in buying and selling” in the Second
Part of the Second Part in Aquinas’ Summa
Theologica
[ii]
The first section of “By sins committed in buying and selling” in the Second
Part of the Second Part in Aquinas’ Summa
Theologica
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