Early Christian attitudes towards merchants
Roman law was not the only influence on economic ideas in the Middle Ages. Ambivalent attitudes in the early Christian tradition also proved highly important. Economic matters were of course scarcely central to either the Old or New Testament, and scattered economic pronouncements are contradictory or subject to ambivalent interpretation. Fulminations against excessive love of money do not necessarily imply hostility to commerce or wealth. One remarkable aspect of the Old Testament, however, is...
The Carolingians and canon law
'Canon law' was the law governing the Church, and during the early Christian era and the Middle Ages the intertwining of Church and state often meant that canon law and state law were one and the same. Early canon law consisted of papal decretals, decrees of church councils, and the writings of the Church Fathers. We have seen that later canon law also incorporated much of the Roman law. But canon law also included something else basically pernicious the decrees and regulations 'capitularies'...
Aristotle exchange and value
Aristotle's difficult but influential discussion of exchange suffered grievously from his persistent tendency to confuse analysis with instant moral judgement. As in the case of charging interest, Aristotle did not remain content to complete a study of why exchanges take place in real life before leaping in with moral pronouncements. In analysing exchanges, Aristotle declares that these mutually beneficial transactions imply a 'proportional reciprocity', but it is characteristically ambivalent...
The politics of the polis
When man turns the use of his reason from the inanimate world to man himself and to social organization, it becomes difficult for pure reason to avoid giving way to the biases and prejudices of the political framework of the age. This was all too true of the Greeks, including the Socratics, Plato and Aristotle. Greek life was organized in small city-states the polis some of which were able to carve out overseas empires. The largest city-state, Athens, covered an area of only about one thousand...
Xenophon on household management
A disciple and contemporary of Plato was the Athenian landed aristocrat and army general, Xenophon 430-354 BC . Xenophon's economic writings were scattered throughout such works as an account of the education of a Persian price, a treatise on how to increase government revenue, and a book on 'economics' in the sense of thoughts on the technology of household and farm management. Most of Xenophon's adumbrations were the usual Hellenic scorn for labour and trade, and admiration for agriculture...
The first economist Hesiod and the problem of scarcity
No one should be misled into thinking that the ancient Greeks were 'economists' in the modern sense. In the course of pioneering in philosophy, their philosophizing on man and his world yielded fragments of politico-economic or even strictly economic thoughts and insights. But there were no modernstyle treatises on economics per se. It is true that the term 'economics' is Greek, stemming from the Greek oikonomia, but oikonomia means not economics in our sense but 'household management', and...