The dispute about begging
When the two strongest mendicant orders, the Franciscans and the Dominicans, won the right to permanently occupy some chairs at the University of Paris, their prestige rose so much within the university that the teachers of the secular clergy were gradually pushed out. The latter reacted by attacking the very principle of religious begging. In 1254 56 Guillaume de Saint-Amour opened a polemic against the friars with various pamphlets and treatises. The ensuing dispute lasted for many years....
Xenophon a double personality
Xenophon, one of Socrates' pupils, is an essential author for our theme. He left us two texts of great interest, which sustain two opposing visions of the increase in consumption and the pursuit of wealth the rush towards economic growth, the increase in trade, production and consumption the prospect in Ways and Means or otherwise the closure into a static economy, which distrusts the wealth gained from trade and investment Oeconomicus . In Oeconomicus, Xenophon gives a faultless definition of...
Chrysohedonism or fear of goods
The fact that the early mercantilists kept talking about 'treasure' when they already meant 'capital' led their successors to be over-critical of them. To understand the mercantilists' 'hunger for goods', we must first evaluate the accusations levelled at them by the Enlightenment thinkers, starting from Hume on the balance of trade see below, page 214 , to Mirabeau,26 and to Adam Smith. Smith's were the most organic criticisms, and they had a devastating effect. It was these criticisms that...
Hunger for goods fear of goods
The central point of our research refers to the time in which modern economics started. In the last centuries of the Middle Ages, in some European cities, wealth began to grow constantly from year to year. It was an event absolutely new in human history. It is therefore understandable that the consequent increase in consumption caused a veritable trauma in economic and social culture. It changed lifestyles and behavioural models brought the social hierarchy and the scale of values into question...
English poor laws to the mid 1500s
In England the question was much simpler. English sources do not reveal anything like the dramatic clash that we saw in Spain. They also show that there was total agreement between the policies adopted towards the poor and theoretical reflection on the problem. The only real point of debate was how the enclosures should be judged, as we shall see. But on the issue of the poor, laws and regulations, practical policies and theories gradually converged towards two shared convictions first, the...
Attitude to trade before Olivi
In the second half of the twelfth century the scholastics' attitude towards merchants and commerce became much more rigid. The main cause of this change was the reaction against the emergence of the new economy and the new society. Greed or avarice, as Little and Newhauser have written, became the most serious vice avarice was actually one of the most condemned sins also among the Christian Fathers and in the early Middle Ages . A host of great intellectuals campaigned against the hunger for...
Peter Olivi extreme economic dualism
This fertile debate culminated in the work of Peter Olivi. With him Franciscan dualism revealed itself as a dramatic, paradoxical contrast. The Proven al friar entirely reproduced the contradiction of the Cathars of his region. In fact, besides being the most rigorous supporter of absolute poverty, Olivi was also a great economic analyst, sympathetic to the needs of the market and of individual profit, and to the independent laws governing the new economy.128 In Olivi's analysis three original...
Alexander of Hales theorist of economic dualism
Compared to Thomistic harmony, dualism seems to be a better expression of the uneasiness and uncertainties characterizing the late medieval period. The theorization of dualism is found in Alexander of Hales, doctor irrefragabilis, the first professor in Paris to wear the Franciscan habit. Alexander was almost the same age as St Francis, and was already teaching at Paris when he entered the order, followed soon afterwards by his colleague and friend Jean de La Rochelle, with whom he elaborated a...
From alms to human capital A system of productive assistance
In the period of about 70 years between Henry VIII's law and the end of the century, England consolidated the system of regulation of the poor, with the policy of assistance and workhouses. In 1548 a proposal was put forward, probably written by John Hales, to exonerate towns from the payment of the tax freeing them from feudal bonds. The savings from this could go into a pool, to be used 'in settying the poore people of the same city on worke'.97 After other laws on the poor promulgated by...
A glance at mercantile ethics
Some of these authors were directly influenced by values that were expressed between the lines in treatises by merchants, or by the writings of the Franciscans or other religious figures who planned operations in favour of the poor, like pawnshops. Agostini, for instance, stated that to make the city rich, it was necessary to declare that the mechanical arts and trading were not ignoble. He called for the setting up of pawnshops, with interest-free loans to the poor in order to enable them to...
Capitalist takeoff beggars and the birth of mercantilism
Europe in the 1500s was a strange world. It was teeming with adventurous merchants, crossing from one country to another and sailing the high seas with merchant-entrepreneurs transforming workshops into manufactories with landowners becoming entrepreneurs with clever artisan-inventors, much sought after by a number of countries and finally with religious reformers and daring intellectuals, seeking new directions for their thought. But it was also populated by apocalyptic friars and scholastic...
The monastic economy and the reassessment of labour
During the Dark Ages sixth to tenth centuries the few intellectuals recorded by historiography were mainly compilers of summaries, collections and a species of encyclopaedia, which have handed down to us a synthesis of ancient and patristic culture. According to historians, those precious summaries hardly ever contained original thinking. They showed originality on only one major topic work. This subject, which was of marginal importance in the Graeco-Roman world and also in Patristics, became...
Reasonsforfailure
The lingering medieval mentality in Spain hindered any greater awareness. This insurmountable cultural barrier can be seen in the extreme caution of the innovators. Even P rez de Herrera puts on a show of adhering to the principles of the Council of Trent and to tradition. He had to rebut to objections to his project, which were incredibly petty and trivial.68 But this stubborn resistance was caused not only by the theological tradition. There was another reason the interests of the great...
The Franciscans and poverty as a life model
The key century of the Middle Ages, the thirteenth, opened with the birth of the mendicant orders, which transformed the church's history. They were created to meet the widespread demand for a life based on poverty, and to be more close to the highly dynamic society of the time. Even after the reforms, traditional monks were still busy administering their property and wealth. They had preserved the original spirit of a community outside society. With the friars of the new orders, the church...
Aristotle fear of change
While Plato wants to limit wealth through political power, Aristotle relies on the far more coercive power of reason. In Aristotle's universe, wealth and consumption must also be under control nothing can be left to chance or, worse still, to the desire for change. Aristotle's supreme ideal is self-sufficiency, understood as the lack of needs 'the final good is thought to be self-sufficient'. Self-sufficiency is 'that which when isolated makes life desirable and lacking in nothing and such we...
The pauperist movements
An early formulation of economic dualism is found in the eleventh century in St Peter Damian Pietro Damiani , a Benedictine cardinal and thus sympathetic to the issue of work , but also a strict hermit. Apparently Peter Damian simply underlined the distinction made by the Fathers between the life of religious figures, who must despise earthly things, and that of secular men, who can love the world, but not to excess.29 But in this traditional context, he put forward some ideas that were totally...