History of Economic Analysis part 12 potx

it not that historiography, inspired by a popular version of Marxian sociology, may easily create the impression—to put it in the crudest possible way—that medieval thought was merely the ideology of a landholding warrior class, verbalized by its chaplains. This impression would be wrong not only from the standpoint of those who refuse to accept the Marxian sociology of ideas, but also from the standpoint of Marx himself, even if we chose to interpret the Catholic system of thought as an ideology, it would still remain the ideology of the clergy and never merge with that of the warrior class. It is important to keep this in mind because of the practically complete monopoly of learning that the Catholic Church enjoyed until the Renaissance. This monopoly was due primarily to the spiritual authority of the Church. But it was greatly reinforced by the conditions of those ages in which there was neither room nor security for professional scholars except within a convent. In consequence, almost all ‘intellectuals’ of those times were either monks or friars. Let us briefly consider some implications of this. All those monks and friars spoke the same unclassical Latin; they heard the same Mass wherever they went; they were formed by an education that was the same in all countries; they professed the same system of fundamental beliefs; and they all acknowledged the supreme authority of the Pope, which was essentially international: their country was Christendom, their state was the Church. But this is not all. Their internationalizing influence was strengthened by the fact that feudal society itself was international. Not only the Pope’s but also the Emperor’s authority was international in principle and, to some varying degree, in fact. The old Roman Empire and that of Charlemagne were no mere reminiscences. People were familiar with the idea of a temporal as well as of a spiritual superstate. National divisions did not mean to them what they came to mean during the sixteenth century; nothing in the whole range of Dante’s political ideas is so striking as is the complete absence of the nationalist angle. The result was the emergence of an essentially international civilization and an international republic of scholars that was no phrase but a living reality. St. Thomas was an Italian and John Duns Scotus was a Scotsman, but both taught in Paris and Cologne without encountering any of the difficulties that they would have encountered in the age of airplanes. In fact as well as in principle, practically everybody who wished to do so was allowed to enter a monastic order and also to join the ranks of the secular clergy. But advancement within the Church was open to everybody in principle only, since the claims of members of warrior-class families in fact absorbed the greater part of bishopries and abbotcies. But the man without connection was never entirely excluded from the higher dignities, not even from the highest; and, what is much more important for us, he was not debarred from becoming an idea-shaping and policy-shaping ‘keyman.’ The regular clergy (the monks) and the friars supplied, as it were, the general staff of the Church. And in the monasteries men of all classes met on equal terms. Naturally, the intellectual atmosphere was often charged with social and political radicalism, though this was, of course, much more the case at some times than at others and much more with the friars than with the regular monks. In the literature that we are going to survey we get this radicalism in a highly rarefied form but we do get it. But how can a radical—hence also critical—attitude of mind be imputed to a social group whose members were bound to obey the dictates of a supreme and absolute authority? This apparent paradox is easily resolved. The lives and the faith of the monks History of economic analysis 72 and friars were indeed subject to authority that was, in theory at least, absolute and spoke immutable truth. But beyond the sphere of discipline and fundamental religious belief— beyond the matters that were de fide—that authority did not undertake to direct their thought, nor did it prescribe results. 1 In particular, it had not, in general, any motive for doing so in the department of political and economic thought, that is to say, for compelling the clerical intellectuals to expound and defend or to represent as immutable any given temporal order of things. The Church was judge of all things human; conflict with temporal authority was an ever-present possibility and very often the actual fact; the monastic orders were important instruments of Papal authority: these were no reasons for preventing them from looking upon temporal institutions as historically mutable works of man. I am far from wishing to belittle the importance of Christian ideals and precepts per se. But we need not invoke them in order to realize that monastic subordination to authority in matters of faith and discipline was compatible with extensive freedom of opinion in all other matters. We must go even further. Not only did the monks’ sociological location—outside, as it were, of the class structure—make for an attitude of detached criticism of many things; there also was a power behind them that was in a position to protect that freedom. So far as treatment of political and economic problems is concerned, the clerical intellectual of that age was not more but less exposed to interference from political authority and from ‘pressure groups’ than was the laical intellectual of later ages. The indictment that unquestioning acceptance of ecclesiastic authority invalidated the reasoning of those monastic scholars from a scientific standpoint is thus seen to be without foundation. We have, however, still to consider a particular form of it. The analytic nature of their reasoning has often been denied on the ground that their arguments can have been only arguments from authority: subject to the authority of the Pope as they were, they had no other method left of establishing or refuting a proposition than to adduce for or against it literary authorities recognized by that supreme authority. But this is not so. The point can be cleared up by a reference to St. Thomas. He taught indeed that authority was of decisive importance in matters involving Revelation— namely, the authority of those to whom the revelations had been made—but he also taught that in everything else (and this includes, of course, the whole field of economics) any argument from authority was ‘extremely weak.’ 2 1 Facts that apparently contradict this statement will be discussed later on 2 ‘Nam licet locus ab auctoritate quae fundatur super ratione humana, sit infirmissimus…,’ Summa I, quaest. I, art. 8, ad secundum. Of course, the scholastics all quoted copiously, but so do we. They deferred to authority—where they agreed with it—more than we do because they emphasized co- operative rather than individual opinion and attached great importance to continuity of doctrine. But this is all. The scholastic doctors and the philosophers 73 With the monopoly of learning went the monopoly of ‘higher’ teaching. In the schools that were founded from the seventh century on, by temporal and spiritual lords, it was clerics who taught the tatters of Graeco-Roman science as well as theology and philosophical doctrines of their own—great teachers like Abelard attracted students and caused, occasionally, a lot of trouble for the controlling authorities. In some cases from these schools, in others independently, the self-governing ‘universities’ developed in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries—incorporated associations 3 of either teachers, as in Paris, or students, as in Bologna, who before long grouped themselves into theological, philosophical, legal, and medical ‘faculties.’ At first, princes and bishops had no more to do with them than what was implied in the granting of corporative privileges and in religious supervision. Accordingly, the universities enjoyed a large measure of freedom and independence; they gave more scope to the individual teacher than do the mechanized universities of today; they were a meeting ground of all classes of society; and they were essentially international. But from the fourteenth century on, government foundations became increasingly frequent. Governments also acquired control of previously independent institutions. Eventually, this changed everything. Government influence not only made for the assertion of purely utilitarian aims but also for restriction of freedom, particularly, of course, in matters of political doctrine. But, precisely because of the power that stood behind the clerical teachers, the universities held their own fairly well until the religious split in the sixteenth century. The opportunities offered by the universities naturally reinforced the old tendency of scholars to become teachers. And since the public was then as prone as it is now to overemphasize the teaching at the expense of the production of what is being taught, medieval men of science were and are usually referred to as Schoolmen or Scholastics (doctores scholastici). In order to disabuse himself of prevailing preconceptions, the reader had better see in these scholastic doctors simply college or university professors. St. Thomas, then, was a professor. His Summa Theologica was, as he informs us in the preface, conceived as a textbook for beginners (incipientes). 3. SCHOLASTICISM AND CAPITALISM The processes that eventually shattered the social world of St. Thomas Aquinas are usually summed up in the phrase Rise of Capitalism. Though infinitely complex, they yet admit of a description in terms of a few broad generalizations that are not too hopelessly wrong. Also, though there was of course no break anywhere, it is possible to date developments at least by centuries. Capitalist enterprise had not been absent before, but from the thirteenth century on it slowly began to attack the framework of feudal institutions that had for ages fettered but also sheltered the farmer and the artisan, and to 3 Universitas originally meant nothing but corporation. Many people enrolled merely for the sake of the legal privileges that membership in such a self-governing corporation entailed. The meaning of universitas litterarum, which we attach to the term University, is of later origin. History of economic analysis 74 evolve the contours of the economic pattern that still is, or until quite recently was, our own. By the end of the fifteenth century most of the phenomena that we are in the habit of associating with that vague word Capitalism had put in their appearance, including big business, stock and commodity speculation, and ‘high finance,’ to all of which people reacted much as we do ourselves. 1 Even then these phenomena were not all of them new. Truly unprecedented was only their absolute and relative importance. The growth of capitalist enterprise, however, created not only new economic patterns and problems but also a new attitude toward all problems. The rise of the commercial, financial, and industrial bourgeoisie of course altered the structure of European society and in consequence its spirit or, if you prefer, its civilization. The most obvious point about this is that the bourgeoisie acquired power to assert its interests. Here was a class that saw business facts in a different light and from a different angle; a class, in short, that was in business, and therefore could never look at its problems with the aloofness of the schoolman. But this point is second in importance to another. As we have seen in the first part of this book, it is more essential to realize that quite irrespective of the assertion of his interests, the businessman, as his weight in the social structure increased, imparted to society an increasing dose of his mind, just as the knight had done before him. The particular mental habits generated by the work in the business office, the schema of values that emanates from it, and the attitude to public and private life that is characteristic of it, slowly spread in all classes and over all fields of human thought and action. Results burst forth in the epoch of cultural transformation that has been so curiously misnamed Renaissance. 2 One of the most important of these results was the emergence of the laical intellectual, 3 and hence of laical science. We may distinguish developments of three different kinds. First, there always had been laical physicians and lawyers; but in the Renaissance they began to crowd out the clerical element. Second, starting from their professional needs and problems, laical artists and craftsmen—there was really no sociological distinction between them—began to develop a fund of tooled knowledge (for example, in anatomy, perspective, mechanics) that was an important source of modern science but grew up outside of scholastic university science: such a figure as Leonardo da 1 Owing to the importance of the financial complement of capitalist production and trade, the development of the law and the practice of negotiable paper and of ‘created’ deposits afford perhaps the best indication we can have for dating the rise of capitalism. Around the Mediterranean both emerged in the course of the fourteenth century, though negotiability was not fully established before the sixteenth. See A.P.Usher, The Early History of Deposit Banking in Mediterranean Europe (1943), and R.de Roover, ‘Money, Banking, and Credit in Medieval Bruges,’ Journal of Economic History, Supplement, December 1942. 2 The ‘revival’ of the interest in the thought and art of ancient Greece and Rome was so powerful a factor in the intellectual life of those times only because ancient forms provided convenient vessels for new needs and meanings. The real cultural achievement of that period did not consist in reconditioning old heirlooms. 3 The word ‘laical’ has been chosen after some hesitation. ‘Secular’ would not do because it derives another connotation from the distinction: secular clergy—regular clergy. ‘Laymen’s science’ conflicts with our use of the term layman (a man not trained in scientific method). ‘Laicist’ conveys the idea of an antagonism to the Church (cf., for instance, the phrases ‘laicist state’ or ‘laicism’). So ‘laical’ will have to serve in order to denote people or any activity (scientific or propagandist) of people who are not in holy orders. The noun shall be ‘laics.’ There is a more serious difficulty, however. On the one hand, the educational system of the The scholastic doctors and the philosophers 75 Catholic Church proved so strong that many laical intellectuals continued to be shaped by it. Many of them retained habits of mind that did not differ essentially from those of the intellectuals in holy orders. On the other hand, an increasing number of the latter renounced allegiance to the scholastic system of thought as completely as any laic could have done: Erasmus of Rotterdam (1467–1536) affords an early instance. Our distinction though based upon a real difference is therefore not an easy one to handle. It is not simply a question of the cloth. Vinci will illustrate this point; and the figure of Galileo will illustrate another point, namely, how this kind of development produced the laical physicist. It had its analogue in economics; the businessman and civil servant, also starting like the artist-craftsman from his practical needs and problems, began to develop a fund of economic knowledge which will be surveyed in the next chapter. Third, there were the Humanists. Professionally, these were classical scholars. Their scientific work consisted in the critical editing, translation, and interpretation of the Greek and Latin texts that became available in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. But they loved to believe that a command of Greek and Latin would make a man competent in everything; and this together with their social location—also outside of the scholastic universities—turned these critics of texts into critics of men, manners, beliefs, and institutions, as well as into all-round littérateurs. They did not, however, contribute to technical economics. For us they are important only so far as they influenced the general intellectual atmosphere of their age. The Catholic Church had little reason to object to the laical physician or lawyer as such and actually did not object to them; it was the most liberal patron of the artist- craftsman, whose art in fact remained primarily religious for a long time to come; it employed humanists in the Papal chancery and elsewhere, and the Renaissance Popes and Cardinals, some of whom were distinguished humanists themselves, invariably encouraged humanistic studies. The conflict that arose nevertheless is therefore a problem. And diagnosis of its nature is not facilitated by painting the picture all in black and white. There is little if anything to the saga of a new light that had flashed upon the world and was bitterly fought by the powers of darkness, or of a new spirit of free inquiry that the henchmen of hidebound authoritarianism vainly tried to smother. Nor is our understanding of the conflict helped by mixing it up with the related but quite different phenomenon of the Reformation—the intellectual revolution and the religious revolution reinforced each other but their sources are not the same; they do not stand to each other in any simple relation of cause and effect. History of economic analysis 76 There was no such thing as a New Spirit of Capitalism in the sense that people would have had to acquire a new way of thinking in order to be able to transform a feudal economic world into a wholly different capitalist one. So soon as we realize that pure Feudalism and pure Capitalism are equally unrealistic creations of our own mind, the problem of what it was that turned the one into the other vanishes completely. 4 The society of the feudal ages con-tained all the germs of the society of the capitalist age. These germs developed by slow degrees, each step teaching its lesson and producing another increment of capitalist methods and of capitalist ‘spirit.’ Similarly, there was no such thing as a New Spirit of Free Inquiry whose emergence would call for explanation. The scholastic science of the Middle Ages contained all the germs of the laical science of the Renaissance. And these germs developed slowly but steadily within the system of scholastic thought so that the laics of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries continued rather than destroyed scholastic work. This applies even where it is most persistently denied. Even in the thirteenth century Albertus Magnus observed, Roger Bacon experimented and invented—he also insisted upon the need for more powerful mathematical methods—while Jordanus the Nemore theorized in an entirely ‘modern’ spirit. 5 Even the heliocentric system of astronomy was not simply a bomb thrown at the scholastic fortress from outside. It originated in the fortress. Nicolaus Cusanus (1401–64) was a cardinal. And Copernicus himself was a canon (though he did not actually take orders), a doctor of canon law, lived all his life in church circles, and Clement VII approved of his work and wished to see it published. 6 4 This problem is a typical instance of what may be termed Spurious Problems, that is to say, of those problems that the analyst himself creates by his own method of procedure. For purposes of abbreviated description, we construct abstract pictures of social ‘systems’ that we endow with a number of well-defined characteristics in order to contrast them sharply. This method of (logically) Ideal Types (discussed below) has, of course, its uses, though it inevitably involves distortion of the facts. But if, forgetting the methodological nature of these constructions, we put the ‘ideal’ Feudal Man face to face with the ‘ideal’ Capitalist Man, transition from the one to the other will present a problem that has, however, no counterpart in the sphere of historical fact. Unfortunately, Max Weber lent the weight of his great authority to a way of thinking that has no other basis than a misuse of the method of Ideal Types. Accordingly, he set out to find an explanation for a process which sufficient attention to historical de tail renders self-explanatory. He found it in the New Spirit—i.e. a different attitude to life and its values—engendered by the Reformation (The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. by Talcott Parsons, 1930; see also, R.H.Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, 1926, and, contra, H.M.Robertson, Aspects of the Rise of Economic Individualism; a Criticism of Max Weber and His School, 1933). The historical objections to this construction are too obvious to detain us. Much more important is it to see the fundamental methodological error involved. 5 See, e.g., Pierre Duhem’s Les Sources des théories physiques (1905) and Les Origines de la statique (1905–6); also Études sur Léonard da Vinci (1906–13). 6 The subsequent struggle about the Copernican system of astronomy should be briefly noticed, both in order to display the element of truth in the traditional saga and in order to reduce it to its true dimensions. Nicolas Copernicus (1473–1543) completed his manuscript in or about 1530. For decades his idea spread quietly without let or hindrance. It met indeed with opposition and even ridicule from professors who continued to hold on to the Ptolemaic system, but this is only what we should expect in the case of a new departure of such importance. It was this ridicule and not the Inquisition that Galileo feared when, toward the end of the sixteenth century, he became a convinced adherent of Copernicus’ theory. The execution (1600) by the Inquisition of another The scholastic doctors and the philosophers 77 adherent of it, Giordano Bruno, is no proof to the contrary because he also held purely theological views of a heretical nature and, moreover, frankly expressed contempt for the Christian faith. But when Galileo finally decided to come out in support of it (1613 and 1632), the theory was indeed declared heretical by a group of theological advisers of the Inquisition—not, however, by Cardinal Bellarmine—and he was forbidden to hold or teach it; when he failed to keep his promise to submit, he was forced to abjure it and was imprisoned for a fortnight. The point is not only that in this case a purely physical theory was considered theologically obnoxious and that its scientific sponsor was made to suffer for it but also that such an occurrence was an ever-present possibility in an age that interpreted scripture more or less literally. This is the element of truth in the saga. But it is clear that the case was quite exceptional; for the bulk of scientific work, that possibility hardly existed at all. Moreover, Galileo’s case was complicated by his impulsiveness and his unfortunate talent for personally antagonizing people who were in a position to make their resentment felt. The case of Copernicus himself, and indeed the whole history of the fortunes of his theory up to 1613, suggest that more tactful handling of the matter might have avoided prosecution. Nor is this at all surprising because, as we have seen, the authority of the Church was not the absolute bar to free research that it has been made out to be. The prevalent impression to the contrary is due to the fact that until recently the world has been content to accept the testimony of the enemies of the Church, which was inspired by unreasoning hatred and unduly dramatized individual events. During the last twenty years or so a more impartial opinion has been gaining ground. This is fortunate for us because it makes it much easier to appreciate scholastic scientific performance in our field. If, then, we remove a coating of partisan colors, the true picture of the conflict appears without further difficulty. It was primarily political in nature. The laical intellectuals, Catholics no less than Protestants, were often opposed to the Church as a political power, and political opposition against a church very easily turns into heresy. It was this spirit of political opposition and the incidental danger of heresy that the Church sensed— sometimes wrongly, more often rightly—in the works of the laical intellectuals and which made it react even to writings that had nothing to do with either church government or religion and would have passed unnoticed had they been published by a cleric of whose political and religious allegiance the Church was sure. There was, however, another point of limited but, for us, considerable importance. It would seem that the scientific profession does not always absorb novelties with alacrity. Moreover, professors are men who are constitutionally unable to conceive that the other fellow might be right. This holds for all times and places. In Galileo’s day, however, the universities were in the hands of monastic orders, except in the countries that had become or were becoming Protestant. These orders welcomed novices and readily opened the scientific career to them. But they did not welcome the scientific work of people who did not want to join them: hence a conflict of interest between two groups of intellectuals that stood in each other’s way. And professional resentment against a scientific opponent, of which all ages afford amusing examples, sometimes acquired a connotation that was not amusing under circumstances in which the universities, though they had not always the ear of the Pope, always had the ear of the Inquisition. But this does not mean that those professors themselves did nothing but rehearse Aristotelian texts. History of economic analysis 78 4. SCHOLASTIC SOCIOLOGY AND ECONOMICS 1 St. Thomas divided the field of tooled knowledge into the sciences that work by the light of human reason only (philosophicae disciplinae), including Natural Theology (illa theologia quae pars philosophiae ponitur), and Supernatural Theology (sacra doctrina). The latter was also a science but a science sui generis by virtue of the fact that, unlike all other sciences, it makes use not only of human reason but also of revelation. (Summa I, quaest. I.) 2 In this schema which seems to have been generally accepted, sociology and economics had no separate compartments of their own. At first, they formed parts of moral theology or ethics, which was itself a part of both supernatural and natural theology. Later on, especially in the sixteenth century, sociological and economic topics were treated within the system of scholastic jurisprudence. Individual questions, mainly about money and interest, were occasionally dealt with separately. So were political questions. But economics as a whole never was. For our purpose, it will be convenient to distinguish three periods in the historical evolution of scholastic thought, according to the degree to which economic problems received attention. [(a) From the Ninth Century to the End of the Twelfth.] The earliest of our periods extends from the ninth century, in the course of which scholastic thought first gathered momentum, to the end of the twelfth. Apart from purely theological questions, it was mainly problems of the theory or philosophy of knowledge which attracted the thinkers of those times. So far as I am able to 1 During the last half-century, research in medieval economic conditions and processes has grown to proportions that are unmanageable for anyone but the specialist. This literature contains frequent references to economic thought or even analysis, which are, however, made in a spirit and from a standpoint that render them almost useless for our purpose. By far the most serviceable work of this kind that I know, outdated but excellent in its way, is W.J.Ashley’s Introduction to English Economic History and Theory (1888 and 1893; especially Book I, ch. 3, and Book II, ch. 6). The standard work on scholastic economic doctrine, though marred by serious defects, is still W. Endemann’s Studien in der romanisch-kanonistischen Wirtschafts—und Rechtslehre (1874 and 1883). Still older and still useful is G.A.L.Cibrario, Dell’economia politica del Medioevo (1839). V.Brants’ L’Économie politique au Moyen-Age. Esquisse des théories économiques professées par les écrivains des XIII e et XIV e siècles (1895) and H.Pirenne’s Economic and Social History of Medieval Europe (English trans. 1936), taken together, complement Ashley’s history for the Continent. J.W.Thompson’s Economic and Social History of the Middle Ages (300–1300) and (1300–1530) [1928 and 1931] does the same. Also see: G.A.T.O’Brien, An Essay on Mediaeval Economic Teaching (1920); E.Schreiber, Die volkswirtschaftlichen Anschauungen der Scholastik…(1913); M.Beer, Early British Economics from the XIIIth to the Middle of the XVIIIth Century (1938); H.Garnier, L’Idée du juste prix (1900); and B.Jarrett, Social Theories of the Middle Ages (1926); some other works will be mentioned later. For ‘background’ see especially M.de Wulf, Histoire de la philosophie médiévale (English trans. by Messenger, 1925–6) and, since the scholastic renaissance in our own day is a phenomenon nobody can afford to neglect, also his Introduction à la philosophie néo-scolastique (1904; English trans. by Coffey, 1907). I make no claims for this selection, except that it will suffice to start off further study. 2 There are two points about this that deserve to be noticed. First, Aristotle defined each science by its subject But St. Thomas realized that different sciences often deal with the same things (de eisdem rebus) and that it is not the subject but the cognitive process (ratio cognoscibilis) which The scholastic doctors and the philosophers 79 identifies a science. Second, St. Thomas did not, of course, deny that Supernatural Theology also used logical procedure (I, quaest. I, art. 8). The real difference is in the source of the starting points (principia) which, like other sciences, it takes for granted. These are derived from revelation in the case of Supernatural Theology but in all other sciences, with the possible exception of the purely formal ones, they are derived either from other sciences or else from direct observation of facts. The latter proposition St. Thomas did not state explicitly. But it is clearly implied. If he had stated it explicitly, much misunderstanding of scholastic thought might have been avoided. make out, no piece of reasoning that could be claimed for the province of economic analysis occurs in any of the works of such leaders as, to mention a few, Erigena, Abelard, St. Anselm, or John of Salisbury. Our program, therefore, debars us from considering their performance, though this will fatally limit our conception of the general stream of scholastic thought. But two things must be mentioned nevertheless. We shall call them (I) the Platonic streak and (II) the individualist streak. I. In the slow and laborious task of intellectual reconstruction that had to be undertaken after centuries during which Europe had been ravaged by barbarian hordes, the remains of ancient learning naturally acquired paramount importance. Most of these remains were, however, not available before the twelfth century and much of the rest was beyond the scholars of the time or was available only in bad translations. Within the little stock, Platonic and Neo-Platonic influences predominated both directly and, through the mediation of St. Augustine’s philosophy, indirectly. But Platonic influence will inevitably bring to the fore the problem of Platonic ideas, the problem of the nature of general concepts (universalia). Accordingly, the first and most famous of all scholastic discussions in pure philosophy was about this problem; and until the end of the fifteenth century it kept on flaring up again and again. We shall not wonder at this or accept it as proof positive of the sterility of scholastic thought. For it should be clear that this problem represents but a particular form of positing the general problem of pure philosophy. To say that the scholastics never ceased to discuss it therefore means no more than that, while interested in a great many other things, they never ceased to be interested in pure philosophy. On the whole, it may be averred that the ‘realistic’ view—the view according to which only ideas or concepts, as such, have real existence, and which is therefore the exact opposite of what we should call a realistic view—prevailed more or less until the fourteenth century when the battle turned in favor of the opposite, the History of economic analysis 80 ‘nominalist,’ view. 3 But Abelard’s (1079–1142) compromise seems to have enjoyed a great, though varying, amount of popularity throughout: the ideas or universals exist independently of any individuals corresponding to them in the mind of God (universalia are ante res, in this sense); but they are embodied in individual things (universalia are therefore also in rebus); and the human mind gets a glimpse of them only by observation and abstraction (in which sense they are post res). This controversy was purely epistemological in nature and has no bearing whatever upon the practice of economic or any other analysis. But it had to be mentioned because, in our own time, the Realism and Nominalism of the scholastic doctors have been linked with two other concepts, Universalism and Individualism, which are held by some writers to be relevant to analytic practice. These writers went so far as to represent Universalism and Individualism as two fundamentally different views of social processes, the conflict between which runs through the whole history of sociological and economic analysis and is indeed the essential fact behind all the other clashes of opinion that occurred throughout the ages. 4 Whatever argument it may be possible to adduce for 3 It is important to keep in mind that, in scholastic times, schools of thought tended to be identified, and even to identify themselves, with individual monastic orders. The Franciscan order was, for example, a stronghold of nominalist philosophy. This phenomenon is readily understandable, and I do not think I need explain it. But there is need for emphasizing its importance, for it also shows in other matters: the reason why the late scholastics were so severe on the economics of Duns Scotus—a fact that is not easy to motivate—may perhaps be sought in the antagonism of orders, just as in later ages it is sometimes necessary to invoke the explanatory virtue of antagonisms between national groups of economists—a not unimportant piece of the sociology of science. 4 The doctrine of Universalism is usually associated with O.Spann, who is in fact responsible for its success in Germany (for his and his group’s publications, see Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, ‘Economics, Romantic and Universalist Economics’). But it is really due to K.Pribram (e.g. Die Entstehung der individualistischen Sozialphilosophie, 1912), who also linked Universalism with scholastic Realism, and Individualism with scholastic Nominalism. I do not hold that the categories Universalist-Individualist are useless for purposes other than ours. Important aspects of economic thought, particularly in its ethico-religious aspects, can perhaps be described by means of them. And the term Universalist is better than the term Socialist, which has acquired a more restricted meaning. Objection is raised only to the improper extension of the field of application of these concepts, which is precisely due to failure to distinguish between economic thought and economic analysis. It is this failure to recognize the epistemological barrier between these two which is to be blamed for the talk about universalist methods and even a universal science that can only produce confusion. The scholastic doctors and the philosophers 81 . origin. History of economic analysis 74 evolve the contours of the economic pattern that still is, or until quite recently was, our own. By the end of the fifteenth century most of the phenomena. ear of the Inquisition. But this does not mean that those professors themselves did nothing but rehearse Aristotelian texts. History of economic analysis 78 4. SCHOLASTIC SOCIOLOGY AND ECONOMICS 1 . generally accepted, sociology and economics had no separate compartments of their own. At first, they formed parts of moral theology or ethics, which was itself a part of both supernatural and natural