this doctrine from the standpoint of economic thought or, conceivably, also from the standpoint of a philosophical interpretation of analytic procedures, there is nothing in it that concerns these analytic procedures themselves: the rest of the book will establish this point. Just now we are interested merely in showing that Universalism and Individualism have nothing to do with scholastic Realism and Nominalism. Universalism as opposed to Individualism means that ‘social collectives,’ such as society, nation, church, and the like, are conceptually prior to their individual members; that the former are the really relevant entities with which the social sciences have to deal; that the latter are but the products of the former; hence that analysis must work from the collectives and not from individual behavior. If, then, we choose to call these collectives sociological universals, then the doctrine in question may indeed be said to oppose universals to individuals. But scholastic Realism opposed universals to individuals in quite a different sense. If I were to adopt scholastic Realism, then my idea of, say, society would claim logical precedence over any individual empirical society that I observe but not over individual men; the idea of these men would be another universal in the scholastic sense, claiming logical precedence over the empirical indi- viduals. Manifestly, this would imply nothing about either the relation between the two scholastic universals or the relation between any empirical society (a universal in the sense of universalist doctrine) and the empirical individuals comprising it. In particular, I could in this case still be as strong an individualist, politically or in any other sense, as I please. The opposite opinion is thus seen to rest on nothing but an error induced by the double meaning attached to ‘universal’ and ‘individual.’ 5 II. In surveying the history of civilizations, we sometimes speak of objective and subjective cases. By an objective civilization we mean the civilization of a society in which every individual stands in his appointed niche and is subject, without reference to his tastes, to superindividual rules; a society that recognizes as universally binding a given ethical and religious code; a society in which art is standardized and all creative activity both expresses and serves superindividual ideals. By a subjective civilization we mean a civilization that displays the opposite characteristics; in which society serves the individual and not the other way round; in short, a society that turns upon, and implements, subjective tastes and allows everyone to build his own system of cultural values. We 5 By the same token, we must not label Abelard as individualist on the ground that he seems to have coined the phrase: nihil est praeter individuum. History of economic analysis 82 need not enter into the general question of the analytic standing of such schemes. But we are concerned with the sweeping assertion so often met with that, in the sense explained, medieval civilization was objective and modern civilization is (or until recently was) subjective or individualist, because this touches, or may be supposed to touch, upon the ‘spirit’ in which people conducted or conduct their economic analysis. There cannot be any doubt that some of the characteristics fit—religious life in the age of ‘One God, One Church,’ as compared to religious life in the age of hundreds of denominations, is the standard example. But neither can there be any doubt that as a whole those abstract pictures are ludicrously inadequate. Is it possible to imagine a fiercer individualist than a knight? Did not the whole trouble that medieval civilization experienced with military and political management (and which largely accounts for its failures) arise precisely from this fact? And is the member of a modern labor union or the mechanized farmer of today really so much more of an individualist than was the medieval member of a craft guild or the medieval peasant? Therefore, the reader should not be shocked to learn that the individualist streak in medieval thought also was much stronger than is commonly supposed. This is true, both in the sense that opinion was much more differentiated individually and in the sense that the individual phenomenon and (in speculations about society) the individual man were much more carefully attended to than we are apt to think. Scholastic sociology and economics, in particular, are strictly individualist, if we understand this to mean that the doctors, so far as they aimed at description and explanation of economic facts, started invariably from the indi-vidual’s tastes and behavior. That they applied superindividual canons of justice to these facts is not relevant to the logical nature of their analysis; but even these canons were derived from a moral schema in which the individual was an end in himself and the central idea of which was the salvation of individual souls. [(b) The Thirteenth Century.] Our second period, speaking roughly, covers the thirteenth century. There is justification for calling it the classic period of scholasticism so far as theology and philosophy are concerned. Theological and philosophical thought was indeed not only revolutionized but also consolidated into a new system that was all that the term Classic implies. Chiefly, this revolution was the work of Grosseteste, Alexander of Hales, St. Bonaventura, and Duns Scotus (Franciscan school) on the one hand, and of Albertus Magnus and his disciple, St. Thomas (Dominican school), on the other. The consolidation, that is, the creation of the classic system, was the towering achievement of St. Thomas alone. But in other respects, there was only revolution and no consolidation. That century, indeed, gave birth to scholastic science as distinguished from theology and philosophy; it produced work that initiated and laid the foundations for further work, but it did not establish The scholastic doctors and the philosophers 83 anything beyond starting points. This holds for the social as well as for the physical sciences. It should be particularly noticed that, as the example of Grosseteste shows, interest in mathematical and physical research was widespread even among men who did no such research themselves. Roger Bacon was a peak, but not a solitary peak; and plenty of men, without and within the Franciscan order, stood ready to go on in his line of advance. The reason why this does not stand out as it should is that the scholastic physicists and mathematicians of the subsequent four centuries tended to become specialists in their particular fields and their scholastic background is easily lost from sight. For instance, we look upon Francesco Cavalieri (1598–1647) simply as a great mathematician. It does not occur to us to associate the origins of the integral calculus with scholasticism in general or with the Jesuit order in particular, though as a matter of fact Cavalieri was the product of both. 6 In itself, that theologico-philosophical revolution is no concern of ours. But one aspect of it is of considerable importance for the history of sociological and economic analysis, namely, the resurrection of Aristotelian thought. During the twelfth century more complete knowledge of Aristotle’s writings filtered slowly into the intellectual world of western Christianity, partly through Semite mediation, Arab and Jewish. 7 To the scholastic doctors this meant two things. First, Arab mediation meant Arab interpretation, which was unacceptable to them in some matters of epistemology as well as of theology. Second, access to Aristotle’s thought immensely facilitated the gigantic task before them not only in metaphysics, where they had to break new paths, but also in the physical and social sciences, where they had to start from little or nothing. The reader will observe that I do not assign to the recovery of Aristotle’s writings the role of chief cause of thirteenth-century developments. Such developments are never induced solely by an influence from outside. Aristotle came in, as a powerful ally, to help and to provide implements. But perception of the task and the will to rush forward were, of course, there independently of him. An analogy will clear up this point. We have had occasion to refer to the partial adoption or ‘reception’ of the Corpus juris civilis in the later Middle Ages and the Renaissance. This phenomenon cannot be causally explained by a lucky discovery of a few old volumes coupled with the naïve belief of uncritical minds that these volumes contained legal material that was still in force. The economic process was evolving patterns of life that called for legal forms, especially for a system of contracts, of the type that the Roman jurists had worked out. There can be no doubt but that the lawyers of the Middle Ages would 6 Roger Bacon (1214?–92), the doctor mirabilis of scholastic tradition, affords another case that illustrates the nature and the causes of the troubles that were experienced by some eminent physicists. He was still more aggressive than was Galileo 400 years later. In all ages people react unfavorably to being called fools. In rough ages they react roughly. 7 Avicenna (Ibn Sina, 980–1037), the Arab physician-philosopher, and Averroës (Ibn Rushd, 1126– 98), the lawyer-philosopher of Cordoba, and Moses Maimonides (1135–1204) the Hebrew theologian-philosopher (especially his Guide of the Perplexed, English trans. by Friedländer, 1881– 5) should be mentioned in this connection. The problem of reconciling Aristotle’s teaching with History of economic analysis 84 Hebrew theology presented itself to Maimonides in much the same manner as the analogous problem presented itself to the Christian doctors. have eventually worked out similar forms for themselves. The Roman law came in usefully, not because it brought something that was foreign to the spirit and needs of the age—so far as it did this, its reception was in fact an unmitigated nuisance—but precisely because it presented, ready made, what without it would have had to be produced laboriously. Similarly, the ‘reception’ of Aristotle’s teaching was principally a most important time- and labor-saving device, particularly in those fields that were as yet waste lands. It is in this light—and not in the light of the theory that there was passive acceptance of a lucky discovery—that we must see the relation between Aristotelism and scholasticism. But so soon as the scholastic doctors realized that in Aristotle’s writings they had all, or nearly all, they could hope for at the moment and that with the help of his doctrines they might accomplish what it would have cost them a century’s work to do by themselves, they naturally made the most of this opportunity. Aristotle became for them the philosopher, the universal teacher, and most of their work took the form of expounding him to students and to the public at large, and of commenting upon him. Moreover, his writings served admirably for didactic purposes since they were in fact summarizing and systematizing textbooks. In consequence, it was in the role of expounders of, and commentators on, Aristotelian doctrine that Grosseteste, Albertus Magnus, and the other leaders mentioned above appeared to the public of their own and of later times. St. Thomas himself became, for many people, simply the man who had succeeded in harnessing Aristotle for the service of the Church. This misconception of the revolution of the thirteenth century and, in particular, of St. Thomas’ performance was not corrected but, on the contrary, was fostered by the scientific practice of the next 300 years. For Aristotle’s work continued to provide the systematic frame for the growing scientific material and to supply the need for nicely pedestrian texts; everything, therefore, continued to be cast in the Aristotelian mold—nothing so completely as scholastic economics, which also illustrates the way in which, by this convenient practice, the scholastic doctors were likely to lose the credit for their original contributions. This explains not only the otherwise quite incomprehensible success of Aristotelian teaching through these 300 years but also the penalty the ancient sage was eventually to pay for this success. We may just as well complete the story which is so full of interest to the student of the tortuous ways of the human mind. We have seen that there was nothing in the scholastic system to bar new developments within it or even developments away The scholastic doctors and the philosophers 85 from the ground taken by its classic works. Descartes’ philosophy may exemplify such a development. 8 He displayed no hostility to the old scholastic philosophy and, among other things, accepted St. Anselm’s proof of the existence of God—rejected by St. Thomas—as the basis of his own theory of the cogito. There is plenty of room for doubt as to how much this amounts to. But it certainly suffices for speaking of peaceful evolution from scholastic backgrounds. We have also seen, however, that scholasticism became a bugbear, as the influence of laical intellectuals asserted itself. And wherever hostility to scholasticism asserted itself, hostility to Aristotle asserted itself also: because Aristotelism was the vessel of scholastic thought, hostility to Aristotelism became the vessel of hostility to the doctors. There were even anti-scholastic and anti-Aristotelian scholastics of whom Gassendi is the outstanding example. 9 His mathematical and physical work, entirely neutral in itself, acquired a critical connotation by the way in which he advocated the cause of experimental—‘empiricist’ or ‘inductive’—methods rather than by this advocacy as such. In philosophy he replaced the Aristotelian basis (substantially) by one essentially Epicurean. However, it was of course among the laical enemies of the Catholic doctors that it became the fashion to represent Aristotle as the incarnation of old dust and of futility. Paracelsus had Aristotelian books solemnly burned before starting his medical lectures; Galileo, in the famous dialogue on the heliocentric system that gave so much offense, made a comic figure of the inept Aristotelian objector; Francis Bacon, in espousing the cause of ‘inductive’ science, contrasted it with both scholastic and Aristotelian speculation. All this was unfair to the scholastic doctors. But it was still more unfair to the old sage. For if there is any general message at all that speaks to us from his pages, it is surely the message of empirical research. 10 So true is it that, in science as elsewhere, we fight for and against not men and things as they are, but for and against the caricatures we make of them. 11 However, let us return to the classic period, the thirteenth century, in order to search for elements of sociological and economic analysis. 8 René Descartes (1596–1650). For the purpose in hand, only his Essais philosophiques (1637) is relevant. He was the mediator between medieval and modern philosophy, and was the product of Jesuit education. 9 Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655) was a philosopher, mathematician, and physicist, a professor in holy orders whom, on his actual work, nobody would think of excluding from the scholastic circle. But he went out of his way to distance himself from it. Of his works those most important for us are: Exercitationes paradoxicae adversus Aristoteleos (1624); Syntagma philosophiae Epicuri, 1649 (works ed. by Montmort, 1658); see also G.S.Brett, The Philosophy of Gassendi (1908). 10 Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, who called himself Paracelsus (1490?– 1541), was a physician and chemist of eminence though not without an element of charlatanism. Francis Bacon (1561–1626; works ed. by Spedding, Ellis, and Heath, 1857–62) presumably needs no introduction. The tremendous success of his writings—not so much in his day but during the Enlightenment and then during the nineteenth century—is amply accounted for by the fact that he expressed with supreme ability what a rapidly increasing number of people actually came to believe. He was the very type of a ‘representative man.’ But precisely because he was and because in consequence his figure stands out so clearly, his ideas now seem much more novel and much less in keeping with previous developments than they were. Therefore, his writings inculcated into the public mind the unreal contraposition of inductive research and scholasticism in which, along with his contemporaries, he himself was so fond of believing, the more so because he probably knew very History of economic analysis 86 little about the work of the scholastics. More than any other individual, he helped to foster the delusion that to this day distorts the history of thought. 11 Outstanding examples from the history of economics are A.Smith’s criticism of the ‘mercantilists’ and Schmoller’s criticism of the English ‘classics.’ Both cases will be discussed in their places. We find small beginnings only—little of sociology, still less of economics. In part this was doubtless due to lack of interest. St. Thomas, in particular, was indeed interested in political sociology but all the economic questions put together mattered less to him than did the smallest point of theological or philosophical doctrine, and it is only where economic phenomena raise questions of moral theology that he touches upon them at all. Even where he does we do not feel, as we do elsewhere, that his powerful intellect is all there, passionately resolved to penetrate into the core of things but rather that he is writing in obedience to the requirements of systematic completeness. More or less, this applies to all his contemporaries. In consequence, Aristotle’s teaching sufficed for them and they hardly ever went beyond it. There was indeed a difference in moral tone and cultural vision and also a shift of emphasis that is accounted for by the different social patterns they beheld. But neither is so important as we might have expected. Since these things are of no great moment in a history of economic analysis, it will suffice to note that the scholastic doctors looked upon physical labor as a discipline favorable to Christian virtue and as a means of keeping men from sinning, which implies an attitude entirely unlike that of Aristotle; that with them slavery was no longer a normal, let alone fundamental, institution; that they gave their blessings to charity and to voluntary poverty; that their ideal of a vita contemplativa carried, of course, a meaning that was quite foreign to Aristotle’s corresponding ideal of life, though there are important similarities between the two; that they repeated but qualified Aristotle’s views on commerce and commercial gain. While all the other points apply to scholastic doctrine of all ages, the one mentioned last holds fully only for the classic period. After the thirteenth century a significant change occurred in the attitude of the scholastic doctors to commercial activity. But the thirteenth-century scholastics undoubtedly held the opinion expressed by St. Thomas, namely, that there is ‘something base’ about commerce in itself (negotiatio secundum se considerata quandam turpitudinem habet, Summa II, 2, quaest. LXXVII, art. 4), though commercial gain might be justified (a) by the necessity of making one’s living; or (b) by a wish to acquire means for charitable purposes; or (c) by a wish to serve publicam utilitatem, provided that the lucre be moderate and can be considered as a reward of work (stipendium laboris); or (d) by an improvement of the thing traded; or (e) by intertemporal or interlocal differences in its value; or (f) by risk (propter periculum). St. Thomas’ wording leaves some room for doubt about the conditions in which he was prepared to admit considerations (d)–(f), and it may be true that others, especially Duns Scotus (1266–1308) and a doctor whom I have not mentioned so far, Richard of Middleton (1249–1306), went somewhat further, especially as regards justifying the social usefulness of the practice of buying in a cheaper market and selling in a dearer one. However, even qualifications (b) and (c) go beyond Aristotle’s teaching. The emphasis all these authors place upon the element of remuneration of some socially useful activity has given rise, on the one hand, to the opinion, which may be correct, that the source of The scholastic doctors and the philosophers 87 the (moral) ‘right to the produce of one’s labor’ may be found in the scholastic literature, and, on the other hand, to the error that the scholastic doctors held a (analytic) labor theory of value, that is, that they explained the phenomenon of value by the fact that (most) commodities cost labor. For the moment, the reader should only notice that there is no logical relation between mere emphasis upon the necessity, moral or economic, of remunerating labor (no matter whether we translate the Latin word by the English ‘labor’ or by ‘activity’ or ‘effort’ or ‘trouble’) and what is technically known as the labor theory of value. St. Thomas’ sociology of institutions, 12 political and other, is not what readers will expect who are in the habit of tracing the political and social doctrines of the nineteenth century to Locke or to the writers of the French Enlightenment or to the English utilitarians. Considering that, in this respect, the teaching of St. Thomas not only was representative of that of his contemporaries but also was accepted by all the scholastic doctors of later times, its main points should be briefly indicated. There was the sacred precinct of the Catholic Church. But for the rest, society was treated as a thoroughly human affair, and moreover, as a mere agglomeration of individuals brought together by their mundane needs. Government, too, was thought of as arising from and existing for nothing but those utilitarian purposes that the individuals cannot realize without such an organization. Its raison d’être was the Public Good. The ruler’s power was derived from the people, as we may say, by delegation. The people are the sovereign and an unworthy ruler may be deposed. Duns Scotus came still nearer to adopting a social-contract theory of the state. 13 This mixture of sociological analysis and normative argument is remarkably individualist, utilitarian, and (in a sense) rationalist, a fact that it is important to remember in view of the attempt we are going to make to link this body of ideas with the laical and anti-Catholic political philosophies of the eighteenth century. There is nothing metaphysical about this part of scholastic doctrine. Nor did the Catholic doctors countenance political authoritarianism. The divine right of monarchs, in particular, and the concept of the omnipotent state are creations of the Protestant sponsors of the absolutist tendencies that were to assert themselves in the national states. 12 Our main source for St. Thomas’ political sociology is a tract entitled De regimine principum, widely used throughout the Middle Ages, and a letter to a Duchess of Brabant. But only part of the former is certainly by St. Thomas himself; the rest may be the work of another Dominican, Ptolemy of Lucca (d. 1327). 13 This theory was not, of course, applied to the government of the Catholic Church. When this was done by Marsilius of Padua (c. 1270–1342; Defensor pacis, 1326), it spelled heresy. From our standpoint two observations suggest themselves: first, the case illustrates how implicit acceptance of supermundane authority in some respects may in practice be complemented by extreme freedom of thought and action in other respects; second, the case also shows why the question of the influence of supermundane authority upon analysis cannot be answered once for all, but must be answered separately for every individual argument. Since too much care cannot be expended on clearing up this point, let us, by way of supplementing previous argument, introduce the following tripartite distinction which applies to all authorities that ever did or do attempt to direct opinion. First, as the case in hand shows, there were matters in which the Catholic Church prescribed opinion and barred analysis that led to any other results. Second, there were many matters in which, being indifferent to both opinion and analysis, it did not interfere in any way. Third, there were History of economic analysis 88 matters (such as interest) in which it prescribed opinion in the sense of moral judgment but did not bar analysis of facts. The individualist and utilitarian streak and the emphasis upon a rationally perceived Public Good run through the whole sociology of St. Thomas. One example will suffice: the most important one, the theory of property. Having disposed of the theological aspects of the matter, St. Thomas simply argues that property is not against natural law but an invention of the human reason, 14 which is justifiable because people will take better care of what they possess for themselves than of what belongs to many or all; because they will exert themselves more strenuously on their own account than on account of others; because the social order will be better preserved if possessions are distinct, so that there is no occasion for quarreling about the use of things possessed in common—considerations that attempt to define the social ‘function’ of private property much as Aristotle had defined them before and much as the nineteenth-century textbook was to define them afterward. And since he found in Aristotle all he wished to say, he referred to him and accepted his formulations. This holds with added force for St. Thomas’ ‘pure economics’ (oeconomia with him means, however, simply household management). It was embryonic and really consists of only part of his argument on Just Price (Summa II, 2, quaest. LXXVII, art. 1) and on Interest (Summa II, 2, quaest. LXXVIII). The relevant part of the argument on just price—the price that assures the ‘equivalence’ of commutative justice—is strictly Aristotelian and should be interpreted exactly as we have interpreted Aristotle’s. St. Thomas was as far as was Aristotle from postulating the existence of a metaphysical or immutable ‘objective value.’ His quantitas valoris is not something different from price but is simply normal competitive price. The distinction he seems to make between price and value is not a distinction between price and some value that is not a price, but a distinction between the price paid in an individual transaction and the price that ‘consists’ in the public’s evaluation of the commodity (justum pretium…in quadam aestimatione consistit), which can only mean normal competitive price, or value in the sense of normal competitive price, where such a price exists. 15 In cases where no such price exists, St. Thomas recognized, as coming within his concept of just price, the element of the subjective value of an object to the seller, though not the element of the subjective value of the object for the buyer—a point that is important for scholastic treatment of interest. Beyond this he did not go in the article referred to. But other passages, perhaps, support the opinion that, by implication at least, he did take a step 14 Summa II, 2, quaest. LXVI, art. 2: proprietas possessionum non est contra jus naturale, sed juri naturali superadditur per adinventionem rationis humanae. On the meaning to be attached to jus naturale, see next section. 15 This interpretation is supported by the fact that the quaestio, in which the theory of just price is presented (quaest LXXVII of II, 2) is entitled De fraudulentia and, in fact, mainly deals with frauds perpetrated by sellers. If the just price were something else than the normal competitive price, practices other than fraud would be more important. But if St. Thomas was thinking of what we call normal competitive price, fraud becomes the chief phenomenon to be dealt with. For if there exists a competitive market price, individual deviations from it are hardly possible except through fraudulent representations about the quantity and quality of the goods. The scholastic doctors and the philosophers 89 beyond Aristotle which was more explicitly taken by Duns Scotus, Richard of Middleton, and possibly others. Duns Scotus, at all events, may be credited with having related just price to cost, that is, the producers’ or traders’ expenditure of money and effort (expensae et labores). Though he presumably thought of nothing beyond providing a more precise criterion of scholastic ‘commutative justice’—which was rightly rejected by the later scholastics—we must nevertheless credit him with having discovered the condition of competitive equilibrium which came to be known in the nineteenth century as the Law of Cost. This is not imputing too much: for if we identify the just price of a good with its competitive common value, as Duns Scotus certainly did, and if we further equate that just price to the cost of the good (taking account of risk, as he did not fail to observe), then we have ipso facto, at least by implication, stated the law of cost not only as a normative but also as an analytic proposition. Following Alexander of Hales and Albertus Magnus, St. Thomas condemned interest as contrary to commutative justice on a ground that proved a conundrum for almost all his scholastic successors: interest is a price paid for the use of money; but, viewed from the standpoint of the individual holder, money is consumed in the act of being used; therefore, like wine, it has no use that could be separated from its substance as has, for example, a house; therefore charging for its use is charging for something that does not exist, which is illegitimate (usurious). Whatever may be thought of this argument, which among other things neglects the possibility that ‘pure’ interest might be an element of the price of money itself—instead of being a charge for a separable use 16 —one thing is clear: exactly like the somewhat different Aristotelian argument, it does not bear at all upon the question why interest is actually paid. Since this question, the only one that is relevant to economic analysis, was actually raised by the later scholastics, we defer the consideration of the clues for an answer, which St. Thomas’ reasoning nevertheless suggests. [(c) From the Fourteenth Century to the Seventeenth.] The last of the three periods into which we have decided to divide the history of scholasticism extends from the beginning of the fourteenth century to the first decades of the seventeenth. It comprises practically the whole of the history of scholastic economics. But, having already fully explained the setting and the nature of scholastic work, we can now afford to be brief. In particular, no further explanation seems to be needed for the ease with which the economics of the doctors absorbed all the phenomena of nascent capitalism and, in consequence, for the fact that it served so well as a basis of the analytic work of their successors, not excluding A.Smith. 16 The reason why St. Thomas did not consider this possibility was obviously that he placed implicit confidence in the proposition that the price of any commodity that is chosen for the standard of value is unity by definition. Reasoning on from this, we may easily arrive at the conclusion that any ‘pure’ premium cannot be anything else but a fraudulent charge for a nonexistent use, since the price of the substance or ‘capital’ must necessarily be equal to the capital itself. History of economic analysis 90 In order to achieve the maximum of economy, I shall mention only a very few representative names and then attempt to draw a systematic sketch of what I conceive the state of scholastic economics to have been about 1600. Other names, of course, would have to be mentioned for other purposes; we are artificially narrowing down what was a very broad and deep stream. For the fourteenth century we choose Buridanus and Oresmius as representatives. 17 The latter’s treatise on money is usually described as the first treatise entirely devoted to an economic problem. But it is mainly legal and political in nature and really does not contain much strictly economic material—in particular, nothing that was not current doctrine among the scholastics of the time—its chief purpose being to combat the prevalent practice of debasing money, a topic that was treated later on in a copious literature to be briefly noticed presently. Our fifteenth-century representatives will be St. Antonine of Florence, perhaps the first man to whom it is possible to ascribe a comprehensive vision of the economic process in all its major aspects, and Biel. 18 For the sixteenth century we select Mercado and, as representatives of the literature on Justice and Law (De justitia et jure) that in the sixteenth century became the main scholastic repository of economic material, the three great Jesuits whose works have been recently analyzed by Professor Dempsey—Lessius, Molina, and de Lugo. 19 17 Joannes Buridanus (Jean Buridan, fl. 1328–58), professor in the University of Paris. Of his many works, all drawn up on the Aristotelian frame, the most important for us are: Quaestiones in decem libros Ethicorum Aristotelis (ed. used, 1637) and Quaestiones super octo libros Politocorum Aristotelis (ed. used with notes by G.Baterel, 1513). His theory of volition (Summula de dialectica, 1487, and Compendium logicae, 1487) led up to the familiar paradox of the logic of choice that is illustrated by the perfectly rational ass that starves between two equally attractive bundles of hay owing to his inability to make up his mind which to consume first. Nicole Oresme (1320?–82), Bishop of Lisieux, was a man of polyhistoric interests who also wrote on theology, mathematics, and astronomy. The work in question, Tractatus de origine et jure nec nor et de mutationibus monetarum, was written between 1350 and 1360 (ed. used 1605). An extract is included in Monroe’s Early Economic Thought, pp. 79–102. After having met with great success in its own time, it seems to have falllen into oblivion from which it was rescued by F.Meunier, Essai sur la vie et les ouvrages de Nicole Oresme (1857) and especially by W.Roscher (‘Ein grosser Nationalökonom des vierzehnten Jahrhunderts’ in Zeitschrift für die gesamte Staatswissenschaft, 1863), who extolled its merits, particularly its originality, beyond all reason, as discoverers of forgotten worthies are apt to do—which naturally induced a reaction. There is quite a literature on Oresme. Let us single out C.A.Conigliani, Le dottrine monetarie in Francia durante il medio evo (1890). 18 St. Antonine (Antonio Pierozzi, also called Forciglioni; 1389–1459), Archbishop of Florence, Summa theologica (ed. used: for the first and second parts, Lyons, 1516; for the third, Venice, 1477); also Summa moralis (Verona, 1740). See B.Jarrett, S.Antonino and Mediaeval Economics (1914). Gabriel Biel (1425?–95), professor in the University of Tübingen, another discovery of Roscher’s (Geschichte der Nationalökonomik in Deutschland, 1874). His Tractatus de potestate et utilitate monetarum (1541; English trans., 1930) does not, however, contain anything that cannot be found in earlier writers. Why he should have been called the last of the scholastics I am unable to understand. But I have chosen him for reference because perusal of his work is particularly effective in destroying prejudices concerning the spirit of scholasticism. Really more important seems to be Panormitanus (Nicolaus dei Tedeschi or Tudeschi, Archbishop of Palermo, 1386– 1445) to judge from quotations in the later scholastic literature. The scholastic doctors and the philosophers 91 . revolution is no concern of ours. But one aspect of it is of considerable importance for the history of sociological and economic analysis, namely, the resurrection of Aristotelian thought Duchess of Brabant. But only part of the former is certainly by St. Thomas himself; the rest may be the work of another Dominican, Ptolemy of Lucca (d. 132 7). 13 This theory was not, of course,. History of economic analysis 82 need not enter into the general question of the analytic standing of such schemes. But we are concerned with the sweeping assertion so often met with