History of Economic Analysis part 15 pps

But what, if that be so, becomes of the great battle on interest between scholastic and anti-scholastic writers that is supposed to have raged in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? So far as the history of economic analysis is concerned, the only answer is that there was no battle. No analytic progress was made and no new analytic ideas on interest were proffered for a long time to come. Even the most famous leaders on the anti- scholastic side such as Molinaeus or Salmasius 33 had nothing new to say: Molinaeus and Navarrus—contemporaries roughly speaking—were about on a par in theoretical grasp of the interest problem. Salmasius only reformulated the scholastic theory about lucrum cessans from available business opportunities that we find in Molina. So far as the moral issue was concerned, the Protestant theologians and the laic lawyers differed among themselves on the subject of interest, but were also content to repeat arguments forged by the scholastics, whichever side they espoused. 34 But, in addition there was a legislative or administrative issue, and it is this that accounts for the controversy in question. As we have seen, the scholastics held that interest had to be justified on grounds not inherent in the loan contract (mutuum) as such. But this amounted to saying that each case, or at least each type of case, was on trial and not to be approved without investigation. Though they 33 Molinaeus (Charles Dumoulin) has been discussed above. Salmasius (Claude de Saumaise, 1588–1653) wrote a number of tracts on interest, of which it is sufficient to mention two: De usuris (1638; but there seems to have been a previous ed., 1630) and De foenore trapezitico (1640). 34 We may as well dispose of this matter once for all. Scholastic doctrine was taught by Richard Baxter (1615–91; see, e.g., his Christian Directory). On a lower level, the same holds for the considerable literature on interest that, representing the popular reaction to the financial aspects of rising capitalism, denounced usury on purely moral grounds. Here are a few English samples which, I think, are fairly representative: Thomas Wilson, Discourse upon Usurie (1584, but there was an earlier ed., in 1572, according to the Kress Library Catalogue; new ed., with introduction by R.H.Tawney, 1925). Philippus Caesar, General Discourse against the Damnable Sect of Usurers (1578), purely moral invective; Anon., Death of Usury or the Disgrace of Usurersi… (1594); Anon., Usurie Arraigned and Condemned (1625). There were, of course, plenty of sermons that I have not investigated. Roger Fenton (Treatise of Usurie, 1612) may stand for the defense of interest on a ground that was known to the scholastics but not accepted by them as relevant to the moral issue, viz. the advantage that accrues to the borrower. History of economic analysis 102 did not always object to secular legislation that permitted interest, 35 it is easy to imagine what inconvenience this principle must have caused after interest had become a normal phenomenon. The question naturally arose, that was in the end answered affirmatively by Popes Pius VIII and Gregory XVI, whether in such circumstances an overcomplicated set of rules, however correct logically, should not be replaced by admitting a sweeping presumption that the acceptance of a market rate of interest was all right. This is really all that a steadily increasing number of laical and even clerical writers demanded. But they did not put it this way, partly because they were not able to understand the finely spun logic of the scholastics and therefore set it down as mere sophistry, and partly because, most of them being enemies of the Catholic Church or the scholastic doctors for political and religious reasons, they could not bring themselves to argue the question of policy without sneers or invective. This created the impression that there was a battle between old and new theoretical principles which, since it distorts the picture of a phase in the history of economic analysis, it seemed worth while to dispel. 5. THE CONCEPT OF NATURAL LAW 1 We must now attend to a subject the consideration of which we have twice deferred. It is beset with difficulties and an inexhaustible source of misunderstandings which cannot be straightened out entirely in the available space. An appeal for the patient co-operation of the reader is, however, justified by its fundamental importance for the origins and early history of all social sciences. For the first discovery of every science is the discovery of itself. Awareness of the presence of a set of interrelated phenomena that give rise to ‘problems’ is evidently the prerequisite of all analytic effort. And in the case of the social sciences, this awareness shaped itself in the concept of natural law. We shall try to disentangle its various meanings and to catch their subtle changes and associations. (a) The Ethico-Legal Concept. The scholastic doctors themselves traced their concept of natural law back to Aristotle and the Roman jurists, although, as we shall presently see, they made of it something totally different. Aristotle, speaking of justice, distinguished the ‘naturally just’ ( ) from the ‘institutionally just’ ( ) (Ethics V, 7). But in that passage, the term Natural must be understood in a very narrow sense. Aristotle 35 St. Thomas even went so far as to say (loc. cit. ad tertium) that, in the condition of imperfect man, many useful things would be impeded (multae utilitates impedirentur) if all sins were strictly forbidden by human law. 1 From the large literature on the subject, I select for the reader’s general information Sir Frederick Pollock’s ‘History of the Law of Nature’ (in his Essays in the Law, republ. 1922). Also see P.Struve, ‘L’Idée de loi naturelle dans la science économique,’ Revue d’économie politique, July 1921. The only study I can commend for correct appraisal of the work done under the auspices of the natural-law idea (though of the work of the successors of the scholastics rather than of the scholastics themselves) is O.H.Taylor’s ‘Economics and the Idea of Natural Laws,’ Quarterly The scholastic doctors and the philosophers 103 Journal of Economics, November 1929. Vinogradoff’s well-known Outlines of Historical Jurisprudence (1920–22) may prove helpful. there means to refer only to forms of behavior that are enforced by very general necessities of life that man shares with other animals. But elsewhere he used the term Natural in a much wider sense, in fact in all the senses it ever acquired without distinguishing, let alone defining, them clearly. And the Natural in the wider senses, also, he associated with the Just, thus setting an example for ages to come—even the English ‘classical’ economists sometimes mixed up the natural and the just—though he was not quite consistent about it: he sometimes approved of what he did not call natural; but he never disapproved of anything to which he affixed this label. The Romans, not much given to philosophizing, simply accepted the Aristotelian definition: Gaius (Instit. I, 2) said naïvely that natural law (jus naturale) ‘is what nature has taught all animals’ (quod natura omnia animalia docuit). Ulpian said the same thing. They simply accepted this Natural Law as a source of legal rules that was just as good as, and in fact superior to, any of the sources of positive law, statutory and other. But there are two important points to be noticed in addition. First, there developed a tendency among Romans of literary propensities, such as Cicero, to affix the term jus naturale to what was officially called jus gentium. The reason was that the latter, embodying as it did rules of equity, seemed somehow more ‘natural’ than the formalistic civil law. The reader should observe that this sense of natural law, the sense that ultimately prevailed (while, as we have seen, the term jus gentium acquired in the seventeenth century the meaning of Law of Nations) is not identical with the sense defined by Aristotle in Ethics V, 7, though it has more to do with the other senses in which Aristotle actually used the word Natural. Second, the Roman jurists also associated different meanings with the words Nature and Natural, of which one is important for us: 2 the rei natura or the nature of the case. For instance, when we are confronted by a legal question arising out of a contract, we must first find out what the ‘nature of the business’ was that the parties to the contract intended to effect. At first sight, this nature of the case seems to have nothing to do with natural law in any sense—as many legal treatises try to explain that are written by jurists who, under the influence of the historical school, have come to hate the very phrase Natural Law. But we shall presently see that it has a lot to do with it. St. Thomas 3 accepted the Aristotelian definition in the legalist formulation of the Roman jurists but merely as a matter of form. Actually, his attempt to put logical order into Aristotle’s various uses of it produced something that was neither Aristotelian 2 Other meanings are embodied in such terms as naturale negotii and naturalis obligatio with which I do not want to bother the reader. All of these and other meanings, though distinct, are of course related. 3 What may be termed the Thomistic theory of law, natural and positive, is presented in Summa II, 1, quaest. XCIV, XCV, and XCVII; II, 2, quaest. LVII, art. 2 and 3. Interpretation is not easy. My thesis of the mutability of natural law is gleaned from an argument that purports to prove the contrary but so qualifies and hedges in the principle that the subsequent statement in the text seems warranted. St. Thomas also argued that natural law was the same apud omnes and again the practical upshot is relativity: his emphasis upon what is loco temporique conveniens suffices to establish this, though different interpretations may very well be appropriate from philosophical or theological standpoints. History of economic analysis 104 nor Roman. 4 In the first place, natural law or the ‘naturally just’ (lex naturalis, justum naturale) may be the set of rules that nature imposes upon all animals and also may be, in the sense of Aristotle’s definition, immutable on principle. But since these rules work out differently in different conditions of time and place and with different people, and since it is possible to add to them or to subtract from them, even this natural law became historically variable in practice (see, especially, Summa II, 1, quaest. XCIV, art. 4 and 5). In the second place, there was another meaning of natural law that St. Thomas explains only by examples but which really equates natural law to the set of rules that conform (habet quandam commensurationem) to social necessity or expedience, the historical relativity of which St. Thomas never tired of stressing. Natural law in this sense is almost, though not quite, identified with jus gentium in the Roman official sense. In the third place, it is held that human positive law necessarily consists either in deductions from this natural law or in adjustments of its rules to particular conditions. An enactment that violates any rule of this natural law does not make valid law at all. The reader will notice the political implications of this doctrine. To make a long story short, we leap from St. Thomas to Molina. Molina clearly identified natural law, on the one hand, with the dictates of reason (ratio recta), and with what is socially expedient or necessary (expediens et necessarium), on the other. These propositions, in themselves, are nothing but Thomism formulated more pointedly. But he took a further step (tract. I, disp. 4): after repeating the Aristotelian definition he added, apparently by way of explaining its meaning: ‘that is to say,’ the naturally just is that which obligates us by virtue of the nature of the case (cuius obligatio oritur ex natura rei). But this is not at all what Aristotle meant. Molina does not interpret his meaning but adds a new one: he definitely married natural law to our rational diagnosis, with reference to the Common Good, of the cases—whether individual contracts or social institutions— which we observe in research or practice. Molina’s view about ‘the nature of natural law’ is mentioned only as an example of what was the general opinion of the doctors in his and even an earlier time. De Soto’s concept of the Command of Reason (rationis ordinatio) amounts to the same thing. One way of putting this result is to say that all speculative or metaphysical or non- empirical elements had evaporated from Molina’s natural-law concept, and that there was nothing left but reason applied to particular facts, though, so far, applied from the normative standpoint. Unfortunately, however, the subject is more complicated than this. The doctrine of the scholastics also contains the sources of two currents of thought that are the very opposites of sober matter-of-factness. These must be mentioned because they contributed substantially to the prevailing confusion about natural law. First, there is the 4 Many critics will disagree. They will point to the references to Aristotle and Ulpian by which St. Thomas supported his exposition. Very likely, these critics and I will have to agree to differ, because no agreement can be expected in matters into which the personal equation of interpreters must inevitably enter. The personal equation in this case refers to the importance we attach to passing remarks, obiter dicta, hints. I admit that pointers to St. Thomas’ teaching can be found in Aristotle and the Roman jurists (also in Cicero). But their weight appears to be so great only because it is precisely such passages that St. Thomas brought together. Taken independently of what he made of them they amount to very little. The scholastic doctors and the philosophers 105 association of natural law with primitive conditions. We have seen that, following Aristotle, the doctors, like A.Smith, frequently made use of a pseudo-historical method of exposition: they liked to start, in explaining a social phenomenon such as property or money, from an imaginary ‘early state’ of society. They did not, so far as I can see, make any improper use of this construction. But the Natural was the Just and if the Natural is particularly clearly revealed in primitive conditions, as that method of exposition implies, then primitive conditions become just as well as natural. From this standpoint starts an uninterrupted line that runs right into Rousseau’s glorification of the natural, in the sense of primitive, state of humanity—an association that is entirely immaterial but did not add to the standing of the concept. The scholastics themselves, needless to say, displayed no tendency to glorify primitive conditions. Second, there is a relation between the scholastic natural law and the Rights of Man, droits de l’homme, and similar eighteenth-century constructs including the laborer’s natural right to his product. The existence of this relation cannot be doubted. For the natural law of the doctors was considered as a source of valid legal rules about rights and duties, and all the framers of the droits de l’homme pretended to do was to draw on this source for the Command of Reason or rationis ordinatio with respect to the political rights of civilized man. Moreover, some items in the list of these rights are clearly recognized by scholastic writers. And yet, the speculative character of these and similarly conceived rights is a commonplace. It is precisely this sort of thing, more than anything else, which accounts for the distaste many of the best economists have felt for the concept of natural law, and which has made it a byword for unhistoric and unscientific metaphysics. So much is this the case that, with some of us, a proposition need only be linked up with natural law in order to be put out of court; in fact, one of the most common reasons for wholesale rejection of economic theory to this day is that it is nothing but an offshoot of unscientific natural-law philosophies. We have, therefore, every motive for looking more closely at the indictment. This will be done under the next heading. (b) The Analytic Concept. So far we have been inquiring into the development of the natural-law concept in its role within the ethical and legal sphere or, what amounts to the same thing, of natural law considered as a source of morally and legally valid imperatives. After what has been said in preceding sections of this chapter, it is easy to find the bridge to the natural-law concept in its analytic role. In fact, we need only generalize our findings in the special case of the theory of interest For this purpose, let us ask the question: why should Aristotle have called certain forms of behavior ‘naturally just’ in the narrow sense of his definition? Evidently because these forms of behavior were necessary conditions of the survival of (as he thought) animal life in general. A similar answer will hold true for the ‘naturally just’ in the wider sense that covers the necessities of social life in the actual historical circumstances of any given human society. Therefore, in order to find out what is naturally just in any particular case, it is first necessary to analyze these circumstances. The generalizations that we may derive by so doing can be called natural law in the analytic sense: the normative natural law presupposes an explanatory natural law. The former is nothing but a particular kind of value judgment passed upon the facts and the History of economic analysis 106 relations between facts unearthed by the latter. The two are logically as distinct and practically as distinguishable as are the value judgments and analytic propositions of any economist. For instance, A.Smith had a theory of wages that consists of statements of fact and of generalizations derived from them. But he also said (Wealth, Bk. I, ch. 8) that ‘the produce of labour constitutes the natural recompence or wages of labour.’ Since by produce of labor he there meant the whole product, and since, on his own showing, the wages do not normally amount to that, we have here clearly a natural-law proposition in the philosophical or value-judgment sense. But when we are interested in scientific analysis only, we have no difficulty in discarding this sentence. Or, a modern economist may both analyze the phenomenon of price discrimination and pass a value judgment upon it. If he does the latter by calling it unjust, he is adopting a natural-law rule that does not differ, in this case, from that of the scholastics. If he approves of the Robinson- Patman Act, which forbids discrimination, he does what the scholastics would have done in their day by saying that this act is valid law because it conforms to an imperative of natural law. We may indeed call this, or any value judgment of any kind, unscientific or extrascientific. But there is no point in throwing out the analytic baby with the philosophic bath-water. And this is precisely what is being done by those who dispose of the economics of the scholastic doctors or their laical successors merely by pointing to its associations with a system of moral and legal imperatives—of natural laws in the analytic sense because of its association with a system of natural laws in the normative sense. The main objection raised against natural-law jurisprudence and economics by the historical school was, however, not this but a different though related one: natural law was supposed to be entirely divorced from historic reality. We have seen that this objection is unfounded so far as the scholastic doctors, who always stressed the historical relativity of social phenomena, are concerned. It is better founded in the case of some of their successors. But it should be observed that, whether well or ill founded, this objection touches only the use of the concept and not the concept itself. Any concept can be faultily used. Moreover, any theory may be inadequate or wrong. In particular, it may claim for its propositions an undue amount of generality. The theoretical views asso-ciated with the droιts de l’homme, for instance, certainly did. But an inadequate—or even wrong—scientific theory is still a scientific theory. On the other hand, we shall understand that the absolute claims made in the eighteenth century on behalf of certain legislative programs, without due reference to conditions of time and place, fostered all sorts of misunderstandings of the true character of natural-law analysis. I have said that social science discovered itself in the concept of natural law. This will be particularly clear if we visualize it in the form of Molina’s definition—as distilled from the ‘nature of the case,’ the rei natura. Taken in this sense, the ideal of natural law embodies the discovery that the data of a social situation determine—in the most favorable case, uniquely—a certain sequence of events, a logically coherent process or state, or would do so if they were allowed to work themselves out without further disturbance. This is putting it in modern The scholastic doctors and the philosophers 107 terms. But the reason why we may attribute this idea, in however rudimentary a form, to the scholastic doctors is in their concept of justice. This (Aristotelian) concept of justice St. Thomas explained by relating the word ‘justice’ to adjustment and the word ‘just’ to adjusted. Just is what is adjusted, or conforms, to—what? The only answer we can give if we take the clue proffered by Molina’s rei natura is: to the social pattern involved, as viewed from a utilitarian Common Good or social expediency. Hence the equations between just and natural, natural and normal. 5 Hence also the ease with which they passed from normative doctrine to the analytic theorem and vice versa, and with which we can pass, for example, from their just price to the price of (short- or long-run) competitive equilibrium. Hence, finally, the relation—not, of course, amounting to identification— that subsists with them between justification and explanation. Therefore, while it is true, as a matter of 5 This relation between natural in the sense of normal and natural in the sense of just explains why the term Natural survived so long—almost until Marshall—in the former sense and also why some authors, who had certain philosophical ideas about ‘natural liberty,’ continued to link it with the just. But this is not all of it. The proviso about absence of disturbance that occurs in our text a few sentences earlier indicates a somewhat different but related meaning of such phrases as natural prices, natural wages, and so on: in these phrases Natural simply means that disturbances other than such as may have been included in the data are assumed to be absent, or that we intend to investigate a process or state as it would be if left to itself. Also, it is, of course, absurd to look for natural-law philosophies wherever the word Natural occurs: ‘naturally’ in particular simply means the same as ‘obviously.’ We do not commit ourselves to any philosophy when we state that a man is ‘naturally’ offended after having been called a fool. It seems worth while adding that the term Normal must not be understood in the statistical sense but rather in the sense in which we speak of normal eyesight: a physiologist, from his grasp of the rei natura, in this case of the structure of the human eye, may arrive at a concept of normality that may be far removed from any statistical measure of the actual eyesights observable in any given population. History of economic analysis 108 history, that modern economics stems from the scholastic writers, as its critics hold, it is also true that this fact does not constitute an objection. 6 (c) Natural Law and Sociological Rationalism. I. A comment on philosophical rationalism. In order to exhibit a point that is important for us, we select the following meaning of the protean word Rationalism. We call Philosophical Rationalism the belief not only that our mind (‘natural reason’) is the source of truths that are antecedent to experience, but also that our mind is able to produce results about supermundane subjects, such as the existence of God. 7 In this sense, St. Thomas was a metaphysical rationalist because, unlike other (mainly Scotist) scholastics, he believed that the existence of God can be logically proved. He was not a metaphysical rationalist in the sense in which this phrase came to be used in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, namely, that human reason was the only admissible source of knowledge in matters of theology, for he also admitted revelation. Now, if a man believes that, also by the unaided powers of his own logical apparatus, he can prove that God does not exist, he is indeed, in this particular matter, contradictorily opposed to St. Thomas. But there is a point in which they are nevertheless brothers in the spirit: the rationalist deist and the rationalist atheist are both rationalists in the sense defined and allies against anyone who does not trust his reason to soar as high as that, in particular against any logical positivist of today. Of course, there is nothing surprising in this. It is a most common occurrence that people who hold different views, nevertheless recognize, and appeal to, the same authority. But it was necessary to advert to this fact because it will help us to see continuity in doctrinal development where, without its help, we should see nothing but break and antagonism. II. Sociological rationalism. Scientific activity is often looked upon as the standard instance of rational activity in the sense that the worker, whatever his ultimate aim, allows himself to be guided by the rules of logical inference. This is indeed not quite accurate: precisely the strongest achievements in science proceed not from observation or experimentation and orderly logic- 6 Some historians of economics have believed that the normative element acquired added significance owing to its theological nature (observe, by the way, the meaning of ‘nature’ in this sentence). This has been held to be relevant even for an appraisal of the physiocrat system (see below, ch. 4, sec. 3). This, however, is another error. For the scholastic order of things, physical and social, is entirely autonomous within the scholastic theology, the only influence of which— beyond ethical imperatives—concerns the problems of miracles and of creation. Apart from miracles and creation, this order is to be understood entirely by the light of human reason. No doubt, in analyzing it, reason is analyzing part of God’s works. But since God’s plan in any case includes any amount of ‘evil,’ not even evaluation is seriously restricted by association with theology, and analysis is left entirely free. For discussion of an exactly opposite error of interpretation, see the next section. 7 I have to apologize for the innumerable shortcomings of this definition. It is, however, brief and it is sufficient for the purpose of making the one point that is relevant to our subject. The scholastic doctors and the philosophers 109 chopping but from something that is best called vision and is akin to artistic creation. Still, results have to be ‘proved’ by the logical or rational procedure dictated by professional standards and this suffices to impress rationality in this sense—which has nothing to do with the sense discussed above—upon the stock of scientific knowledge that we possess at any time. But this concept of scientific rationality refers only to the attitude of the analysts and not to the behavior of the object analyzed. The alienist may ‘rationally’ investigate the reactions of madmen, the sociologist may rationally investigate war psychologies or the behavior of maddened crowds, without implying that the words and actions observed ‘make sense.’ So far as this goes, we are all of us, including the scholastic doctors no less than their worst enemies, of necessity Methodological Rationalists, that is, we all believe that some rational methods are applicable to the description of social phenomena. Generalizations resulting from the application of such methods may be called natural laws, and this is the only indispensable relation that exists between the natural-law concept and the ‘right reason’ or ratio recta. But Sociological or Economic Rationalism means something else. Just as we may look upon the physical universe—in the way first made fashionable by the Stoics—as a logically consistent whole that is modeled upon an orderly plan—so we may look upon society as a cosmos that is possessed of inherent logical consistency. For us, it matters little whether this order is imposed upon it by divine will—directed to some definite ends by an invisible hand—or is inherent merely in the sense that the observer discovers in it plan and purpose that are independent of his analytic rationality, because in either case nothing is allowed to enter that ‘rational’ cosmos but what comes within the grasp of the light of reason. We must, however, further distinguish Objective Sociological or Economic Rationalism which does not, and Subjective Sociological Rationalism which does, postulate that this order or plan is or can be realized by the rational action of the individuals or groups that compose society. Both must evidently be attributed to the scholastic doctors as well as to most of their successors down to our own time. And this lends additional color to their concept of Natural Law and establishes another relation between it and their ratio recta that is quite distinct from the one established in the preceding paragraph—the relation formulated for all times by St. Thomas: rationis autem prima regula est lex naturae (Summa, II, 1, quaest. XCV, art. 2). This, of course, is inacceptable from the standpoint of modern positivism. It constitutes in fact the one justification for finding ‘speculation’ not only in the normative but also in the analytic concept of natural law. All the more important is it to repeat that sociological or economic rationalism bears only upon the interpretation of natural-law propositions and not necessarily upon their content. We may drop the former and retain the latter. It is true, however, that the postulate of subjective rationalism embodies an exaggerated opinion of the explanatory value of rational action and tempts us into placing undue confidence in teleological arguments and into similar errors. This is especially serious if associated with a habit economists have of setting themselves up as judges of the rationality not only of means but of ends (motives), that is to say, if they approve, as rational, of ends (motives) that seem ‘reasonable’ to themselves and dispose of all others as irrational. The scholastic doctors are guilty on all these counts. But it is interesting to note that so are we: in this respect, too, as in so many others, we are their heirs. No better example can be found to illustrate this point than Alfred Marshall. History of economic analysis 110 III. Ratio recta and la raison. Observe that sociological or economic rationalism need not lead to ‘conservative’ attitudes in practice. Like metaphysical rationalism it cuts both ways. We may indeed infer from our belief in the existence of an economic order or cosmos that all is always for the best in the world as it actually is—the view that Voltaire ridiculed in the figure of Dr. Pangloss (in Candide). But we need not assume that the rational order of things actually exists in the things as they are. It is sufficient to believe in a rational order that exists only in the realm of reason and that reason itself calls upon us to assert as against a deviating reality. This is the meaning sociological or economic rationalism carries with all reforming groups who propose ‘to apply reason to social phenomena’—with the men of the Enlightenment whose cult of la raison was of this type, with the Benthamites, and with most liberals, radicals, and socialists of today. And all of them descend from the scholastics. For the political sociology of the doctors is by itself sufficient to prove that they held the second and not the first view concerning the social cosmos or the natural law. All the differences in the results of the application of the ‘light of reason’—amply accounted for as they are by differences of standpoints and circumstances—are immaterial so far as the point under discussion is concerned. It is the same methodological principle that pervades all sociological and political thought that is not anti-intellectualist. The Greeks were the first to give it articulate expression. But the scholastics were the first to do so in the Germanic world. Whatever la raison revolted against in the eighteenth century, it was not a mode of thought. Epistemologically, there is perfect continuity, and ratio recta (equal to naturalis ratio) is the mother of la raison. This need not surprise or shock anybody. The sword that was forged by angels might easily fall into the hand of devils. And the sword that was forged by devils might be wrenched from them by angels—only that, in this case, the devils are entitled to the kind of recognition that every civilized socialist extends to the achievements of capitalism. 6. THE PHILOSOPHERS OF NATURAL LAW: NATURAL-LAW ANALYSIS IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY We now part company with the scholastic doctors in order to consider the work of their immediate successors. The eternal questions about the government of mankind continued to be asked, of course, and others arose during the seventeenth century from the welter of new political patterns and problems. Especially in England, these produced a torrent of pamphlets of all types that ranged all the way from closely reasoned argument—I suppose that the writings of (George Savile, Marquess of) Halifax, the ‘trimmer,’ will always stand out as the peak achievements of this literature—to rantings nourished on apocalyptic quotations. But the craving for answers was also satisfied, on the level of general principle, by a group of writers whom we shall call Philosophers of Natural Law. 1 1 This term I have adopted on the advice of Professor A.P.Usher. The scholastic doctors and the philosophers 111 . the picture of a phase in the history of economic analysis, it seemed worth while to dispel. 5. THE CONCEPT OF NATURAL LAW 1 We must now attend to a subject the consideration of which we. for the origins and early history of all social sciences. For the first discovery of every science is the discovery of itself. Awareness of the presence of a set of interrelated phenomena that. appraisal of the work done under the auspices of the natural-law idea (though of the work of the successors of the scholastics rather than of the scholastics themselves) is O.H.Taylor’s ‘Economics