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- A) Capitalism as "Spirit".
- The World As I Have Found It Sequel to Incidents in the Life of a Blind Girl (TREDITION CLASSICS)?
- Catholicism, Protestantism, and Capitalism by Amintore Fanfani?
- 1908. Firenze capitale delle avanguardie (Italian Edition).
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Amazon Music Stream millions of songs. Amazon Drive Cloud storage from Amazon. The mercantilists, however, were pro-statist ad hoc pamphleteers, and contributed less to economics and to liberalism than the late scholastics. Emphasis on subjective values of individuals and utility was also continued by the great Protestant political philosophers Grotius and Pufendorf, who were directly influenced by the Spanish scholastics also, as we will see below, in the field of natural law , and by Italian economists de Volterra midth century , Davanzatti late 16th , Montanari late 17th , and especially Galiani about Theory was further developed by Turgot and Condillac, French Catholics midth century.
By the time of the latter three, in fact, Kauder claims that the "value paradox" gold vs.
Catholicism, Protestantism, and Capitalism
I might add that the resultant holistic approach by Smith and Ricardo was subtly socialistic in still a fourth way: Now, Kauder goes on to point out that the Italian-French subjective value, utility theorists were Catholics, while the labor-value theorists: Petty, Locke, and Smith were British Protestants. Kauder attributes this precisely to the Calvinist emphasis on the divinity of work, as opposed to Catholic thought, which only considered work as a means to making a living. The Scholastics, then, were free to come to the conclusion that the "just price" was essentially the freely competitive price set on the market, whereas the Protestant-influenced British had to say that the fair price is the "natural" price where the "amount of labor exchanged in each good is the same.
In fact, Smith and Locke were influenced both by the scholastic stream which they acquired from their philosophic training, and the Calvinist emphasis on the divinity of labor. It is true that Smith believed that free competition would eventually bring market prices around to the "just price," but it is evident that a danger has been introduced — a danger that Marx fully exploited and, in fact, that lingers on in the imperfect competition theories, which are akin to emphasis on some juster world where the "natural" or "optimum" prices reign.
B) The Capitalistic Man
Thomists, on the other hand, always centered their economic studies on the consumer as the Aristotelian "final cause" in the economic system, and the ends of the consumer are "moderate pleasure-seeking. He does point out, however, the importance of his strict Evangelical background for Alfred Marshall. Marshall's father was a very strict Evangelical, and the Evangelicals were strict Calvinist-revivalists. Perhaps this is why Marshall resisted utility theory, and insisted on retaining much of Ricardian cost-theory, which even yet persists as a result.
I would like to add further comment, however. The most "dogmatic" laissez-fairists in the 19th century were not the British, but the French Catholic economists.
Further, laissez faire theory was developed in fine flower by the Catholic Physiocrats, who were directly influenced by natural law-natural rights thought. This brings me to the second great influence of the Catholic scholastics — the natural law, natural rights theory.
Certainly natural law was a great hindrance on state absolutism, and it began in Catholic thought.
lifeissues | Catholicism, Protestantism, and Capitalism: Part I
Schumpeter points out that the divine right of kings was a Protestant theory. The natural law, natural rights theory, also came down from the scholastics to the French and British moral-philosophers. The connection was obscured by the fact that many of the 18th-century rationalists, being bitterly anti-Catholic, refused to acknowledge their intellectual debt to Catholic thinkers. Schumpeter, in fact, claims that individualism began in Catholic thought. 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. This… argument is remarkably individualist, utilitarian, and rationalist…. Schumpeter particularly mentions the anti-statist spirit of the scholastic Juan de Mariana, He also treats their adoption of the market price as essentially the just price, utility theory, subjective value, etc. He says that while Aristotle and Scotus believed the normal competitive price was the just one, the later Spanish scholastics identified the market price with any competitive price, e.
They also had a gold standard theory, and opposed debasement. Schumpeter also says that de Lugo developed a risk-theory of business profits, which, of course, was only fully developed at the turn of the twentieth century and later. While the 18th-century natural-rights theory was much more individualistic and libertarian than the scholastic version, there is a definite continuity here, too.
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The same is true for Rationalism, reason having been the main device used by Aquinas, and reason having been fought by Protestants, who place their theology — and their ethic — on a more emotional, or direct Revelation, basis. We may sum up the Case for Catholicism as follows: