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[This article is excerpted from Economic Thought Before Adam Smith .] The views of the great philosopher Aristotle are particularly important because the entire structure of his thought had an enormous and even dominant influence on the economic and social thought of the high and late Middle Ages, which considered itself Aristotelian. Although

[This article is excerpted from Economic Thought Before Adam Smith . An MP3 audio file of this article, read by Jeff Riggenbach, is available for download .]   The three main schools of political thought: the Legalists, the Taoists, and the Confucians, were established from the sixth to the fourth centuries BC. Roughly, the Legalists, the latest

[This article is excerpted from An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought , vol. 1, Economic Thought Before Adam Smith . ]   St. Thomas Aquinas St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) was the towering intellect of the High Middle Ages, the man who built on the philosophical system of Aristotle, on the concept of natural law, and on

[This article is excerpted from An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought , vol. 1, Economic Thought Before Adam Smith . ]   Being a Franciscan and a student of William of Ockham did not prevent the great French philosopher–scientist Jean Buridan de Bethune (1300–1358), born in Picardy, to become rector of the University of Paris,

[This article is excerpted from An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought , vol. 1, Economic Thought Before Adam Smith . ] One nominalist and student of Buridan, Heinrich von Langenstein the Elder (also known as Henry of Hesse) (1325–1397), while an uninfluential and minor scholastic philosopher in his own and later centuries,

[This article is excerpted from An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought , vol. 1, Economic Thought Before Adam Smith . ]   “The Sermon of Saint Bernardino of Siena” (1784) Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (1746–1828)   The great mind, and the great systematizer, of scholastic economics was a paradox among paradoxes: a strict

What I call the Old Right is suddenly back! The terms “old” and “new” inevitably get confusing, with a new “new” every few years, so let’s call it the “Original” Right, the right wing as it existed from 1933 to approximately 1955. This Old Right was formed in reaction against the New Deal, and against the Great Leap Forward into the leviathan

[This article is excerpted from Economic Thought Before Adam Smith .]   Juan de Mariana (1536–1624) One of the last Spanish scholastics was a Jesuit but not a Salamancan. He was the “extremist” contemporary of Molina and Suarez, Juan de Mariana (1536–1624). Mariana was born near Toledo, of poor and humble parents. He entered the great University

[This article is excerpted from An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought , vol. 1, Economic Thought Before Adam Smith . ]   Bacon and Descartes agreed on one crucial and destructive point: the severing of reason and thought from empirical data. Sixteenth-century Spain has well been called the Indian summer of Scholasticism. After

[From Egalitarianism as a Revolt against Nature and Other Essays ] Until very recently, free-market economists paid little attention to the entities actually being exchanged on the very market they have advocated so strongly. Wrapped up in the workings and advantages of freedom of trade, enterprise, investment, and the price system, economists