Thomas Aquinas and the Civil Economy Tradition: The Mediterranean Spirit of Capitalism 2020053044, 2020053045, 9780367376109, 9780429355240, 9780367776374

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Thomas Aquinas and the Civil Economy Tradition

Delving into the history of economic thought, this book presents a picture of the Mediterranean spirit of capitalism, a tradition that has its protagonists in Thomas Aquinas and the eighteenth-century civil economy, and seeks to understand its presence and relevance for contemporary societies. The book argues that it is reductive to attribute to the ‘Protestant ethic’ the different formations of capitalism in the Western world. Instead, it is vital to acknowledge the differences in the ways in which the market is lived, enterprises are created and conducted, and civic life in general is understood in different regions. This thought-provoking study demonstrates that in Southern Europe, the legacy of Aquinas and the civil economy adds different terms to those recurring in classical and neo-classical economy: common good, reciprocity, virtue, public trust, mutual assistance, and public happiness. It is these ideas of a market as a place for mutual assistance which can be said to characterize the Mediterranean spirit of capitalism. Thomas Aquinas and the Civil Economy Tradition will be of interest to advanced students and researchers in the history of economic thought, economic philosophy, Christian ethics, and moral theology. Paolo Santori holds a PhD in Sciences of Civil Economy at Libera Università Maria Santissima Assunta (LUMSA) University in Rome. Currently, he is a grant research holder for the Centro Universitario Cattolico (CUC) and a member of the Economy of Francesco. In 2020, he taught history of economic thought at the Pontifical Lateran University.

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Classical Liberalism and the Industrial Working Class The Economic Thought of Thomas Hodgskin Alberto Mingardi English Economic Thought in the Seventeenth Century Rejecting the Dutch Model Seiichiro Ito Poverty in the History of Economic Thought From Mercantilism to Neoclassical Economics Edited by Mats Lundahl, Daniel Rauhut and Neelambar Hatti Macroeconomic Analysis in the Classical Tradition The Impediments of Keynes’s Inf luence James C.W. Ahiakpor Foundations of Organisational Economics Histories and Theories of the Firm and Production Paul Walker John Locke and the Bank of England Claude Roche Poverty in Contemporary Economic Thought Edited by Mats Lundahl, Daniel Rauhut and Neelambar Hatti Thomas Aquinas and the Civil Economy Tradition The Mediterranean Spirit of Capitalism Paolo Santori For more information about this series, please visit www.routledge.com/series/ SE0341

Thomas Aquinas and the Civil Economy Tradition The Mediterranean Spirit of Capitalism

Paolo Santori

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Paolo Santori The right of Paolo Santori to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Santori, Paolo, 1991– author. Title: Thomas Aquinas and the civil economy tradition : the Mediterranean spirit of capitalism / Paolo Santori. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020053044 (print) | LCCN 2020053045 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367376109 (hardback) | ISBN 9780429355240 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Thomas, Aquinas, Saint, 1225?–1274—Knowledge and learning—Economics. | Economics—Religious aspects— Catholic Church—History. | Common good—Religious aspects— Catholic Church. | Capitalism—Mediterranean Region—History. Classification: LCC B765.T54 S26 2021 (print) | LCC B765.T54 (ebook) | DDC 330.15/12—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020053044 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020053045 ISBN: 978-0-367-37610-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-77637-4 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-35524-0 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by codeMantra

To the memory of Geom. Paolo Santori (1920–1999) Giovanni Piccinini (1934–2017)

Contents

Preface Acknowledgements

ix xiii

1

Introduction

1

2

Aquinas’s social and economic teachings

31

3

Aquinas and economic thought

65

4

From Aquinas to civil economy

90

5

The Thomistic soul of civil economy

112

6

Conclusion

142

Index

153

Preface

This book continues the study of my PhD thesis, titled The Roots of Civil Economy: Echoes of Aquinas in Genovesi’s Economic Theory, in which I sought to answer two research questions: (1) Can the kernel of a civil economists’ account of the market be found in Aquinas’s social and economic ideas? And, consequently, (2) Was Aquinas a reference point for Italian civil economists of the eighteenth century? When I was assigned to inquire into the broad topic of Aquinas’s philosophical vision of the market and civil society, in fact, I wondered how I could contribute to the vast literature on the subject. My PhD course, titled ‘Sciences of Civil Economy’, and my supervisor in those days suggested the answer. Civil economy is an Italian philosophical and economic tradition that was developed in the eighteenth century (Bruni and Zamagni 2016). In particular, the Neapolitan School, with Antonio Genovesi as its founder, proposed an understanding and description of the developing market society different from, yet not the opposite of, the account proposed by political economy (Adam Smith). Bruni and Zamagni (2016) pointed to the Aristotelian and Thomistic tradition as some of the sources of civil economists. From there arose my will to understand if and to what extent Aquinas had been a steady reference point for Genovesi and, through him, for the civil economy tradition. The result was two-fold. First, I explored the possible reading of Aquinas’s social and economic teachings through the lens of civil economy. Civil economists’ philosophical categories were found to be very fitting for shedding light on many well-known Aquinas ideas, such as the doctrine of the just price or his view about commerce and the common good. I tried not to apply concepts from the eighteenth century to an author of the thirteenth century. Rather, my aim was to show to what extent the seeds of these ideas emerged spontaneously within the Thomistic system, coherent with Aquinas’s moral and ontological view. Still, the risk of anachronism was behind the door. I assumed three antidotes to avoid this problem: (1) an ethical commitment not to force Aquinas’s texts to provide confirmations of my hypothesis; (2) to stress the element of discontinuity between Aquinas’s and Genovesi’s theories; and (3) to prove that Aquinas’s ideas were fundamental for Genovesi’s social and economic view. Although I maintained the first two points, point three was

x Preface

the second main result of my thesis. Genovesi drew extensively on Aquinas’s ideas from the theological and philosophical point of view, and this inf luence had considerable consequences for his economic view. In a nutshell, according to Aquinas and civil economists, the market is the realm of self-interest and contracts, and, at the same time, the realm of gifts, cooperation, and deep concern for the common good. Not only does this latter point not coincide with an unintentional consequence; it is also not even a secondary product of self-interest. The conceptual core around which my thesis revolved was the idea of a market in which gift, intended as an anthropological mode of being in action (caring for the good of others, contributing to the well-being of others), and a contract based on incentives and personal interest are both present. In other words, it revolved around a market in which, in parallel with self-interest, virtue and the common good are analyzed as fundamental determinants of human action. It is known that gift and reciprocity have not been components of political economy since the time of the Physiocrats and, later, the Scottish Enlightenment. In Naples and other parts of Italy, however, gift and mutual assistance were the cornerstones of the market, as far as the tradition of civil economy was concerned. Civil economy furnished an alternative (micro) economic paradigm to that of political economy. My thesis investigated the roots of this paradigm, identifying a reference author in Aquinas. Soon, I realized that the project went beyond the analysis of two authors. The similarities between Aquinas and civil economy led me to think about the possibility of identifying a spirit of capitalism rooted in the Christian Catholic world. However, I noticed something different from what Fanfani (1934) and Novak (1993) had argued from separate angles. I was not seeking to prove that the spirit of capitalism, as analyzed in Max Weber’s masterpiece Die protestantische ethik und der geist des Kapitalismus (The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism), was anticipated by the Christian world of the fifteenth century (Fanfani 1934; Barbieri 2013). Nor was I interested in showing the accordance between capitalism as a socio-economic system and Catholic belief (Novak 1993). Divergently, I realized that the authors and tradition I was enquiring about were connected to a spirit of capitalism different from the one examined by Weber and rooted in the Protestant ethic. My aim became to trace its features, which meant understanding what the main ideas were, around which the invisible thread connecting Aquinas and civil economists was woven. I found support in literature mostly through the work of Bruni (2015, 2020; Bruni and Milbank 2019) and Zamagni (2010). Both recognized that modernity produced different spirits of capitalism, which gave rise to the different ways in which market societies are realized today. Despite the claim of universality inherent in its structure, in fact, capitalism, conceived as an economic and social system, has taken different forms in the various contexts in which it developed. The methods and agents related to this market conception seem to create a watershed—not always clear and well defined—between a model of Anglo-Saxon capitalism, widespread in

Preface xi

Northern Europe, England, and the United States, of Protestant and AngloSaxon origins, and a Mediterranean one, widespread in Southern Europe, of a Catholic and Latin matrix. The former prefers anonymous, self-regulated markets and vertical enterprises alongside philanthropic activities that reach different degrees of intensity. In the second, community culture is more emphasized, and cooperative mutualist movements, such as associations, family businesses, and ethical banks, are fundamental. Drawing again on Weber, we are faced with two spirits of capitalism, that is, two symbolic values and cultural spaces in which economic practices are grafted and that, in turn, the same practices have contributed to shape. To account for these differences and to take a comprehensive look at current economic systems, we must retrace the philosophical and theological roots developed by the various economic schools in modern times (eighteenth and nineteenth centuries). One could argue that it is incorrect to draw boundaries that are too sharp between a Protestant ethic and its spirit of capitalism, as realized in the societies of Northern Europe and the United States, and a Catholic ethic, another spirit of capitalism typical of Southern Europe. What I find more incorrect, however, is ignoring the differences in the ways in which the market is lived, enterprises are created and conducted, and civil life in general is understood in different regions of the Western world. This impoverishes academic debates and divests economics of something that today is desperately needed—heterogeneity. The idea of the present book is to conduct an analysis into the history of economic thought to identify a tradition that has its protagonists in Aquinas and civil economy, and its cornerstones in the ideas of mutual assistance, civic virtues, and the common good. The broad aim is to draw a picture of the Mediterranean spirit of capitalism and to understand its presence and relevance for our societies. Why have I opted for ‘Mediterranean’ instead of ‘Catholic ethic’ for the subtitle of this book? I intended for Mediterranean to express a marked difference from those researchers who sought a Catholic origin of the spirit of capitalism but failed to recognize that there are many and varied spirits. For a similar reason, I have not chosen the term ‘Thomistic’, employed by Sombart (1915) to revise Weber’s thesis and rightly criticized by Scheler in an important article (1964). I am not arguing that both the Catholic ethic and the Thomistic ethic are unrelated or inappropriate labels for what I am exploring; I chose to associate Mediterranean with the spirit of capitalism because it seems less controversial than the others, and it stresses the discontinuity of my analysis from the others. I have always been fascinated by the ways in which thinkers use water and seas to describe the most disparate concepts. Pascal, for example, employed the images of tide waves to describe the action of grace on human nature: ‘Nature acts by progress, itus et reditus. It goes and returns, then advances further, then twice as much backwards, then more forward than ever, &c. The tide of the sea behaves in the same manner’ (Pascal 1958, 101). As this book

xii

Preface

is also concerned with the theological and philosophical roots of economic ideas, it seems worthwhile to highlight the idea that the itus et reditus theory affected French economists’ models (Dal-Pont Legrand and Frobert 2010). Most of all, my choice of ‘Mediterranean’ was inspired by this quote from Plutarch, which I found in Jacob Viner’s reconstruction of the Universal Economy doctrine (Viner 1972), and which expressed well the essence of the spirit of capitalism I will describe: Furthermore, though there are but four elements, water provides from itself a fifth, so to say, the sea, one no less beneficial than the others, especially for commerce among other things. This element, therefore, when our life was savage and unsociable, linked it together and made it complete, redressing defects by mutual assistance and exchange and so bringing about cooperation and friendship. (Plutarch 1927, 299)

Bibliography Barbieri, G. 2013. Decline and economic ideals in Italy in the early modern age. Florence: LS Olschki. Bruni, L. 2015. Il mercato e il dono: gli spiriti del capitalismo. Milano: EGEA spa. Bruni, L. 2020. The southern spirit of capitalism. In The Routledge handbook of economic theology, ed. S. Schwarzkopf, 304–313. Oxon: Routledge. Bruni, L., and S. Zamagni. 2016. Civil economy: Another idea of the market. NewcastleUpon-Tyne: Agenda Publishing. Bruni, L., and J. Milbank. 2019. Martin Luther and the different spirits of capitalism in Europe. International Review of Economics 66: 221–231. Dal-Pont Legrand, M., and L. Frobert. 2010. Le « prophète des crises ». Économie politique et religion chez Clément Juglar. Astérion 7. http://journals.openedition. org/asterion/1642. Fanfani, A. 1934. Cattolicesimo e protestantesimo nella formazione storica del capitalismo. Milano: Vita e Pensiero. Novak, M. 1993. Catholic ethic and the spirit of capitalism. New York: Free Press. Pascal, B. 1958. Pascal’s pensees. New Delhi: Prabhat Prakashan. Plutarch. 1927. On whether water or fire is more useful. Plutarch’s moralia, Vol. 12. London: Loeb Classical Library. Scheler, M. 1964. The Thomist ethic and the spirit of capitalism. Sociological Analysis 25, no. 1: 4–19. Sombart, W. 1915. The quintessence of capitalism: A study of the history and psychology of the modern business man. London: TF Unwin, Limited. Viner, J. 1972. The role of providence in the social order: An essay in intellectual history. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society. Zamagni, S. 2010. Catholic social thought, civil economy, and the spirit of capitalism. In The true wealth of nations, ed. D. Finn, 63–93. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Acknowledgements

During the writing of this book, I was affected by COVID-19. I had almost completed Chapter 3, and it suddenly became harder to continue. I did it, but I have not done it alone. My first acknowledgement goes to my parents, who shared the house with me before, during, and after my quarantine. The reader will pardon me if I continue in Italian, but they are not able to read English, and I want to be understood by them. Ringrazio i miei genitori, Lorena Piccinini e Marino Santori, per il sostegno, per la pazienza, per aver creduto nelle mie scelte, per il loro aiuto costante e silenzioso; grazie a loro a casa mia si sta davvero bene. Then, I would like to thank my sister’s family, Ilaria, Pietro, and my beloved nephew Larissa, who brought joy and happiness to our lives. I dedicated this work to the memory of my grandfathers, and I am sure that my grandmothers Nonna Giuseppa Marchetti and Nonna Elvira Capretta will join me in being touched in remembering them. I would like to also thank my cousins Stefano, Valeria, Francesca, Elisabetta, Giovanni, Antonio, and Zio Pierangelo Santori; Zio Nino (Ernano) Ventilii; Zia Oriana Straccia; and Zia Daniela Piccinini. After family, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Luigino Bruni, my mentor, co-author, and friend. He is my abbé Faria. He is one of the most clever, profound, sincere people I have ever known. Meeting him changed my life as a researcher. His biggest teaching was that one always ought not to be a sycophant (ruffiano) with people and, especially, with ideas. This book, in fact, draws very much on his insights—he could be considered a silent co-author—including books, lectures, and our joint papers, but also on the conversations we had during numerous lunches. I am sure he will not agree on everything I have written and argued, but this is how science f lourishes and advances. I hope that the ‘sacred fire’ of knowledge will unite our work for a long time, being the communicatio on which our friendship is based. I would like to thank my best friends, Enea Bianchi and Alessandro Borghesi. With Enea I shared all the steps of writing this book, including the difficulties and pains. He is my brother, only blood insists on proving otherwise. The same can be said of Alessandro, whose energy, intelligence, and spirit are sources of constant inspiration. I really believe they are both better philosophers than I will ever be.

xiv Acknowledgements

A special mention also goes to Alessandro Piegari, my last f lat mate. If people could have half of his generosity, the world would be a more pleasant place to live in. From academia, I would like to thank professors Stefano Zamagni, Adrian Pabst, Robert Sugden, John Milbank, Tommaso Reggiani, Matteo Rizzolli, Alessandra Smerilli, Stefano Semplici, Jeffrey Sachs, Francesco Guala, Richard Sturn, Rocco Buttiglione, Yuriy Pidlisnyy, Piero Coda, Helena Marujo, Michele Bee, Paul Van Geest, Joost van der Net, Michel Bronzwaer, and Antonio Magliulo. In various forms, in very different times, all have helped me in growing as a researcher. I would like to thank Marta Paolesse. She masterfully revised most of my works for many years, giving shape to my confused thoughts. I am also grateful to my editor Andrew Humphries for having given me this great opportunity. Among my colleagues a special mention goes to my co-authors from which, during these years, I have learned very much: Plinio Limata, Federica Nalli, Gabriele Mandolesi (Ezio), Emanuele Pili, Maxime Menuet, and Renato Raffaele Amoroso. I am also grateful to Loredana Piersampieri, Thomas Conti, Jordan Bietz, Katharina Maria Kalinowski, Andrea Fazio, Dalila de Rosa, Maria Francesca Cavalcanti, Giorgia Diletta Nigri, Katia Laffusa, Roshan Borsato, Lorenzo Semplici, Maria Beatrice Cerrino, Enrico Gabriele, Roberto Luppi, Emi Arwen Sfregola, Eleonora Mei, Marta Pancheva, Morgan Harris, Pablo Michel, and Cristiana di Pietro. “It is a law of the universe that one cannot make oneself happy without making others happy” (Antonio Genovesi). Among my friends, I want to mention Michele Bianchi (Alfio), Marco Piergallini, Matteo Paluselli, Matteo Paolucci, Sofia Croso Mazzuco, Giuseppe Candela Verderese, Elena Bianchi, Matteo Paolucci, Caterina di Alessandro, Gian Marco Garbetti, Andrea Mignini, Michele Carosi, Domenico Bandini, Leonardo Tonelli, Maria Gaglione, Greta Contò, Arianna Peruzzi, Angie Estrella Dioses, Gabriele Severini, Michele Paolesse (eroe), Roberto Paolesse (PF), Margherita Neri, Francesco Paolo Paolesse, Daniele Pagano, Donato Ceci, Benedetto Ceci, Dario Valenti, Marco Costantini, Claudia Alberico, Antonella Ferrucci, Valquiria Ribeiro, Alice Andreuzzi, Sara Luconi, Marilisa Castellano, Costanza Brugnettini, Lorenza Versace, Mattia Manganiello, Eleonora Nespeca, Simone Ciarrocchi, Lorenzo Echeoni, Chiara Stocco, Maria Sofia Bucarelli, Marco Antonio Bucarelli, Francesco Giuli, Daniele Barnaba, Raffaele Siani, Francesca Pistonesi, Silvia Massicci, Valentino di Antonio, Erika de Angelis, Sara Palmieri, Lourdes Hercules, Florencia Locascio, Nathan Harris, Julies Signeux, Valeria Guarino, and Ilaria Magagna. Additionally, I would like to thank those people that did not want to be listed here but who I still wish to thank for the support. I wish to thank Centro Universitario Cattolico (CUC) for supporting me in this research project. Finally, I dedicate this book to all the participants of the Economy of Francesco.

1

Introduction

The ideas of Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism ([1904–5] 2005) mark an era. Weber did not try to show that the Protestant Reformation, its various confessions, and its theology are related to capitalism as causes and their effects; nor was it his intention to argue that capitalism was the desirable social outcome envisaged by Reformers like Martin Luther or John Calvin. Today, one of the more widely accepted theses is that capitalist society emerged instead as an unintended consequence of the Reformation, as captured in the very efficacious title of Brad Gregory’s book The Unintended Reformation (2012). What is everlasting and still unrefuted of Weber’s argumentation are the links between the theological understandings of the Reformers and the ethos on which and through which the capitalism of Northern Europe (Holland, United Kingdom) and North America (the United States) f lourished. Three links should be highlighted. First, Weber illustrates that the idea of work as a calling (beruf ) is a novelty of Protestantism with respect to Catholic doctrine. The barycentre of religious life was moved from the monastic and extramundane life to the intermundane activity. To the fulfilment of daily tasks, above all the duties of a profession, Protestantism attached a system of psychological sanctions and rewards that religions usually attached to sacred activity. Furthermore, Weber is very clear in saying that this religious doctrine, advanced in part by Luther but mostly by Calvinists, left the religious sphere and became somehow autonomous, so that this trait of sacrality would remain alive in the social and economic sphere, even independent from the theological doctrine from which it originated. The second element is tied to the doctrine of predestination. Starting from an anthropology that emphasizes the devastating effects of Original Sin on human nature, the Protestant world removed the possibility of man deserving God’s grace through works and deeds. The Scholastic world was accused by Reformers of holding a semi-pelagian doctrine (Backus and Goudriaan 2014) when they tried to find room for man’s merits on the path to salvation. It is God who freely and indisputably predestines people to salvation or damnation (McGrath 2005). Weber noticed that, especially among Calvinists, the doctrine of predestination produced a collective anxiety related to

2 Introduction

this question: How can I be certain to have been elected by God? Not by the mediation of religious institutions as in Catholicism or through feelings and sentiments as in Lutheranism. The answer was connected to the ascetic intermundane conduct of the Protestant believer: I can feel God operating in me through my work at His service, hard work that is framed in my daily routine lived at His service. I cannot deserve election by my actions but, by performing actions related to my beruf, I can be certain of having been elected. Here, the third element of the Protestant world emerges—the idea of rational acquisition of wealth as a sign of election. According to Weber, the Puritan world emphasized the dichotomy between irrational and rational use of wealth. The former is wealth expended on luxury and superf luous goods, fostering vices and laziness, as shown by the Italian cities of the fifteenth century to which Luther, blaming the Church for not having controlled them, opposed his austere conduct of life and morality. The latter is the result of the conduct of the hard-working entrepreneur, living his day between the rigid work ethic necessary to run his business and the severe morality of husband at home. The hours of the day were God’s property: ‘Waste of time is thus the first and in principle the deadliest of sin’ (Weber 2005, 104). What Weber noticed is that his rational way of conceiving and living the economic sphere frees wealthy people and their accumulation of riches of all blame and accusations of turpitudo that the medieval and ancient world attached to them. Was Weber right in seeing these features as signs of a qualitative leap between the Reformation and the pre-Reformation world? His thesis was immediately challenged by his contemporaries (Fischer 1907; Rachfahl 1909; Brentano 1916; Sombart 1967), and discussions continue to the present day (Tawney 1926; Robertson 1933; Samuelsson 1961; Delacroix 1992, 1995; Parson [1930] 2005; Gregory 2012). Among the many forms these criticisms took, it is possible to group the ‘Catholic’ side of Weber’s refuters. This should not be thought of as a cluster of Catholic authors all moving from the same starting point. Rather, this group lamented Weber’s obliviousness to the role of the Christian Catholic world before and after the Reformation. For example, in agreement with Fanfani (2003), Lüthy (1965) ref lects that the fifteenth century saw great development of the spirit of capitalism through a silent alliance between Italian cities and the Holy See. Fanfani saw this development as a perversion of the Catholic religion, whereas Novak (1993) expressed it as a profound and hidden alliance between capitalism and Catholic values. What Fanfani (2003) and Lüthy (1965) agreed on is that the Reformation, which started from Luther’s polemics against the dissolute way of life of Humanism, continued the spirit of capitalism already developing in Italian cities; then, when the Counter Reformation stopped the advent of a Catholic capitalistic society, Protestantism remained alone in promoting the spirit of capitalism with all the peculiarities described by Weber. Yet again, Lüthy (1965), this time with Fanfani (2003) and Trevor-Roper (1967), stressed the important role of Italian Catholic merchants in helping the sovereigns of Northern Europe reach their economic success. From the intellectual point

Introduction 3

of view, Trevor-Roper (1967, Chap. 1) wondered why the role of Erasmus of Rotterdam (called ‘the Catholic Luther’) and his disciples had been overshadowed in Weber’s analysis. The present book is interested in the relation between Catholicism and the spirit of capitalism, but it asks questions different from those in Weber’s analysis: Is it possible to identify a spirit of capitalism, spreading in Southern Europe, linked to Catholicism, grounded on an ethic different from the Protestant one? Can the features of this ethic and the spirit of capitalism annexed be outlined with the same clarity as Weber’s? If so, are the effects of this spirit of capitalism recognizable in contemporary market societies? The last question can be addressed immediately, although not exhaustively, but needs to be reformulated with more precision. Attempting to answer, Bruni (2019a) made two important remarks. On the one hand, he convincingly argued that we should be cautious in making cross-cut geographical distinctions in Europe. The Protestant ethic, which Weber described, was more related to the Calvinism and Puritanism that spread in Holland, England, and the United States than to Lutheranism, which characterizes central Europe and produced social market economies (Martino 2020). Hence, to see differences linked to different spirits of capitalism, it may be worthwhile to compare, for example, capitalism as realized in the United States with the Italian one—maintaining that there are differences also between Northern and Southern Italy. On the other hand, taking religious backgrounds as the only determinants of the economic institutions of a country is risky and reductive. Many other factors, genius loci included, are linked to a specific shape that one market society has taken with regard to another. Thus, the scope of analyses, like the ones attempted in this book, is limited, even though the legitimacy of finding a connection between theological ideas and economic institutions of practice remains intact. With these two admonitions in mind, let us reformulate the question: Are there observable differences in the ways people approach and live the market relations upon which economic institutions are organized, between Latin capitalism, as developed in European societies such as Italy’s, and AngloSaxon capitalism, as developed in England or the United States? According to Bruni and Milbank (2019, 222), most of the present-day differences in labour culture, attitudes to public debt, private and public ethics, in state welfare, individual rights and conceptions of the market lie in the two different ways that Europe took after the Reformation and Counter-Reformation eras. To pick one topic from the list as an example, just think of the difference in the kind of enterprises developed in Italy (or some parts of Italy) rather than the United States. Family businesses, distretti, and cooperatives are mostly typical of the former, vertical corporations and anonymous markets of the latter. According to recent data of ISTAT, in 2016 in Italy, 1.4 million enterprises—95.2%

4 Introduction

of the total number of active enterprises—were micro-enterprises (less than 10 workers), whereas 204,000 were small-medium enterprises (10 to 249 workers), and 3,601 were big enterprises (more than 250 workers) (Istat 2019, 507). Conversely, in the United States, firms with 1 to 250 workers accounted for 46.2% of the quasi-total (decreasing from 50.7%), whereas 53.7% were firms with more than 250 workers (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics 2016). This macro-difference is not entirely ascribable to the ‘spiritual’ factors I will describe herein; still, it manifests an evident difference in the way of living and conceiving the market sphere. Bruni and Zamagni (2016) gave an efficacious portrait of this situation, finding the reason in the diverse role of community in the market economy: The family company (still ninety percent of the private sector in Italy), cooperatives, and Adriano Olivetti can all be explained by taking seriously the cooperative and communal nature of the economy. This is why the European cooperative movement has been the most typical European market economy. The Italian industrial districts of Prato (spun goods), Fermo (shoes) and Carpi (knitted goods) are entire communities that turned economic without ceasing to be communities. Thus while American capitalism has the anonymous market as its model and seeks to merchandise the firm, which is increasingly seen as a nexus of contracts, as a commodity or a market with internal suppliers and clients, the European model has instead sought to ‘communitize’ the market, taking the mutualistic and communal model as its model, exporting it from the firm to the whole civil life (that is, cooperation in credit and consumption). (Bruni and Zamagni 2016, 11) One should not see these elements as immutable catch-all concepts encapsulating the reality of different social environments and creating unbridgeable walls.1 They should rather be thought of as tendencies trying to capture some features of how economic institutions and economic life are lived in different contexts. Much less is this an attempt to show the superiority of one economic system (and its spirit) above the others. It is widely known, for example, that overemphasis on the role of community in Italy is linked to problems such as amoral familism, corruption, and mafia. If you find merit in this brief description, if you see differences between capitalism as developed in the United States and in Italy, then you might agree that it could be worthwhile to enquire into their different ‘spirits’ (i.e., to come back to the history of ideas). Towards that end, I must consider the first two research questions this book asked regarding the debate on the spirits of capitalism. The answers I will try to support through my analysis are affirmative: Yes, it is possible to identify the Mediterranean spirit of capitalism as linked to a Catholic ethic, which presents considerable differences from the Protestant one; and yes, it is possible to individuate its main traits. To describe them, my research into the history of ideas will focus mainly on

Introduction 5 2

two authors: Thomas Aquinas (1224–1275) and the civil economy tradition of the eighteenth century, represented by Antonio Genovesi (1713–1769).3 Aquinas and Genovesi will be the cornerstones of the intellectual edifice on which the Mediterranean spirit of capitalism will be built, but along the line connecting these two authors, many other thinkers, school of thoughts, and ideas, will furnish the cement. Before describing further the scope of this book (i.e., the reasons why one should look at Aquinas and Genovesi) and what one might expect to find, it is important to define with more precision what ‘spirit of capitalism’ means and what its main features are, according to my reconstruction.

Capitalism The spirit of capitalism is a complicated expression often linked to many misunderstandings. This is because it combines two terms that are very difficult in their own meanings. Weber was aware of this problem and, luckily for researchers who attempt to emulate his method, he addressed the meaning at the very beginning of his book and in replies to his first critics, Fischer and Rachfahl (Weber 2001). Initially, we should distinguish between capitalistic action and pursuit of gain. The latter is included in the former but not vice versa. This constitutes Weber’s reply to all the critics who see the pursuit of gain as a constant in the history of humanity and who stand on this fact to invalidate his reconstruction of a capitalistic spirit emerging from Protestantism. Capitalistic economic action is composed of the assemblage of many characteristics: a constant, endless, rational search for gain; the pursuit of profit based on peaceful instances of exchange; the rational employment of capital (means of production) to obtain more capital; and profitability of the economic enterprise, calculating the rate of profit by weighing the final balance against the initial one (i.e., the calculus of capital). Even if these features are present in the behaviour of many economic protagonists of Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and Pre-Modernity, it is the bourgeois enterprise who realized it to its fullest. However, capitalistic economic action is still not capitalism. Capitalism is conceived by Weber as the phenomenon widespread in a society in which the model of the bourgeois enterprise is combined with the rational organization of free work and supported by a rational structure of law and administration. To understand my research with respect to this definition, two points are worth mentioning. First, Weber’s definition of capitalism is appropriate for the time he was describing, but it is outdated for our times. Today, we say capitalism mostly for lack of a better term. However, as my book addresses a chronological period from the thirteenth to the eighteenth century, it seemed appropriate to retain the very same term. Second, Weber’s definition leaves out some actors and elements of the economic society that are fundamental for the capitalism I will describe.

6 Introduction

Probably conditioned by Marx’s idea of the struggle between capitalists and salariats as the main driver of history, Weber did not stress the role of rent and rentiers in the economic system. Since I will address mainly authors and ideas from the Italian cultural context, the role of rural economic systems with their formal and informal rules cannot be ignored (Bruni 2019b). This was a common concern for all modern schools of economic thought—political economy (Smith) as well as civil economy (Genovesi). Nonetheless, in Italy the agrarian world and mentality have survived until today; just think of the relation between servants (cafoni) and masters (padroni) of twentieth-century Italy masterfully described in the book Fontamara of the Italian writer Ignazio Silone. Moreover, the importance of considering rent goes beyond the Italian context. Today, the forms of rent related to the agricultural sphere are quasi-dissolved. This does not mean that rent has disappeared from our world—other forms of rent still characterize the economic cycle, including financial rent or inheritance, which, like rent, are characterized by problematic inequality and privilege (Piketty 2014, 2020). Zamagni (2010) would disagree with this choice of terms. In describing a Catholic spirit of capitalism based on authors and ideas that are very similar— yet not coincident—with the ones I will consider, he argues that we should employ the term ‘civil market economy’ rather than capitalistic market economy. Hence, this book should have been titled ‘The Mediterranean way to civil market economy’. He believed that, whereas in capitalism the economic action addresses the total good, that is, the sum of the good of individuals, in the Catholic tradition economy is intentionally directed to the common good of society. Not by chance Weber pointed to the abandonment of economy as oikonomia, domestic administration, in favour of economy as political economy directed to the public good, the peculiarity of Capitalism as a socioeconomic system. To Weber, this change of perspective was as fundamental as the innovations brought by the Industrial Revolutions. For the most part, I agree with Zamagni (2010), and I will discuss the difference between total and common good in several chapters of this book. However, conscious of the two remarks I have just made, I still prefer to retain the word capitalism, also to show my indebtedness to the kind of analysis Weber did.

Spirit of capitalism When approaching the meaning of the ‘spirit of capitalism’, scholars looked to the second chapter of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Weber [1904–5] 2005). However, there is an immediately antecedent work in which Weber set out his methodological premises without which, in my view, the general ratio of his project is somewhat missed (1975). The reference is to one of his first works, which still remains less known, cited, and read, namely Roscher and Knies and the Logical Problem of Historical Economics (Weber 1975). Published in the early twentieth century, this work criticizes the method proposed by the German historical school represented by Wilhelm H. Roscher

Introduction 7

and Karl Knies. It is no coincidence that Gustav Schmoller, exponent of the second generation of the same historical school, published it in his magazine. In fact, a characteristic feature of this second generation of historicists was an inquisitorial regard towards some theories of the first generation guilty, according to them, of not having withstood the impact of the neo-classical and marginalist revolution that was forcefully asserting itself in the European context.4 The Weberian text remained incomplete. The section dedicated to the analysis of Knies’s philosophy analyses the German economist’s thought minimally. The part of the work intended to serve this function, in fact, was never written. A thesis by Knies, brief ly mentioned at the beginning of the treatise, constitutes a pretext for Weber to dive into a general discourse on the methods of the historical-social sciences, which will comprise the basis for later works, such as The Protestant Ethic. This text is a fundamental gateway to understanding what Weber means by the spirit of capitalism. Knies’s starting point is the idea that each scientific method is prescribed by the material entity objectively assigned to it. As political economy deals, on the one hand, with human action and, on the other, with the natural and historical conditions in which it occurs, it must be counted among the historical sciences, that is, the disciplines dealing with external processes, nevertheless conditioned by spiritual reasons. If the presence of natural factors allows the formulation of general economic laws (in the idea, shared with Roscher, that causality equals legality), according to Knies, they fail to fully grasp the object they are dealing with, as it cannot be subject to any generalization, due to the ‘free’ and ‘unpredictable’ nature of human action. This is the foundation of Weber’s analysis, focused on the status of human action in historical-social sciences and the methodological misunderstandings it provokes. The first author analysed is the German psychologist Wilhelm Wundt. Wundt believed that the qualitative differences present in historical occurrences could be interpreted as objective causal differences, since they were triggered by the free actions of mankind. In other words, referring to psychological considerations, Wundt supported the idea that history had an objective meaning and that this meaning coincided with a constant increase in spiritual values (logical, ethical, aesthetic, and so on). Human action, intended as free and meaning-creator, could be analysed and understood to the extent of its connection to said increase. Regardless of their personal evaluative position on historical events, historians’ task was to trace those human actions responsible for qualitative changes in history and understand their meaning. Weber challenges the Wundtian view on three levels. At the first level, considering Wundt’s assumption as somewhat valid, it is not clear to Weber why human actions should have a peculiar character with respect to natural events. Those who do historical research are very familiar with this phenomenon: it is not uncommon to encounter qualitatively relevant natural events and human actions unworthy of mention as well as vice versa. At a second level, given both the general assumption and the qualitative distinction between human

8 Introduction

actions and natural conditions, it is not clear where the objective qualitative change lies—in the actions themselves or in the consequences they produce. The doubt is legitimate, as not all actions lead to relevant outcomes just as not all relevant outcomes are produced by significant actions. The third level, which sums up and, to some extent, elucidates the other two, shows that the fault in Wundt’s general methodology lies in pondering value, regardless of the subject that it evaluates. Weber is very clear on this point: the ‘creative’ aspect of historical action is induced by the variable meaning, from both a qualitative and a quantitative perspective, accorded to the causal course of happening by virtue of our ‘conception’ of historical reality. In other words, the intervention of those evaluations to which our historical interest is anchored gives rise to a constellation furnished with meaning, cultured and coloured in certain elements by that same historical interest. Before drawing the consequences of these methodological findings, Weber resumes his analysis on freedom in human actions. Knies believes that human action is unpredictable, even irrational, because, unlike natural events, it cannot be completely explained through causal relations and therefore summarized in laws. Weber disputes this thesis by demonstrating that, once the terminology is specified, things are exactly the opposite. If by explanation of a natural phenomenon we mean its non-contradiction with the nomological knowledge of the subject analysing it, then it is clear that many aspects of it will be explainable and many others not. Take, for example, the fall of a rock from a mountain. Various data can be gathered about this event: the size of the rock, its descending speed, and so on. It is also clear that many others, such as the size of the fragments into which it breaks down, will remain unknown due to the impossibility of inserting them into causal relations. Scientists are unlikely to assess said phenomenon in every aspect, not only due to understandable impossibility but also due to their disinterest in doing so. Therefore, one must abandon the erroneous idea that scientific knowledge analyses phenomena in their ‘completeness’ and that it is in its interest to do so. Besides, when it comes to the analysis of human behaviour, in fact, there is a qualitative difference compared to scientific analysis, even though not in the same formulation Knies had proposed. When offering an interpretation of human behaviour, one should pursue not only the aim of ‘conceiving’ it as possible, in the sense of compatibility with our nomological knowledge, but also of ‘understanding’ it, in other words, determining a concrete reason or even a composite of concrete reasons that can be ‘relived internally’ and used to describe it with a degree of precision that certainly differs depending on the material available. Here things change completely and human actions become more understandable as they appear freer. Knies would also be wrong if, in a desperate attempt, he tried to posit the example of madness as proof of the impossibility of understanding an individual’s motives. Given that, in this case, irrationality can be ascribed to a pathology, it would be more correct to compare it to that of a natural occurrence. Given this peculiar difference, according to Weber, laws formulated in the historical

Introduction 9

sciences, at least to the extent to which human action is considered, differ qualitatively from the natural ones. If the latter are focused on the recursion of the phenomenon, for the former it is fundamental to make intelligible, without claiming universality, the action considered. It should be noted, incidentally, that in the Weberian idea it is the scholar’s ‘interest’ that determines the method of science and not the material examined. Weber faces another misunderstanding before dealing in depth with the laws of historical science. Despite sharing his idea on the interpretation of human action, some authors do not share its postulations; that is, they do not believe that the study of human actions has any scientific-nomological status, and that therefore, social sciences must proceed in another way. In other words, this group of thinkers affirms that the motives underlying human actions can only be grasped through the tools of empathy and understanding. This is a sign of an ontological difference between the object grasped by these sciences, defined as ‘subjectivating’, and those of all other sciences, defined as ‘objectifying’. In order to clarify the terms of the question, Weber once again drew a comparison among four thinkers who, each with their own specificities, adopt this standpoint. The head of this group of authors is Hugo Münsterberg, a psychologist with dual German and American citizenship who lived in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Münsterberg rejected the use of scientific-discursive tools in the analysis of human behaviour because they would undermine the peculiarity of the human experience, that is, its actual ‘living’ and ‘acting’ in the world. According to Münsterberg, the ‘ego’ of real life, as we ‘experience’ it at all times, cannot be the object of research that proceeds in an analytical way, operating with causal concepts, laws, and ‘explanations’, since it is not ‘experienceable’ in the sense we ‘experience’ our environment, and it is therefore ‘indescribable’. It is only through the tools of empathy and reliving understanding (a particular type of identification), characterizing the ‘subjectivating’ method, that the historian can trace the motives of a subject’s actions without betraying their relevance. The historian, therefore, can only interpret the motivations of an individual by ‘understanding’ them in the current context and rejecting any type of discourse or causal explanation. Weber refutes this argument in its entirety. Münsterberg’s argument does not understand that history does not act within the ‘internal side’ of the human experience, but it ‘embraces’ the entire historical constellation of the ‘external’ world, both motive and result of the ‘inner processes’ happening within the subjects of historical action. For instance, Weber states that psychological notions allow us to understand the behaviours of historically relevant individuals suffering from particular pathologies. It is also common for educators to refer to abstract laws of pedagogy as a starting point for establishing an empathic relationship with students. Weber does not aim at affirming that psychology and pedagogy are privileged sciences in the historical analysis: it depends, in fact, on the extent to which history and political economy have the opportunity to take into account the results of a science of  laws.

10

Introduction

To better elucidate how the historian ‘interprets’ the motivations of historical agents, Weber adopts the distinction proposed by Simmel between the objective understanding of the meaning of an expression and the subjective interpretation of the motives of a man who speaks and acts. The ‘interpreting’ subject proposed by Münsterberg actually understands the world in its many aspects. Interpretation, in other words, comes into operation only when one does not understand an element of reality, to the extent that one has already moved on to another sphere, that of historical knowledge. The latter, according to Weber, is exactly the object of study of the historical-social sciences. Another thinker considered is Austrian economist Friederich Von Gottl, whose theories may be defined as a continuation of Münsterberg’s ideas. In particular, two theses are vehemently put forward by Gottl: The first stated that the peculiarity of the historical sciences derives from the difference between the process of inference, understood as interpretative penetration employed by their scholar, and the concept of ‘experience’ of the natural sciences; the second affirmed that the only historically relevant events are those deduced from the ‘laws of thought’, while the rest of history little if ever referred to those. Weber, with his usual clarity, disputes both arguments. The first thesis is wrong because it unduly identifies the psychological process of knowing, that is, inference, and its gnoseological meaning, that is, the status of historical-social science. Assuming that the only possible inference is feasible within the ‘laws of thought’, as in the second thesis by Gottl, leads to a ‘rational’ vision of historical events. Weber believes that Gottl missed a crucial point in his theorization, namely that interpretation, understood as reviving understanding, allows us to penetrate historical events, but it is always investigated through the control of experience, just as in the case of natural sciences. To affirm that historical occurrence is rational based on the ‘laws of thought’ overcomes the sphere of the social sciences and crosses into the terrain of the philosophy of history. Later in the text, Weber distinguishes between ‘evidence’ and ‘validity’ of the interpretation. The two expressions are blurred in Gottl’s analysis, since evidence, that is, the particular nature of what is ‘understood’ compared to what is ‘conceived’, does not guarantee validity, that is, that the interpretation really captures the course of historical events. In the last paragraphs, Weber sums up and offers some considerations on the methodologies employed by the historical-social sciences. An important notion, acquired from comparison with all the authors mentioned, is the relationship between historical-social disciplines and ‘hard’ sciences: Only under a very superficial assumption, the use of the ‘rules of experience’ in order to control the ‘interpretation’ of human action differs from the analogous procedure used with regard to concrete ‘natural processes’. The socio-historical sciences, therefore, can make use of concepts of gender and laws to the extent that they help to clarify aspects, fundamental for interpretation, that experience has left obscure. In other words, these laws do not have in themselves cognitive value, nor do they aspire to the systematic nature of the natural

Introduction 11

sciences, but they help the historian insert some elements of reality in a historical constellation endowed with meaning. In the case of the interpretation of a historical object, according to Weber, what matters is to bring out its ‘value’, in other words, its importance as the ‘content of a position’, without necessarily identifying with it. The task of those who deal with historicalsocial sciences is then to bring out the ‘value relationships’ and evaluate their impact on reality, without however making an ‘evaluation’, that is, to marry the vision of the world given by a particular value. According to Weber, this awareness distinguishes those who do scientific research from ‘militant’ thinkers. After this methodological premise, we can better understand why Weber explicitly affirmed that it is impossible to define with precision the ‘spirit’ of capitalism. Nonetheless, it gave us important insights into trying to capture its main features. The spirit of capitalism is an expression that denotes historical individuality, that is, the point of gathering historical-spiritual connections that the observer finds in his object of analysis. It resembles the meaning of the word ethos, applied to both individuals and communities. The spirit is thus the attitude and disposition of people to hold a rational conduct of life, a maxim for practical life to conform their lives to. Not casually, Weber preferred to show the spirit of capitalism through the example and words of Benjamin Franklin rather than offering a conceptual definition. For the same reason, he claimed that the reader could get an approximate picture of the spirit of capitalism at the end of his book rather than at the beginning. Benjamin Franklin served Weber in illustrating another point: The spirit of capitalism is connected to religious ethics, but it is not coincident with them. This is not just because there is no strict causal relationship between Protestantism and capitalism. More importantly, Weber acknowledged the process of disenchantment operated by the Protestant ethic and its effects on society. The quest for meaning and a society full of religious and magical objects connecting the person to God (Taylor 2009, Chap. 1) are substituted by a quantitative modern society based on rational calculus. The spirit of capitalism maintained, at the beginning, the sacred aurea of Calvinist, Puritan, or Methodist ethics. The profit result of serious and sober professional activity was connected to all the religious meanings I have outlined above. Thanks to them, it defeated the traditional atmosphere of condemnation towards riches and profit. But Weber lived in a society in which capitalism had already won; the spirit of capitalism permeated the institutions of society so profoundly that it became the implicit socio-cultural background in which the modern individual is born. Revealed and rational religions with their annexed theologies are fundamental to understanding the genesis of the spirit of capitalism but not its current life and evolution.5 If the contents and the authors of the spirit of capitalism I will describe are different, formally and methodologically, from the ones illustrated by Weber, I will follow quasi-integrally his pattern. I specify ‘quasi’ for two reasons: on the one hand, because the disenchantment Weber had in mind cannot

12 Introduction

be applied to the Catholic world in which the presence of the Church and its institutions maintained a central role across the centuries. In this respect, Schumpeter (2006) is right in saying that 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; (77) the story I will tell here is one of a latent spirit of capitalism whose seeds are in Aquinas and that survived until the civil economy of the eighteenth century and beyond but that never became intellectually dominant. If one wants to see this spirit fully realized, one should probably look at the Italian industrial expansion in the seventies and eighties of the last century. On the other hand, it is not clear if the notion of secularization employed by Weber is the best fit to describe what happened in Western society. There are alternative meanings of secularization. Weber can be seen as being in line with Löwith (2011) when he says that secularization means that Modernity found new answers for the same questions humanity asked in Antiquity and the Middle Ages. But there is also Blumenberg’s alternative (1985), which sees secularization as involving a qualitative change of Modernity with respect to the previous Ages—not only the answers but also the questions had changed. Benjamin (2002), in his pamphlet, says that capitalism did not f lourish and eliminate religion, but that it became in itself a religion. What are the more appropriate conceptual schemas we should adopt when we approach the debate on the spirit of capitalism? The question is open, but this book will remain mostly within Weberian framework.

Mediterranean, double-fold Catholic The subtitle of this book could have run as follows: ‘the Catholic ethic and the spirit of capitalism’. After all, Aquinas was the most famous theologian of Catholicism even before Leo’s encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891), and Genovesi was a Catholic priest. Moreover, the history I will tell has the Church and Controriforma as two important co-protagonists. However, I maintain that ‘Catholic ethic’ is not the best option available, and I will explain why in this section (some inklings are also in the Preface). The first problem arises when looking at the alternative usages of Catholic ethic linked to the debate on the spirit of capitalism. Novak is probably the most famous in this literature, thanks to the echo his book, The Catholic Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1993), had all over the world. Novak sees capitalism, especially North America capitalism, as supportive of genuine Catholic values. It should not be forgotten that the metre of comparison was the communism of the Soviet Union, and this brings Novak and especially

Introduction 13

his followers to radicalize the linkage between Catholicism and capitalism. In the last century, the school of the Università Cattolica of Fanfani (2003) and its student Barbieri (2013) followed another direction. They recognized that the seeds of capitalist society were present in Italy long before the Reformation and that the development of a capitalistic attitude was connected to Christianism. Still, they maintained that the development of a capitalistic attitude was a deviation, rather than a derivation, of Christianism and later Catholicism (Bruni and Zamagni 2016; Bruni 2018, 2020). Novak and Fanfani are on opposite sides, but they both spoke about one unique spirit of capitalism, the one described by their intellectual adversary Weber. In this book, I am not interested in enquiring into the origin of that spirit of capitalism. Rather, I want to retrace the features of another spirit, developed in the thought of other authors and in the practices of other cultural contexts. Fanfani (2003) argued that one of the reasons for the development of capitalism linked to the Protestant ethic is that the economic barycentre of Europe moved from the Mediterranean Sea to the Atlantic Ocean. From here, my choice to describe the ‘Mediterranean’ spirit of capitalism that developed in Southern Europe and especially in Italy emerged. If its features can be described with good approximations, its concrete manifestations will be harder to describe. The control of the Church on society and the Controriforma blocked the spread of economic institutions that were f lourishing in the Late Middle Ages and during Humanism and the Renaissance. So the story I will tell is also made of missed opportunities, developments, and uchronies (Bellanca and Guidi 1997). In a nutshell, the Mediterranean spirit of capitalism, at least in the period I will consider (thirteenth to eighteenth centuries), will show its features more in the ref lections of intellectuals than in economic practices. There is another good reason to be cautious with the choice of the Catholic ethic as the source of the Mediterranean spirit of capitalism. Following Bruni (2018, 2020) and Zamagni (2010), I believe that Catholic should be interpreted here not only as blending a theological connotation but also in its etymological meaning of ‘universal, inclusive’. The protagonists of the Mediterranean spirit of capitalism, in fact, are not the individuals, neither the communities nor the states: it is the person in relation to other persons within a community whose boundaries are clear-cut but not excluding. Choosing Mediterranean (Baeck 2012), I maintain the connection with both meanings of Catholic, intrinsically linked but not limited to the religious sphere. Sombart investigated the link between the advent of capitalistic market societies driven by the bourgeois and the spread of Rationalism in Western culture. Even if Sombart is most remembered for his work The Jews and the Modern Capitalism ([1911] 2001) in which he stressed the role of Jewish traders in the development of the capitalist spirit, in another important work, Der Bourgeois ([1915] 1967), the Rationalism emerging in Europe was closely associated with the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas (Scheler 1964). Since my analysis is based on Aquinas’s social and economic teachings and their inf luence

14

Introduction

in the tradition of civil economy, would it not have been appropriate to choose ‘The Thomistic Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism’ as subtitle? I am sceptical about making such a choice. My analysis does claim that Aquinas’s thought is fundamental for delineating the story of the Mediterranean spirit of capitalism, but it also stresses that many parts of his social and economic ideas are not. I will show that some authors of Controriforma interpreted Aquinas’s teachings as contrary to the spread of commerce. I will problematize the legitimacy of these interpretations, but it is indisputable that they held some seeds of truth. Moreover, civil economists and, in particular, Genovesi were inf luenced by many other ancient and contemporary authors who were also important in developing their ideas on the features of the market society. My scepticism in claiming that a Thomistic ethic was inexorably tied to a spirit of capitalism originated here. After having clarified the implications of all the words of the ‘Mediterranean Spirit of Capitalism’, in the next section I will list its main features.

Main features of the Mediterranean spirit of capitalism Listing its main features, I diverge from the advice Weber gave at the beginning of his book about the spirit of capitalism: In the title of this study is used the somewhat pretentious phrase, the spirit of capitalism. […] Such an historical concept […] must be gradually put together out of the individual parts which are taken from historical reality to make it up. Thus the final and definitive concept cannot stand at the beginning of the investigation, but must come at the end. (Weber 2005, 13) The reason I anticipate them is because I want to provide the reader with the lens through which this historical research can be read. The parts I will list are remarkably like what Weber named the ideal types. Ideal types are interpretative hypotheses, that is, models through which the scientist attempts to penetrate historical events, including the history of thought. To get a clearer idea, it may be useful to imagine historical occurrence as a continuous f low of possible meanings into which the scholar drops, like fishnets, the ‘ideal types’ and then draws up constellations of meaning with which to give an interpretation of the facts or ideas considered. It is important to understand that ideal types must not force reality into their nets—if it does not fall in, and therefore the historical events or the idea considered have not followed the pre-imagined course, the interpretative research of the historian will have in any case achieved progress. In Chapter 3 of this book, for example, all the elements will be considered that distance Aquinas’s theory from the economic theory developed by civil economy. The features of the Mediterranean spirit of capitalism, in fact, do not coincide exactly with the authors and ideas I will describe, although they can be inferred from them. Focusing mostly on Aquinas

Introduction 15

and Genovesi, it could be stated that they are the points of contact of their ref lections. The features will be divided into anthropological, social, and economic ones. Each section is not separate from the others, and each feature will present many implicit references to the theological and philosophical ideas that will be explored in the chapters of this manuscript to which it is connected. Here, the reader will find complicated and controversial concepts, such as the social animal, virtue, common good, and self-interest with which libraries have been filled, only defined in general and simple terms. The analysis of Aquinas’s and Genovesi’s theories, alongside the authors connected to them, is aimed at clarifying and specifying these concepts. Thus, the chapters of this book could also be considered as a treatise to penetrate deeper into the meaning of the ideas I will sketch in this subsection. Here, my book meets Weber’s statement that the reader will have understood autonomously only at the end of his book the traits of the spirit of capitalism. Anthropology 1

2

Social nature of human beings. The Mediterranean tradition receives the Aristotelian tradition of the zoon politikon (social animal), in turn grounded on the zoon logon echon—being man an animal equipped with the capacity of discussing and solving problems in the community (Aristotle 1995, Book I, Chap. 1). Both Aquinas and Genovesi were deeply inf luenced by Aristotelian philosophy, and yet, both significantly revised its ideas. Between Aristotle’s zoon politikon and Aquinas’s naturaliter homo homini amicus est, there were Christianity and the Christian tradition, Augustine above all. Between Aquinas’s naturaliter homo homini amicus est and Genovesi’s homo homini natura amicus, there were the Franciscan tradition, Italian civic humanism, English sentimentalists (Shaftesbury), and Vico, but also Machiavelli’s l’uomo qual è and Hobbes’s homo homini lupus. Once recognized that one must be cautious in tracing an identity in these quite different anthropologies, it is possible to attempt a definition. In general terms, the social nature of human beings here means that people are moved by two natural inclinations: one drives them to seek their own good; the other naturally inclines them towards the promotion of the good of the other and the good of the society in which they live. One inclination is not resolved by or grounded in the other, being both basics and primitives. The life lived balancing these two inclinations is a life according to virtue, that is, it expresses the full realization of human nature and is inexorably related to happiness and human f lourishing. The real point of convergence between Aquinas and Genovesi’s anthropological accounts lies within this conception. Both authors recognize these two basic kinds of motivations, and both advocate the necessity to moderate them through reason. The wounded nature of human beings. The Christian doctrine of Original Sin, as developed by Augustine, brought one main message:

16

3

Introduction

After the Fall, human nature is wounded. Here, it is possible to trace a watershed between an Augustinian and a Thomistic tradition. The Augustinian tradition, especially developing in France and the Netherlands in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, interpreted ‘wounded’ mostly as ‘corrupted’. Jansenist and Calvinist authors overemphasized Augustine’s vision of fallen humanity as radically corrupted by sin, blinded by an uncontrolled concupiscent self-love, and thus incapable of virtue without God’s grace (Force 2003). Without the help of divine grace, a human being is incapable of goodness: He is an evil, perverted, and uncivil agent. From this perspective, there is no space for virtue or sincere caring for the common good in worldly conduct or, at least, too little of it to explain social life. Self-love, often equated with concupiscence, is the only or the main force driving human actions. The Protestant world was fully imbued in this atmosphere. As Weber testified, English Puritan literature is full of ‘warnings against any trust in the aid of friendship of men’ (Weber 2005, 62); but also the Augustinian monk Luther, who first interpreted work as beruf, as an expression of the commandment of brotherly love, soon left behind this part and focused on the fulfilment of worldly duty. Conversely, the Thomistic tradition—for the scope of this book, Aquinas and Genovesi above all—interpreted ‘wounded’ more as ‘lacking, deficient’. The effects of Original Sin on human nature correspond to a weakening of its main faculties. The key anthropological but also economic word here is the Latin verb Indiget that can be translated as ‘needs’, but whose semantic scope concerns ‘something that lacks’ or ‘something which is missed’. After the Fall, the human being is lacking his physical and moral abilities and is therefore more in need of the help of his fellows for everyday life activities and on the path towards virtue and happiness—MacIntyre named it ‘acknowledged dependence’ (MacIntyre 1999, 119). This is the meaning of ‘wounded’ that characterized the Mediterranean spirit of capitalism. However, it should not be forgotten that deficient, for these authors, also includes some nuance of ‘corrupted’. Genovesi, for example, inherited Machiavelli’s and Vico’s concerns on the importance of studying man as he is (l’uomo qual è), with all his vices grounded on immoderate concupiscence. Still, the corrupted nature of human beings is not the only anthropological element of human beings, not even the most basic. People are basically and essentially social animals and are inclined to virtuous behaviours. Therefore, they can cultivate virtue by helping others and thanks to the help of others. Relational virtue. The word for virtue is aretè (ἀρετή), something that is related to excellence. Virtue is a habit, something that must be cultivated through constant exercise and practice. The Latin word for habit is habitus, from the Greek word héxis, which means a disposition acquired through constant and intentional action. Virtues do not depend on our individual tastes or desires; they are traits that express the excellence of

Introduction 17

human nature. This is a perspective very distant from the theory of utility functions (and its hidden idea of happiness as utility) that rules standard economic theory. Once acquired, virtues help individuals achieve the good in their actions, and this path will bring them to a state of happiness (eudaimonia). Trying to synthesize the classical notion of virtue and the social and wounded nature of human beings, I will advance a definition of virtue (i.e., relational virtue) that is at the base of the Mediterranean spirit of capitalism: The relational virtue f lourishes within a relationship of mutual assistance between two or more people, helping each other in the joint enterprise of cultivating their character. In other words, it is a personal virtue predicated with the first person plural, ‘we’, constituting both the good reached and the way to reach it. Genovesi and Aquinas both rejected egoism and altruism, linking their anthropologies with the fundamental category of reciprocity. Relational virtue is fundamental not only for the working of the market sphere but also as the cement of social life. To see more precisely in what terms, I turn now to the social elements. Civil life 4

Necessitate and mutual assistance as states of exception. The foundation of civil life is created by an objective situation and a subjective reaction to that situation. The first is close to what in Roman Jurisprudence, but also in the Decretum Gratiani, was named status necessitatis (Agamben 2005), a situation whose objective features require an immediate response either from political power, as in the case of a danger to the State, or by the citizens, as in the case of a person in urgent need of help. The latter circumstance requires a subjective response from the citizens: to suspend all daily activities, to contravene the established law, to suspend even spiritual duty (see Chapter 2 on Aquinas) in order to help the person in a deprived situation. This act of gratuitousness is what really founds civil life or, more precisely, it is the possibility that citizens offer each other to perform reciprocally these gratuitous acts. The conceptual passage could be better understood with reference to the theory of state of exception (Agamben 2005). I believe the combination of the objective situation and the subjective response constitutes a state of exception. Schmitt ([1934] 1985) defined a state of exception as an extra-juridical condition in which the rule of law is suspended and the power that decides manifests itself. The apparently natural and legal course of social and political life ultimately and hiddenly rests on this power. Schmitt ([1934] 1985) wrote that ‘all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts’ (36); the theological correspondent for the sovereign power he

18

5

Introduction

individuates, in fact, is the miracle, as the intervention of God’s providence in the natural course of things. Benjamin (1921, 1966) contested Schmitt on two points: the state of exception is what is totally different from the law, and it does not need a sovereign power that decides over it. My definition is somewhere between Schmitt’s and Benjamin’s. The latter is right in saying that the state of exception does not necessarily require a power to decide. The former is right in seeing the state of exception as something basic, grounding the normal course of social life. In this sense, the state of exception raised by the objective condition of the person in need of help and the subsequent gratuitous response of fellow citizens reveals the core of civil life: mutual assistance. This is grounded on the social and wounded nature of human beings, and on the relational virtue that is peculiar to the Mediterranean spirit of capitalism. Furthermore, the fact that mutual assistance emerges so vividly in status necessitatis does not imply that it does not characterize the normal course of civil life. In different forms and different shapes, it is present in all social spheres, from the family to the market or politics. Mutual assistance expresses the fundament but also the excellence of civil life, and it is connected to its main aim: the common good. Civic friendship as common good. In the history of Western civilization, many notions of common good have been given. Modern economists who theorized what I named the Mediterranean spirit of capitalism dealt with this modern idea. When Genovesi explained that civil economy is the science of public happiness (pubblica felicità), he was thinking of something remarkably like the idea of common good (Bruni and Zamagni 2016; Bruni 2018). This umbrella term subsumed many different things: (i) the good of society to which, if necessary, the private good of the individual should be sacrificed; (ii) the virtuous life and happy life of the citizens; (iii) the peace and correct administration of justice; (iv) the material well-being of the state and its citizens; (v)…. Among the many meanings this term assumed in the heterogeneous tradition that arrived to the civil economists (Aristotle, Cicero, Aquinas, Civic Humanism), there is one that is peculiar and central to the spirit of capitalism we describe: friendship, or better said, civic friendship. The intuition is that, before focusing on the noun ‘good’, it is the adjective ‘common’ that matters. Here common means joint, that is, when two or more people do things together, cooperate. When Aristotle described political friendship and Aquinas civic friendship, they both believed it closely coincided with a kind of friendship of utility in which two people love each other for the utility that they derive from it. Certainly, Aristotle, and later Aquinas, did not reduce the common good to a web of utilitarian relations, since, as is known, the term they used for utility (utilitas) cannot be equated with its modern definition and use. The fact that people are useful to one another and they cooperate to achieve common goals should be conceived in continuity with the mutual assistance that

Introduction 19

is the base of civil life. Furthermore, citizens exercise and develop the relational virtues that are connected to their happiness. In this sense, the Mediterranean spirit of capitalism sees no problematic relation between the individual and the common good but rather a continuity—yet not identity. Referring to Aquinas’s view, Gilson (2002) summarized this point well: To live in society in order to unite the efforts of all and to help one another; to seek truth in the realm of the natural sciences or, what is better, in what concerns the highest intelligible being, namely, God; correlatively, not to injure those with whom we are called to live; to avoid ignorance and to do what we can to dispel it. (304) Civil life must be understood as a net of relationships of mutual assistance between citizens, and economic life is included in it. A clarification is in order before considering the economic features of the spirit of capitalism: So far, one may be tempted to think that I am referring to an ideal society in which people cooperate and help each other gratuitously. This is not the case, nor mine, nor that of the authors of the spirit of capitalism I am describing. Remember the anthropological elements: people seek their own good alongside the good of others. Moreover, their wounded nature often leads them to seek the former harder than the latter. Explaining how the social nature of human beings and mutual assistance works in the economic domain will show more precisely how they interact with self-interest and the pursuit of one’s own good. Economy 6

Moderate profit, mutual assistance. The Mediterranean spirit of capitalism holds a central place for profit in economic activity, but not in its unlimited form in which it becomes an end rather than a means. Profit is always a means for the personal and common good. Moderate denotes distance from the extremes; in this case, more than the meaning, the reason economic actors moderate their pursuit of profit is important. Is that a form of self-restraint? I believe this language is misleading because we are not confronting a restriction but rather an enlargement in which profit is not the only aim pursued in the market sphere. In the utility function of economic agents, in fact, many other elements enter alongside profit, such as the good of the parties involved in the exchange but also the good of the society in which the exchange takes place. Hirschfeld (2018) made the case, as far as Aquinas’s paradigm is concerned, for the substitution of calculating reason with practical reason (prudentia), wherein natural and artificial wealth are considered instrumental goods on the

20

Introduction

path to  happiness. However, I believe that in Aquinas and the tradition I will describe, we are faced with something far more unique. It is a different understanding of the behaviour of economic actors, an alternative microeconomic category with respect to the one developed by political economy. Drawing on Genovesi’s theory in comparison with Smith’s, Bruni and Sugden (2008) defined it as mutual assistance. As I will show in Chapter 2, this concept is also fundamental to understanding what Aquinas thought the behaviour of the buyer and the seller should be in determining the just price. What is mutual assistance? To get a general idea, which will be enriched in the course of the book, mutual assistance regards the self-understanding of the parties involved in a market exchange (Bruni and Sugden 2008). The parties conceive themselves during the economic transaction as a team directed towards a common goal, which is mutual gain. The semantic scope is not the ‘I’ but the ‘we’: Both parties care, at the same time, about their own good and the good of the others with whom they are trading. Here, the economic theory meets the anthropological elements we stressed regarding the social nature of human beings. This understanding changes not only the perceptions of economic actors, but it can also affect the choices and actions performed. The meaning may become clearer with an example. Imagine Irene and Enea. Irene is the owner of a computer shop. At the end of the day, she is left with two computers in stock. One (computer A) is very expensive due to its high performance and characteristics, but, for that very reason, it will need to be replaced in three or four years. The other (computer B) is a reliable computer, normal price, medium performance, duration guaranteed for eight to ten years. Enea enters Irene’s shop asking her advice: ‘I am a PhD student in Philosophical Aesthetics. I need a computer to write my PhD thesis. I am not an expert in computers. Since my salary as a PhD student is modest, I would like to buy a normal computer, one that guarantees the basic performance I need, such as writing or reading, and that I will not need to replace soon’. Which computer will Irene sell? According to the standard economic paradigm, she is concerned with her own interest and thus will try to maximize it by selling computer A. After all, she is not cheating Enea; it is not a case of caveat emptor—she is just maximizing her own profit. Nonetheless, the authors of the Mediterranean spirit of capitalism would indicate the selling of computer B not only as the normative choice (what Irene must do), but as Irene’s normal behaviour (what she usually does) in a similar situation. Irene is not being altruistic towards Enea; she gains from the exchange as well as Enea. Still, Irene is thinking of Enea’s interests alongside her own during the market transaction. Her profit is moderate in the first situation, but the goal of the economic contract (i.e., mutual advantage) has been achieved. Mutual concern is the form in which mutual assistance manifests in market exchanges along with self-interest. The main message is that humans can express in the

Introduction 21

7

markets, as well as in other spheres of civil life, their relational virtues, which are in turn connected to their happiness. The net result of relations that constitute civil life is, as defined above, the common good of society. Role of institutions. The Mediterranean spirit of capitalism gives less space to the role of unintended consequences in promoting the good of society. In Smith’s theory, this is well expressed by the functioning of the invisible hand in converting the self-interested action of a person ‘who has no intention to serve the public’ (Smith 1976, 549) towards the public good. These mechanisms are also present (Genovesi mentioned them several times), but they play a secondary role in the fundamental dimension of mutual assistance and intentional pursuit of the common good. Moreover, in Vico’s The New Science (3rd ed. [1744] 1948), where we find an important account of unintended consequences (Hirschman 1997), institutions are fundamental in converting private vices (‘ferocity, avarice, and ambition’) into elements that are good for the state (‘strength, opulence, and wisdom’). In his books on the history of economic thought (1942, 1946), Fanfani defined Aquinas’s economic teachings as voluntarist and Genovesi’s as neo-voluntarist. The common element is man’s capability to direct, through reason, his natural impulses towards the common good, but also the role of institutions in constraining human actions and channelling them towards desirable outcomes. In Aquinas, for example, due to the disharmony between passions and reason, human beings are not always willing to enter a business transaction with the perspective of mutual assistance, and often their judgment is overshadowed by the need for immoderate gain (turpe lucrum). Therefore, Aquinas stressed the role of the institution of a contract (contractus) between two individuals, which guarantees equality in the exchange by the force of law. But here there is more than the simple acknowledgement of the role of institutions in civil society. This presence is not surprising, given the strong authority of the Church in the history of the spirit of capitalism we are describing. The Mediterranean spirit of capitalism also entails a criterion through which the institutions can be judged: A political or economic institution is useful when it promotes the common good of society. All the authors I will consider held this broad framework. In a sense, we can say that the economic and political spheres are founded on the good course of civil life. The presence of institutions also coincides with a hierarchical vision of society. The most vivid example is the feudal system, which civil economists strongly opposed in the eighteenth century. From Aquinas to Genovesi, the legitimacy of the hierarchical structure of society would be progressively questioned and abandoned but never completely left behind. Still, a basic understanding remained constant: The legitimacy of whoever holds a superior place in society, from the king to the merchant, is conferred by the way he contributes to the common good.

22

Introduction

The list presented here is not exhaustive, but it includes the concepts from which many others emerged that will be considered in this book—the just price, incentives and prizes, meritocracy, and we-rationality. Now, it is important to turn to the authors and ideas from which I extracted these general features.

Scope and outline of the book As I have already indicated, the starting point of my research is Aquinas. In this book, the focus will be on his social and economic teachings, with an eye to the anthropological and theological background. In the last (roughly) twenty years, there are four books—among the many analyses (Lapidus 1994; Dierksmeier and Celano 2012; Monsalve 2014; Chaplyigina and Lapidus 2016; Cendejas Bueno 2017; Sturn 2017; Bruni and Santori 2018; de Lara 2018)— that have been devoted to enquiring into Aquinas’s economic matters. I will divide them into books that focused on Aquinas and books that originated from Aquinas. In the first group, we can put Odd Langholm’s L’economia in Tommaso D’Aquino (the Italian edition in my possession is dated 1996). There, Aquinas’ economic teachings are analysed through the lens of the historian seeking to capture Aquinas’s intention and compare them to those of his predecessors and contemporaries. The book written by Christopher A. Franks, He Became Poor (2009), followed a similar, although not coincident, pattern. The author focused on Aquinas’s economic ideas broadly reconsidered within the context of his anthropological and theological ideas. In the second group are books such as John Finnis’s Aquinas: Moral, Political, and Legal Theory (1998) and Mary Hirschfeld’s Aquinas and the Market (2018) whose authors, both at the beginning of their analysis, declared that they are more interested in developing a Thomistic framework through which to address contemporary issues rather than rendering precisely the letter of Aquinas’s ideas. In other words, they draw on and sometimes even revise Aquinas’s thought, seeing it as an everlasting source of wisdom for our world. Where does my book stand? My analysis stays predominantly in the first group. In Chapter 2, in fact, Aquinas’s social and economic ideas will be investigated with the aim of rendering, as far as possible, the thirteenth-century meaning that Aquinas attributed to them. The objects of research will be the concepts of donum (gift), necessity, mutual assistance, virtue, and the common good, alongside the economic concepts of just price, trade, and profit. It will emerge that the seeds of the Mediterranean spirit of capitalism, fully developed by eighteenthcentury civil economists, are already present in Aquinas’s thought. Still, many ideas appear to contrast with the advent of a market society. Aquinas seems to hold a hierarchical and static view of society, in which everyone had to preserve his fixed place in the hierarchy, and a suspicion towards profit and international trade. Moreover, he lived in an age in which, while commerce was developing, the market societies were far from being developed. Chapter 3 will be devoted to delving more deeply into these

Introduction 23

issues, which naturally prevented us from seeing a connection between Aquinas and modern traditions of economic thought, such as civil economy. I will show that, rather than representing immutable truths of Aquinas’s philosophy, these objections should instead be perceived as tensions present in his thought. If we interpret the five centuries dividing Aquinas from civil economists through these lenses, a clear watershed emerges on the aforementioned tensions. On the one hand, part of the Catholic and non-Catholic world interpreted Aquinas’s social and economic teachings along the lines of a picture of commerce and pre-modern markets as places for mutual assistance, developing that cultural background from which the Mediterranean spirit of capitalism emerged. Clear examples of this attitude are the Italian civic humanists of the first half of the fifteenth century (Bruni and Zamagni 2016) or Dominicans in their manuals for confessors. On the other hand, the authors of the Counter Reformation radicalized Aquinas’s static view of society, praised agricultural life and the feudal economic system in contrast with urban economy, and held a suspicious attitude toward commerce and economic development. In Italian territory, the latter attitude has been dominant and overshadowed the former. Therefore, Chapter 4 will be devoted to analysing the Carsic rivers (Bruni and Zamagni 2016) through which Aquinas’s ideas, linked to the Mediterranean spirit of capitalism, arrived to Italian civil economists of the eighteenth century. Chapter 5 will focus on the civil economy tradition. If the roots of political economy can be traced back to the Scottish enlightenment, the Italian enlightenment was the background of the tradition of civil economy. This multi-faceted tradition, born in the eighteenth century, included different schools of economic thought (Bruni and Zamagni 2016). Undoubtedly, the two major schools were based in Milan (Pietro Verri, Cesare Beccaria), whose major theses were based on a proto form of utilitarianism (Porta and Scazzieri 2002), and in Naples (Antonio Genovesi, Gaetano Filangieri). In Chapter 5, I will consider the inf luence of Aquinas’s social and economic teachings on the works of Genovesi, the founder of the Neapolitan civil economy school. First, I will highlight some theological and philosophical paths through which Aquinas’s anthropology arrived to Genovesi. Consequently, I will stress how the notion of mutual assistance, implicit in Aquinas’s economic teachings, served as the cornerstone of the Genovesian understanding of the market. Civil economy and Genovesi’s thought have been the objects of numerous analyses (Bellamy 1987; Bruni and Porta 2003; Robertson 2005; Zamagni 2010; Bruni and Zamagni 2016; Milbank and Pabst 2016; Bruni and Santori 2018; Dal Degan 2018; Pabst 2018). Unfortunately, we lack an English edition of Genovesi’s works, one for all his Lezioni di Economia Civile (Lessons of Civil Economy). This linguistic barrier also reduced the enquiries directed to the historical and philosophical roots of this modern tradition of economic thought. As sources for civil economists, Bruni and Zamagni (2016) listed: (1) the Aristotelian and Thomistic tradition linked

24 Introduction

to the issues of Common Good and the Ethics of Virtue; (2) Roman Jurisprudence and focus on civic virtues; (3) the Franciscan economic thought (Zamagni 2010); (4) Italian Civic Humanism of the first half of the fifteenth century (Coluccio Salutati, Leonardo Bruni); and (5) Giambattista Vico and the Italian Enlightenment. In this book, the focus will be devoted to the first one, more precisely to the role of Aquinas’s thought in the theorizations of civil economists. However, all the others are important in the story of the Mediterranean spirit of capitalism. Why have I left them out of this analysis? The question involves a precise methodological choice that I will discuss in the next paragraph. One last note before approaching that issue: While I believe that ideas of donum and mutual assistance fully express Aquinas’s account of commerce, I also recognize the validity of the tensions present in his thought. For this very reason, I am less confident that Aquinas’s economic account can be applied to the modes in which the market works in contemporary capitalism. Finnis (1998) and Hirschfeld (2018) avoided this trap because they elaborated on Aquinas’s ideas, and that elaboration rendered them suitable for our world. From here arose my choice of the connection between Aquinas and Genovesi. Different from Aquinas, Genovesi considered the economy as a self-sustaining science. This means that Genovesi’s view was chronologically and intellectually closer to the functioning of contemporary markets than were Aquinas’s theses. Hence, I believe that Genovesi’s economic account expresses a stronger claim in favour of the emergence of the Mediterranean spirit of capitalism and its relevance for contemporary debates. This will be the background of Chapter 6, dedicated to contemporary debates and titled ‘Gift and Contract Intertwined’.

Methodology The present book is tied to the methodological choices made by the author. The reader accustomed to the standard analysis in the history of economic thought will find something slightly different, not due to a lack of information on the thinkers and historical periods analysed. In his introductory course to philosophy published in the volume Philosophische Terminologie (1979), Theodor W. Adorno devoted many chapters to explaining that the profoundness of an analysis is not conferred by the object of research but by the serious and rigorous attitude of the researcher. In this respect, the following chapters analyse the protagonists of the Mediterranean spirit of capitalism seeking to capture their profundities. This attempt, however, forces me to be at once comprehensive and selective about the research materials. The interdisciplinary nature of this study, which focuses on theology, philosophy, and economy, seems to expand the usual object of enquiry of the history of economic thought. Even in the

Introduction 25

diatribe between incrementalists (Screpanti and Zamagni 2005) and relativists (Blaug [1964] 1997; Screpanti and Zamagni 2005), both believed that economic theory, for the relativists complemented with the socio-economic conditions where it developed, should be the object of research. Expanding the focus to include other disciplines, this book tries to maintain interdisciplinarity, which has more or less implicitly characterized economic science from its origin until today. Schumpeter would have classified the present book as a history of economic thought rather than a history of economic analysis (Schumpeter 2006). The selection regards the authors and materials included and especially those excluded. Francis of Assisi’s ideas (Todeschini 2004) and Franciscan economic thought (Zamagni 2010, 2017; Agamben 2013) and the economic institutions created and developed by Franciscans, such as the Mount of Piety, are fundamental protagonists of Italian economic development from the late Middle Ages to Modernity. They play a marginal role in this research mostly because including them would have meant handling too heterogeneous material. The same argument stands for the choice of picking Genovesi as the representative of Italian civil economy tradition, although there are others who could be legitimate protagonists of the Mediterranean spirit of capitalism (Gaetano Filangieri, Cesare Beccaria, Pietro Verri, Agostino Paradisi). Fortunately, this book does not stand alone in the enquiries into the spirits of capitalism. Zamagni’s (2010, 2017) and Bruni’s (2018, 2019, 2020) works, in which many of the aforementioned authors are discussed, are its background and natural complement. The double choice of expansion and selection is motivated by the interpretative work necessary to reconstruct the Mediterranean spirit of capitalism. Here, the history of economic thought meets the history of philosophy, this work being an attempt to reconstruct one of the genealogies of Modernity. The same reason brought Weber, who was highly criticized for it, to put his focus on some ideas and authors rather than others. The attempt is to underline the intellectual tendencies that helped the emergence of a certain spirit of capitalism, classified here as Mediterranean. Scholars in the history of economic thought are reluctant to stretch the difference too far—a North-Atlantic spirit of capitalism grounded in the Protestant ethic and developing in the Netherlands, England, and the United States versus a Southern-Mediterranean spirit of capitalism grounded in the Catholic ethic and developing in Italy and Southern Europe. Where should one classify, for instance, the social market economy developed in German territory? To add another example, the social fabric of Italy, with its medium-small size firms, really developed between the 1970s and 1980s, a period very distant from the thinking and the authors addressed in this book. There is no unique answer to these objections and arguments. Hopefully, they will be answered throughout the following chapters. If Weber’s work was accused of stretching too far the impact of the ideas on the course of

26

Introduction

socio-economic history, this accusation is far more valid for this book, which is mostly an intellectual history. This does not mean that I ignored—as Weber did not—the material factors that contributed to the development of systems of thought. The impact of the Italian socio-economic context from the thirteenth to the eighteenth century would be a fundamental character of this story, although a co-protagonist. However, I cannot deny being in profound agreement with John Maynard Keynes (1953, 384) when he claimed that ‘the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas… sooner or later, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil’.

Notes 1 The tendency to expansion of Anglo-Saxon capitalism is evident when many forms of enterprises, such as cooperatives, are defined today as ‘hybrid’ in mainstream science, as if there is a standard form and the others are deviations. 2 Thomas Aquinas (Roccasecca 1224–5–Fossanova 1274), Saint and doctor of the Roman Catholic Church, was a theologian and philosopher, member of the Dominican Order. Aquinas is mainly known for having embedded Aristotelian philosophy into the Christian Doctrine. The synthesis derived from his efforts is unparalleled in the history of Western philosophy. Aquinas tied Neo-Platonic and Aristotelian philosophies, Latin Jurisprudence and Philosophy (Cicero, Seneca), and Christian teachings (the Bible as well as the Church Fathers) in a unique, harmonious and dynamic system. After the Encyclical Aeterni Patris (1879) by Leo XIII, Aquinas’ work is considered the cornerstone of Catholicism, from theological and ontological matters to the Social Doctrine. The Second Vatican Council stressed the central role of Aquinas’ philosophy, defining it as ‘Perennial Philosophy’. Furthermore, Aquinas’ ref lections started the philosophical current of Thomism, i.e., all the philosophers and theologians who explicitly declared having adopted Aquinas’ categories and concepts. 3 Antonio Genovesi (Castiglione, Salerno 1713–Naples 1769) was an Italian philosopher and economist. He became a Catholic priest in 1738. Genovesi taught Metaphysics and Ethics in Naples until 1753. Due to accusations of heresy by the Catholic Curia and by his friend from Seminary, motivated by the apparent similarity of his doctrine with that of Pierre Bayle and John Locke, he was dismissed from his teaching duties. Thanks to the intercession of Archbishop Celestino Galliani, Genovesi was appointed Chair of Commerce and Mechanic (1754), the first chair of Economy in Europe. 4 The work was divided into two sections, redacted and published in different periods. The first, dedicated to Wilhelm H. Roscher’s (1817–1894) thought, was written in the 1890s and published in 1903. The second focused on Karl Knies’ (1821–1892) thought, among others, and was published between 1905 and 1906. The magazine in which they were first published was titled ‘Schmoller’s yearbook for the legislation, administration and economics of the German empire’, edited by German economist Gustav Schmoller (1838–1917). Roscher, Knies, and Schmoller were all exponents of the Historical School of German Economics, developed in the second half of the nineteenth century, which was born in opposition to the followers of the Classical Economic School. 5 Today capitalism is experiencing a profound crisis but, if there is one virtue it has been shown to possess, it is resilience. What is the reason for this ability of the capitalist economy to survive the criticisms, albeit radical, that are levelled

Introduction 27 against it? Of interest is what two French sociologists, Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, write in their monumental book that has now become a classic, The New Spirit of Capitalism (2007). According to the authors, capitalism evolves by incorporating into its structures the criticisms it receives from various fronts. Thus the ‘social’ criticisms (from socialists, workers, environmentalists…) and the ‘aesthetic’ ones (from intellectuals and artists), which represented the main reaction to capitalism in the second half of the twentieth century, rather than causing the collapse of capitalism, have become its cornerstones, giving life to the new capitalism of today, in which the major players are businesses born of young people with cultures and mentalities very different from those of the capitalists of the past century. Today, in large companies, we are increasingly witnessing the development of social and environmental budgets, of ‘social business’, attention to workplace well-being, up to the recent concepts of ‘symbolic’ or even ‘spiritual’ company capital. Parallel to the inclusion and transformation of social criticism, this capitalism has also internalized ‘aesthetic’ criticism, giving rise to a new creative era. Capitalism, chameleon-like, transforms itself, feeding on everything it finds in its path, like all empires that conquer enemy peoples and incorporate their culture, art, and religion. We see it even today, with capitalism absorbing a new series of criticisms, the ‘ecological’ ones.

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Introduction 29 Franks, C.A. 2009. He became poor: The poverty of Christ and Aquinas’s economic teachings. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. Gilson, E. 2002. Thomism: The philosophy of Thomas Aquinas. Toronto: Pontifical Inst. of Medieval studies. Gregory, B.S. 2012. The unintended reformation: How a religious revolution secularized society. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Hirschfeld, M.L. 2018. Aquinas and the market: Toward a humane economy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Hirschman, A.O. 1997. The passions and the interests: Political arguments for capitalism before its triumph. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Keynes, J.M. [1936] 1953. The general theory of employment, interest, and money. San Diego: HBJ publisher. Langholm, O. 1996. L’economia in Tommaso D’Aquino. Milano: Vita e Pensiero. Lapidus, A. 1994. Norm, virtue and information: The just price and individual behaviour in Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae. The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought 1, no. 3: 435–473. Löwith, K. 2011. Meaning in history: The theological implications of the philosophy of history. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lüthy, H. 1965. Le passé present. Combats d’idées de Calvin à Rousseau. Monaco: Editions du Rocher. MacIntyre, A.C. 1999. Dependent rational animals: Why human beings need the virtues. Chicago: Open Court Publishing. Martino, M.G. 2020. Civil economy: An alternative to the social market economy? Analysis in the framework of individual versus institutional ethics. Journal of Business Ethics 165, no. 1: 15–28. McGrath, A.E. 2005. Iustitia Dei: A history of the Christian doctrine of justification. New York: Cambridge University Press. Milbank, J., and A. Pabst. 2016. The politics of virtue: Post-liberalism and the human future. London: Rowman & Littlefield. Monsalve, F. 2014. Scholastic just price versus current market price: Is it merely a matter of labelling? The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought 21, no. 1: 1–17. Novak, M. 1993. Catholic ethic and the spirit of capitalism. New York: Free Press. Pabst, A. 2018. Political economy of virtue: Civil economy, happiness and public trust in the thought of Antonio Genovesi. The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought 25, no. 4: 582–604. Parson, T. [1930] 2005. Translator’s preface to the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. London: Routledge. Piketty, T. 2014. Capital in the twenty-first century. Cambridge: Belknap Press Piketty, T. 2020. Capital and ideology. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Porta, P.L., and R. Scazzieri. 2002. Pietro Verri’s political economy: Commercial society, civil society, and the science of the legislator. History of Political Economy 34, no. 1: 83–110. Rachfahl, F. 1909. Felix Rachfahl’s review of the Protestant ethic. From the Internationale Wochenschrift für Wissenschaft, Kunst und Technik, 3rd quarter: 1217–1366. Robertson, H.M. 1933. Aspects of the rise of economic individualism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Robertson, J. 2005. The case for the enlightenment: Scotland and Naples 1680–1760 (Vol. 73). New York: Cambridge University Press.

30 Introduction Samuelsson, K. 1961. Religion and economic action. New York: Basic Books. Scheler, M. 1964. The Thomist ethic and the spirit of capitalism. Sociological Analysis 2: 4–19. Schmitt, C. [1934] 1985. Political theology. Cambridge: MIT Press. Schumpeter, J.A. [1954] 2006. History of economic analysis. New York: Routledge. Screpanti, E., and S. Zamagni. 2005. An outline of the history of economic thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Smith, A. [1776] 1976. The wealth of nations. Ed. Edwin Cannan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sombart, W. [1911] 2001. The Jews and the modern capitalism. Kitchener: Batoche Books Sombart, W. [1915] 1967. The quintessence of capitalism: A study of the history and psychology of the modern business man. Firenze: Nabu Press. Sturn, R. 2017. Agency, exchange, and power in scholastic thought. The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought 24, no. 4: 640–669. Tawney, R.H. 1926. Religion and the rise of capitalism. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company. Taylor, C. 2009. A secular age. Cambridge: Harvard university press. Todeschini, G. 2004. Ricchezza francescana. Dalla povertà volontaria alla società di mercato. Bologna: Il Mulino. Trevor-Roper, H.R. 1967. Religion, the reformation and social change. London: Macmillan. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. 2016. Business employment dynamics: Entrepreneurship and the U.S. economy. https://www.bls.gov/bdm/entrepreneurship/bdm_chart7. htm (accessed 13 October 2020). Vico, G. [1744] 1948. The new science of Giambattista Vico. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Weber, M. 1975. Roscher and Knies: The logical problems of historical economics. New York: Free Press. Weber, M. 2001. The Protestant ethic debate: Max Weber’s replies to his critics, 1907–1910 (Vol. 3). Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Weber, M. [1904–5] 2005. The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. London: Routledge. Zamagni, S. 2010. Catholic social thought, civil economy, and the spirit of capitalism. In The true wealth of nations, ed. D. Finn, 63–93. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zamagni, S. 2017. Traces of civil economy in early modern Franciscan economic thought: An education essay for civilisation and integral human development. International Studies in Catholic Education 9, no. 2: 176–191.

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Donum and amor To describe Aquinas’s social and economic view, one should refer first to his anthropological account, rooted in turn in the theological sphere. In Aquinas’s account of human nature, attention is usually focused on passions (Miner 2009; Stump 2012), cardinal (Porter 1990, 2016; Foot 2002) and theological virtues (Wawrykow 2012), the dialectic between intellect and will (Anscombe and Geach 1961; Finnis 1998; McGrath 2005), and natural law (Young and Gordon 1992; MacIntyre 1996; Pizzorni 1999; Bobbio 2017; McCormick 2018). However, this runs the risk of overshadowing the fact that, for Aquinas, the basic anthropological trait is the pair gift–love (donum– amor) that informs the relationships of God to man, man to God, and man to man. All other dimensions, virtue and law included, must be considered from this anthropological standpoint. In his monumental Summa Theologiae, Aquinas connects gift and gratuitousness, and then he frames both within the broader concept of love: Now, the reason of donation being gratuitous is love; since therefore do we give something to anyone gratuitously forasmuch as we wish him well. So what we first give him is the love whereby we wish him well. Hence it is manifest that love has the nature of a first gift, through which all free gifts are given.1 (Summa Theologiae, Ia, q. 38, a. 2, corp.) The inner link between gift and love is of the utmost importance because it implicitly reveals Aquinas’s position in the controversy on the nature of gift-giving (Scalzo 2017). What does it mean that gift is gratuitous? Does it imply that the person ‘gifting’ expects something in return from the ‘gifted’, like an equal compensation or maybe just a sign of acceptance? These questions have ancient roots. Nygren (1953) believed that the opposing answers separate Greek and Christian notions of love, respectively eros and agape, one acquisitive and self-directed, the other disinterested and other-directed. The same issue characterizes Seneca’s treatise On Benefits (2011), which strongly

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inf luenced Aquinas. On the one hand, Seneca believed that expecting a return undermines, if not eliminates, the nature of the gratuitous benefit: ‘But he hoped for some profit in return. Then it was not a benefit after all, since it is the mark of a benefit not to even think about a return’ (Seneca 2011,  54). On the other hand, he dedicated the entire treatise to the proper way to give and receive benefits. The beneficiary has to welcome the gift and give something in return, not of an equal amount and not in a fixed time; still, reciprocity is an essential part of gift-giving. Seneca argues that without reciprocal gift-giving, social concord, which is the cement of social life, is damaged by innumerable quarrels and destroyed from within: The first reward from a benefit is one’s awareness of it, and this comes when the giver gets the gift through to its intended destination; the threads in the form of fame and things provided in return for the gift are secondary. (Seneca 2011, 56) Here, secondary does not mean unimportant. Both Seneca’s theses had long echoes in the history of ideas. The idea that gift is an anthropological dimension with no room for reciprocity held a central place in Christian thought. Among many, there is a millennial French ‘tradition’ that holds this position. In the twelfth century, Bernard of Clairvaux affirmed, ‘Pure love is not mercenary, nor does it derive its strength from hope’ (1952, 259). Centuries later, the pietist authors emphasized contemplative and disinterested pure love towards God as the paradigm of the perfect Christian. One interesting hint came from French philosophy of the second half of the seventeenth century. The debate on pure love (amour-pour) between the Catholic priest Francois Fenelon, who advocated an unconditional love for God, free from every form of self-love or reciprocity, and the Catholic Jacques Bousset, who preached the impossibility of the separation between the love for God and the love for the self, echoed throughout the European philosophical scene (Ronila 2013). The French school has continued until today. Boltanski detached agapegift from any possible interaction between subjects: The gift of agape has nothing to do with counter-gifts. For a person in a state of agape, what is received cannot be related to what he or she has given at an earlier moment. In this sense, unlike philia, agape is not based on interactionist schema. (Boltanski 2012, 112) Derrida (1992) associates the gift with the impossibility of temporalization: As long as a form of time, past–present–future, is attached to the gift, this provokes the disappearance of the gratuitous nature of gift-giving. This is because when the person who gives or receives the gift perceives it as such,

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then some expectation inevitably comes to mind. As Marion (2011) put it, to let the pure gift live, the donor has to disappear somehow—he advanced the example of the death of the giver, as in the case of legacy. The second Seneca thesis was implicitly developed by the anthropological study on gift by Marcel Mauss (2002). The idea is that in tribal societies, the gift has a hau, that is, the object is inhabited by a spirit which forces the recipient to make restitution. Therefore, the gift always implies a form of reciprocity. Developing this stance, many theoretical and empirical studies have been conducted on the interpersonal and social obligations that characterize gift-giving. A list of important followers would include the scholars of the group self-named M.A.U.S.S. (Anti Utilitarian Movement in Social Sciences), Caille and Godbout with their book The World of Gift (1998), and Mary Douglas with her preface to Mauss’s book titled “No Free Gifts” (1990). From different angles, all accounted for the impossibility of a free relationship based on an initial gratuitous gift. In contrast, in his book on reciprocity, Bruni (2008) employed Caille’s terminology, unconditional conditionality, to describe how a purely gratuitous gift can coexist with some form of reciprocity. Which side did Aquinas take? There is no easy answer to this question. Associating gift with love, Aquinas seemed to allow room for reciprocity. At the same time, he maintained that gift is ‘giving without expecting a return’ (datio irreddibilis). To deal with this conundrum, one should focus on Aquinas’s account of love meaning passion (passio) and an act of will (actus voluntatis). The first pitfall to avoid in interpreting this part of Aquinas’s philosophy is relegating the passive and receptive realm of passion to the sphere of the concupiscible and, consequently, ascribing all such activity to human will and, thus, to the intellect. Conversely, love as a passion characterizes both the sensible and the volitive spheres (Pasnau 2002). In this respect, love is the reception of something external—in the sense of being outside the subjectivity of the person—known and perceived as good. The good somehow shapes man’s appetite, giving it form (immutatio appetitus) and, in turn, it prepares him for movement towards the good itself. It may be useful to imagine man’s appetite as a wax plate with a spring behind it. When known, the good impresses its image on the plate and, at the same time, triggers the spring. The spring is wound, and thus it reacts, allowing man’s appetite to reach the good whose form is now present in it. Aquinas is careful in intellectually distinguishing the two moments, even if in reality they are inseparable. The moment in which the good is perceived and then informs the appetite belongs to a type of love that Aquinas called love of complacency (amor complacentiae). At this stage, love is a moment of pure appreciation of the value of a good that corresponds to the passage from indifference to interest in its value. The love of complacency is similar to an aesthetic experience. Aquinas offered the Aristotelian example of the ‘voice of the deer’ (Tatarkiewicz 1979); when man hears the voice of the deer, he appreciates its harmonious sounds without willing to appropriate it; when the lion hears the same voice, to him it

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means a promise of nourishment.2 Hence, love of complacency resembles the gratuitousness of the gift, that is, our capacity to love and to appreciate goods’ value in themselves without willing to possess it immediately. In Aquinas’s view, man is able to love something for its own sake because it was first loved by God. God’s love towards creation lets man participate in His gratuitous love. In this sense, love has the nature of the first gift, from which man is able to experience gratuitousness in his worldly life. When the spring is activated, movement toward the good is inevitable. This, for Aquinas, constitutes the very essence of man: ‘human beings… act through the intellect, which characteristically and manifestly works towards an end’ (agens per intellectum, cuius est manifeste propter finem operari (Aquinas 1997, 61). However, what is ‘good’ for human beings? To provide an answer, Aquinas’s view on happiness (beatitudo) must be recalled. Aquinas describes happiness as both the operation (operatio) that consists of the attainment or enjoyment of the ultimate good and as the good itself. Every good towards which human actions are directed has to be ordered to the utmost good. Moreover, the attainment of a good is an aim consistent with the fundamental inclinations of human beings, and this consistency (similitudo) can be both potential, since the good is present in the subject as one of its possible perfections, or actual, since the good is attained in operation. Thus, a human’s consistency with the good pursued will be measured on the basis of his nature. By regarding the intellect as the highest expression of human nature (optima potentia) and God as its object (optimum obiectum), Aquinas defines beatitudo perfecta as the contemplation of God, that is, participation in His own beatitude. Since perfect beatitude can be achieved only in eternal life, a contemplative and active virtuous life,3 corresponding to the highest expressions of sensible faculties, will, and practical and theoretical intellect, are the only grades of beatitude (imperfecta) that man can fully accomplish on earth (Hirschfeld 2014, 2018). The potential and actual consistency (similitudo) of the good divides love into amor concupiscentiae and amor amicitiae (Sherwin 2005; Miner 2009; Kimbriel 2014). Aquinas resumes here the Aristotelian maxim stating that love means ‘to will good to someone’, namely goodwill (benevolentia): If the motion of love is directed to a good in order to turn one’s potentiality of goodness into actuality, we are referring to love of concupiscence; conversely, if the motion of love goes towards the good of the person that one loves and in whom one has recognized the same degree of goodness, then we are referring to love of friendship. In other words, amor concupiscentiae is always directed to a further aim, whereas the object of love in amor amicitiae is appreciated for its own value. Thus, the greater the similarity between two people is based on virtues and the contemplative life, the more the gratuitous dimensions of amor amicitiae characterize the relationship. However, Aquinas specifies that even if amor amicitiae is the gratuitous appreciation of another’s good, we must not reduce it to only an act of the will (benevolentia), for two reasons.

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First, in the whole of human experience of love, there are interactions between sensible love and love of the will (dilectio), and in the latter between amor concupiscentiae and amor amicitiae. Even if Aquinas regards the love of friendship as the eminent and formal element, the other dimensions do not disappear; instead, they should be well ordered to realize the perfect order of love (ordo amoris). Second, the consequence of love, its inevitable effect, is the attempt to create a relationship with the other, perceived as another ‘self ’. In this regard, Aquinas explains that love formally produces the union of affection (unio affectuum) between the lover and the beloved, by virtue of which the former considers the good and the interest of the other as his own. Then, the lover tries to reach a real union (unio realis) with the beloved, which equates to standing with him and acting for his good as far as possible: As the appetitive power, the object loved is said to be in the lover, inasmuch as it is in his affections, by a kind of complacency: causing him either to take pleasure in it, or in its good, when present; or, in the absence of the object loved, by his longing, to tend towards it with the love of concupiscence, or towards the good that he wills to the beloved, with the love of friendship: not indeed from any extrinsic cause (as when we desire one thing on account of another, or wish good to another on account of something else) but because the complacency in the beloved is rooted in the lover’s heart. For this reason we speak of love as being intimate. (Summa Theologiae, Ia–IIae, q. 28, a. 2) Thus, the conquest of the beloved, typical of amor amicitiae, is not to be thought of as a stagnant achievement, since the lover tries to reach a deep knowledge of the other in order to attain his goals, to sustain him in bad times, and to share his happiness. After these considerations, one can observe that in Aquinas’s perspective, the dimension of gift, conceived under the light of amor amicitiae, has a relational structure. The attempt to achieve a real union with the other person, to spend time together and to share good and bad experiences, is based on the unity of affections that connect the lover’s mind with the beloved. Thus, another characteristic of gift is to perceive oneself in a relationship and to act accordingly. In Aquinas’s words, after the union of affection, love produces the real union (unio realis); from this last kind of unity follow the acts of beneficence (beneficentia), in which the gift shows itself as a free activity of promoting what is good for the beloved. From this reconstruction, one pivotal element of Aquinas’s thought has been intentionally left aside: mutual love. This omission allowed to analyse love without overlapping it with friendship, which is strictly related to the category of reciprocity. One could state that love of friendship does not initially need the beloved’s answer, and from this view, it is thus similar to self-love, but it should be noted that this kind of love finds its perfection in mutual relationships. As far as this matter is concerned, Aquinas advanced

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the suggestive view of mutua inhaesio, that is, a mutual intimacy by which the lover lives in the spirit of the beloved, and, vice versa, the beloved is in the lover’s spirit: ‘mutual indwelling in the love of friendship can be understood in regard to reciprocal love: inasmuch as friends return love for love, and both desire and do good things for one another’ (Summa Theologiae, Ia–IIae, q. 28, a. 2). Dante Alighieri translated this into a beautiful sentence in the Divine Comedy: ‘s’io m’intuassi, come tu t’inmii’ (Paradiso, Canto IX. Alighieri 2015). Therefore, friendship retains three main aspects: benevolentia, as described above; redamatio, that is, mutual love of friendship that enables the lovers to desire the same good things for one another; and communicatio, that is, the sharing of the same good, which manifests itself by living together (conversatio). In its highest form, friendship is based on the communication of an active-virtuous life. From this perspective, the idea of gift acquires a more precise connotation. The ability to commit oneself, to proffer intentions and deeds, is willingness to build a relationship with the other and, at the same time, hope, yet not the certain expectation, to be loved back. It is fundamental to render the other capable, yet not constrained, of returning something, not necessarily equivalent to the gift, in the spirit of giving. Without the beloved’s answer, friendship cannot arise and last for a long period. In this case, reciprocity is expressed first by mutual exchange of love, from which the union of affections arises; second, and consequently, it is expressed by the mutual exchange of gifts, understood as acts of beneficence. On the basis of the authority of Dionysus and Aristotle, Aquinas is able to stress the union of affections as the principal effects of love and gift: Hence it is clear that love is not the very relation of union, but that union is a result of love. Hence, too, Dionysius says that “love is a unitive force” (Div. Nom. iv), and the philosopher says (Polit. ii, 1) that union is the work of love. (Summa Theologiae, Ia-IIae, q. 26, a. 2) Nevertheless, according to Aquinas, each form of friendship, not only the ones based on virtues but also those based on pleasure or utility or on other types of communicatio (blood ties, citizenship), shares degrees of gratuitousness to certain extents. To sum up, while saving the role of gratuitousness in human life, Aquinas seemed to be closer to the idea of a love-gift commixed with reciprocity. In the relational paradigm of friendship based on mutual amor amicitiae, in fact, one can observe the co-existence of self-love and gratuitousness, which might be conceived, in broader theological terms, as the co-existence of eros and agape. To present a full portrait, and then to see how this idea of man impacted Aquinas’s social and economic view (Van Houdt 1999), the next section is dedicated to two anthropological elements already mentioned— virtue and friendship.

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Virtue and friendship In Aquinas’s view, virtue is ‘good quality of the mind, by which we live righteously, of which no one can make bad use, which God works in us, without us’ (Summa Theologiae, Ia–IIae, q. 55, a. 4). In the following passages, he specifies that one should use the word ‘habit’ (habitus) rather than ‘quality’, and that the definition could be applied to all virtues once any reference to God is omitted. The habit is a quality of the character that man can cultivate through continuous exercise (Annas 2011). The Latin habitus, in fact, derives from the Aristotelian term hexis (Pinckaers 1962), meaning a repetitive, intended action. Aquinas answered to the question, ‘Whether any virtue is caused in us by habituation’ (Summa Theologiae, Ia–IIae, q. 63, a. 2). He responded positively: intellectual and moral virtues are indeed generated within mankind by habituation, meaning that, ‘certain seeds or principles of acquired virtue pre-exist in us by nature’ (Summa Theologiae, Ia–IIae, q. 63, a. 2, ad. 3).4 How one acquires virtue also determines virtue’s object. For Greek philosophers, ethics signified ethical life (bios etikos), to the extent that virtue was learned in the social life and political arena. Virtue is first studied from a master and then progressively exercised in public life; few sages can have access to the higher forms of virtue, developing the theoretical life (bios theoretikos). As Viner (1978) stated, the Greek sage walks the hard path of virtuous life from his birth, but the crucial step happens when he becomes self-sufficient, that is, capable of phronesis (practical wisdom) by himself, not needing a master or a friend as guides. Drawing on these ideas, mediated by Stoicism, Roman and Christian thinkers, Aquinas stressed the importance of assistance by others in cultivating virtues. One needs good friends: For the purpose of a good operation, viz. that he may do good to them; that he may delight in seeing them do good; and again that he may be helped by them in his good work. For in order that man may do well, whether in the works of the active life or in those of the contemplative life, he needs the fellowship of friends. (Summa Theologiae, Ia–IIae, q. 8, a. 4, corp.; emphasis added) The Latin text is even more revealing than the English one. Aquinas said, ‘Indiget enim homo ad bene operandum auxilio amicorum’. The Latin term indiget can be rendered as needs, but the semantic scope entails something that is lacking or something missing. What does one lack that leaves him unable to operate well by himself? Why is he missing something that makes ethical action difficult? These questions are less cogent in Aristotle’s philosophy, but they are perfectly contextualized in Aquinas’s work. When Aquinas dealt with Aristotelian virtue ethics, he applied it within the Christian anthropological

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view informed by the consequences of Original Sin. In other words, between Aristotle and Aquinas, there was the biblical narration of the Fall as expressed by, among others, Augustine of Hippo. Unlike Augustine, Aquinas did not conceive of humanity as the sinful masses (massa damnata), nor did he see damnation as an ineluctable destiny beyond divine grace. Even in an imperfect form, man is capable of virtue, and he is guided to the good of human life, that is, imperfect happiness (beatitudo imperfecta). The effects of the corrupt nature of human beings, in fact, are related to man’s attitude towards virtue: The good of nature, that is diminished by sin, is the natural inclination to virtue […] the aforesaid inclination is to be considered as a middle term between two others: for it is based on the rational nature as on its root, and tends to the good of virtue, as to its term and end […] it is diminished on the part of the obstacle which is placed against its attaining its term, it is evident that it can be diminished indefinitely, because obstacles can be placed indefinitely, inasmuch as man can go on indefinitely adding sin to sin: and yet it cannot be destroyed entirely, because the root of this inclination always remains. (Summa Theologiae, Ia–IIae, q. 85, a. 2, corp.) Due to the effects of Original Sin, to be virtuous, to be capable of ethical reasoning informed by practical wisdom, is not an easy task. For this reason, Aquinas emphasizes the needy nature (indigentia) of human beings (MacIntyre 1999) and gives relevance to two moments in which virtue is learned: in the master–disciple relationship and in the one between friends. The same categories were already present in Aristotle. However, the meaning has slightly changed. Moral virtue is a habit that requires long and constant exercise; the aim is to become capable of practical wisdom. Additionally, in Aquinas’s thought, moral virtue requires the help of other people because even the most virtuous among men can falter at any time. The path towards virtue is upward, even if it is marked by many falls: The help of other men becomes necessary not only in the first steps but throughout the way. This is roughly Aquinas’s relational idea of virtue. The way in which virtue is acquired also affects its object. In the first Quaestio dedicated to the very essence of virtues, Aquinas discusses Augustine’s concept of virtue as the order of love (ordo amoris). ‘When we say that virtue is the order or ordering of love’, argues Aquinas, ‘we refer to the end to which virtue is ordered: because in us love is set in order by virtue’ (Summa Theologiae, Ia–IIae, q. 55, ad. 4). In the last section, it has been shown how gift (donum) and love (amor) are central to Aquinas’s philosophy. All human acts originate from love: ‘It is evident that every agent, whatever it be, does every action from love of some kind’ (Summa Theologiae, Ia–IIae, q. 28, a. 6, corp). When love is well regulated, it causes the emergence of friendship (amicitia) of two subjects. As far as this matter is concerned, Aquinas states: ‘Friendship

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cannot exist except towards rational creatures, who are capable of returning love, and communicating one with another in the various works of life’ (Summa Theologiae, Ia, q. 20, a. 2). Friendship based on virtue emerges from the passion of love. Apparently, this form of friendship can be defined as a mature relationship of two people very advanced in the path of virtue. However, Aquinas clearly states that mutual assistance provokes friendship since everyone, even the saints, needs assistance in cultivating and developing their virtues. Virtue is not the mere individual and increasing striving for excellence. Conversely, love affects the object of virtue, identifying mutual assistance as its cornerstone. Once more, in Aquinas’s paradigm, the individual virtue appears rather as a relational virtue, fruit of a cooperative venture. Aquinas’s philosophy is relational in all aspects, including the contemplative. An incisive commentator of Aquinas, Jean Pierre-Torrell, advised readers to identify perfect happiness as just a matter of the intellect. Beatitude, for Aquinas, is God’s gift, and therefore, it is experienced within a relation: ‘Given that there is a certain communication of man with God since he communicates his beatitude to us, a certain friendship must be based on this communication’ (Aquinas in Torrell 2003, 339). Torrell also commented: ‘Differently stated, God not only wants us to be happy, he wants us to be happy with the happiness with which he himself is happy, his beatitude’ (Torrell 2003, 339). This reference to friendship implies that for Aquinas, relationality is even a constitutive part of perfect happiness (Torrell 2003; Kimbriel 2014). In this regard, it is important to note that the theological virtue of charity, as interpreted by Aquinas, also carries the meaning of friendship. Aquinas defines charity (caritas) as the friendship between man and God (amicitia quaedam est hominis ad Deum) and, following the Christian tradition, love (agape) that is based on communication (communicatio) of God’s beatitude. In the latter meaning, ‘charity denotes, in addition to love, a certain perfection of love, insofar as that which is loved is held to be of great price, as the word itself implies’ (Summa Theologiae, Ia–IIae, q. 26, a. 3). Here, according to Nygren (1953), Aquinas continued the Augustinian attempt to unify two incompatible kinds of love, eros and agape, under the notion of caritas, employing, as had his master Albert, the Aristotelian notion of friendship. Nygren’s judgement was clear-cut: ‘It need hardly to be said that this attempt was doomed to failure’ (1953, 645). To Nygren, Aquinas failed to combine the two dimensions of gratuitousness and reciprocity under the notion of charity. But Nygren’s judgement was probably too harsh. Aquinas tried to propose his own solution to the difficult conundrum. In Aquinas’s words: Now to be loved is not the act of the charity of the person loved; for this act is to love: and to be loved is competent to him as coming under the common notion of good, insofar as another tends towards his good by an act of charity. (Summa Theologiae, IIa–IIae, q. 27, a. 1; emphasis added)

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Based on the friendship between human beings and God, charity does not require that the beloved’s answer must be returned to the lover; rather, the commune ratione boni is to enable the others to communicate their love and, eventually, to create other relations of friendship in turn. What the beloved does should not be the concern of the lover; still, Aquinas is clear in saying that the beloved’s answer concerns the perfection of charity, which is the fullest expression of the relational nature of human beings. In a nutshell, reciprocity completes and fulfils the gratuitousness of charity.5 Friendship is not only related to the theological sphere, perfect happiness, and the man–God relation, but also analogously connected to the natural sphere, imperfect happiness, and the relations between human beings. In commenting on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, where the Stagirite made clear that happiness should not be conceived as a stable possession but as an activity in becoming (Aristotle 2002, IX, 1170a), Aquinas argued that activity takes place in becoming (Aquinas 1964, IX, 405). This means that it is not an entity whose existence remains in a condition of stability; in other words, happiness is not a thing that man comes to possess and that, once obtained, remains stable and immutable. Conversely, happiness consists of living and acting continuously according to virtue and to the social nature of human beings. In Aquinas’s words, “naturaliter homo homini amicus est” (Aquinas 1956, IV, Chap. 54, a. 6), where naturaliter also acquires teleological nuances: It is not only a human inclination to friendliness towards other people—it is also the conscious openness to creating authentic relations of friendship based on various degrees of virtue. Relationality can also be observed from an ontological perspective. Aquinas’s trinitarian ontology inspired many scholars (Milbank 2003; Maspero 2014; Coda 2019) to see the category of relation not only as an accident (accidens) of substance (as in Aristotle’s philosophy), but as a substance in itself. This is shown from the reality of the three divine entities. However, Aquinas saw relationality as also an accident of human nature and considered it in itself, because man is ‘the individual substance of a rational figure […] The individual in itself is undivided, but is distinct from others’ (Summa Theologiae, Ia, q. 29, a. 4). At the same time, Aquinas clarified that being an image of God (imago dei), every human being participates in the essence of the Trinity, as argued in this key passage: Every effect in some degree represents its cause, but diversely. For some, effects represent only the causality of the cause, but not its form, as smoke represents fire. Such a representation is called a “trace”: for a trace shows that someone has passed by but not who it is. Other effects represent the cause as regards the similitude of its form, as fire generated represents fire generating; and a statue of Mercury represents Mercury; and this is called the representation of “image.” Now the processions of the divine Persons are referred to the acts of intellect and will, as was said above. For the Son proceeds as the word of the intellect; and the Holy Ghost proceeds as

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love of the will. Therefore, in rational creatures possessing intellect and will, there is found the representation of the Trinity by way of image, inasmuch as there is found in them the word conceived, and the love proceeding. But in all creatures there is found the trace of the Trinity, inasmuch as in every creature are found some things which are necessarily reduced to the divine Persons as to their cause. For every creature subsists in its own being, and has a form, whereby it is determined to a species, and has relation to something else. (Summa Theologiae, Ia, q. 45, a. 7, corp.) Therefore, what was just accidental from the natural point of view becomes substantial, inscribing human beings in their fullest nature, which is theologically determined. In Coda’s words (2019), ‘every personal being—not only God but also human beings—is in itself a relation’ (105). This is the key trait of Aquinas’s anthropology, the cornerstone on which all the elements analysed so far as gift, love, virtues, and friendship are built. What are the consequences for social life of these theological and anthropological teachings?

Necessity and the common good In Aquinas’s most important work, the Summa Theologiae, particularly in the parts referring to man and his life on earth, there is a recurrent element: necessity (necessitate). There are at least two meanings of necessity that Aquinas considered. On the one hand, necessity is an ontological category—it could not be otherwise—as in the case in which it has to be judged whether man’s actions should be said to be meritorious before God (Summa Theologiae, Ia–IIae, q. 114; Wawrykow 2016), and likewise, when Aquinas asked if it was necessary that God dispose His gratuitous grace upon humanity (Summa Theologiae, Ia–IIae, q. 110), or if the sacrifice of Christ was necessary to redeem humanity corrupted by sin (Summa Theologiae, IIIa, q. 46). On the other hand, necessity is an objective state of things represented by the subjective condition of a person in need. In this case, necessity requires an immediate answer by other men who, Aquinas taught, must help the person in need, leading him out of his state of necessity or at least alleviating it. According to Aquinas, mutual assistance coming from people as a response to a state of necessity is the foundation of civil life. However, there are some elements that denote when precisely a state of necessity occurs. First, Aquinas distinguishes between necessity and extreme or absolute (absolutae) necessity (extrema necessitate). The latter is the case in which a person cannot survive without being provided the basic means (food, shelter); very differently, the former is a situation in which a person cannot live according to his state (status). Aquinas, in fact, embraced a vision of society typical of Christianity of the Middle Ages, in which everyone holds a specific place in the social hierarchy. The two meanings of necessity can enter in contrast: Is a person allowed to renounce part of the means that help him live according

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to his social status in order to help someone who is in extreme necessity? In Quaestio 32 of IIa–IIae, relating to almsgiving, Aquinas answers positively, but he immediately specifies that almsgiving should not bring the donor into the recipient’s state of extreme necessity. The only exception admitted for this case is when a person renounces the good indispensable to avoid extreme necessity for the sake of the common good, as when he offers it for the salvation of the Church or the country. Second, there is no fixed measure to determine someone’s state of extreme necessity. Each situation must be judged according to its circumstances. For example, if there is a person in great need and a relative with a less cogent need, who should receive the benefit? Aquinas’s answer is thoughtful: The case may occur, however, that one ought rather to invite strangers, on account of their greater want. For it must be understood that, other things being equal, one ought to succour those rather who are most closely connected with us. And if of two, one be more closely connected, and the other in greater want, it is not possible to decide, by any general rule, which of them we ought to help rather than the other, since there are various degrees of want as well as of connection, and the matter requires the judgment of a prudent man. (Summa Theologiae, IIa–IIae, q. 31, a. 3, ad. 1) The variability of social life and life in general led Aquinas to promote an ethic grounded on virtue, in which the person, through the virtue of prudence (practical reasoning), is able to judge above differing circumstances. According to Aquinas, the moral and intellectual virtue of prudence is ‘the right reason about things to be done (est recta ratio agibilium)’ (Summa Theologiae, Ia–IIae, q. 57, a. 4, corp.). Prudence brings man to accomplish good acts because it includes two ref lexive moments, which Aquinas named ‘taking counsel’ and ‘judging’, which precedes the specific act of prudence, which is named ‘command’. In this way, prudence allows man to judge the different circumstances through universal principles (synderesis), and, in consequence, to act virtuously. Prudence informs all the moral virtues, as charity informs all the cardinal and infused virtues: ‘Prudence helps (adiuvet) all the virtues, and works in all of them’ (Summa Theologiae, IIa–IIae, q. 47, a. 5, ad. 2). It is not the task of prudence to establish the goods which are the objects of moral virtues. Prudence is the virtue of the means, and it involves the behaviour of man in accomplishing his aims with the right means. There is an interesting relational element in prudence, well-expressed by one of his parts, namely, docility (docilitas). If virtue is a joint enterprise, where people assist each other in f lourishing as human beings, then also prudence would present some features of this reciprocal help. Since the scope of prudence is large as the concrete situations that a person can face in his life, the advice of other people is fundamental. Here emerges the virtue of docility, virtue of the intellect, which  is the

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inclination ‘to be ready to be taught’ (Summa Theologiae, IIa–IIae, q. 49, a. 3, corp.). According to Aquinas, docility is a (quasi) integral pillar of prudence. In other words, without docility the building of prudence risks to collapse. Docility is also required because man, corrupted by concupiscence, often is deceived in his action (Summa Theologiae, IIa–IIae, q. 52, a. 1, ad. 2). Hence, ‘in matters of prudence, man stands in very great need (indiget) of being taught by others, especially by old folks who have acquired a sane understanding of the ends in practical matters’ (Summa Theologiae, IIa–IIae, q. 49, a. 3, corp.). Here, we encounter again the verb indiget, analysed previously as a paradigmatic case of Aquinas’s anthropological account. One might argue that prudence and docility divide the social context in two categories: the learned and the ready-to-be-taught. The distinction is far more nuanced in Aquinas’s philosophy. In this respect, ‘even the learned should be docile in some respects, since no man is altogether self-sufficient in matters of prudence’ (Summa Theologiae, IIa–IIae, q. 49, a. 3, ad. 3). This is valid in distinguishing cases of necessity and extreme necessity. The third element peculiar to the doctrine of necessity is its ubiquity. In analysing Aquinas’s doctrine, Agamben (2005) sees necessity not as an element that suspends or grounds the law; to him, necessity is just a particular case extracted from the jurisdiction of the law. Hence, the state of necessity is not a state of exception in Schmitt’s sense. To Schmitt (1985), the state of necessity is an extra-juridical space and an anomie in which the rule of law is suspended and the power that decides manifests itself. The state of exception uncovers the basic truth that is at the base of the institutions of civil life. According to Agamben, none of this could be found in Aquinas’s doctrine of necessity. He offered this quote as an example: Nevertheless it must be noted, that if the observance of the law according to the letter does not involve any sudden risk needing instant remedy, it is not competent for everyone to expound what is useful and what is not useful to the State: those alone can do this who are in authority, and who, on account of such like cases, have the power to dispense from the laws. If, however, the peril be so sudden as not to allow of the delay involved by referring the matter to authority, the mere necessity brings with it a dispensation, since necessity knows no law. (Summa Theologiae, Ia–IIae, q. 96, a. 6) In his comment on this passage Agamben, correctly interpreting Aquinas’s thought, sees necessity as a state of peril or danger. The case could be an imminent attack on a city by foreign forces. This meaning of necessity supports Agamben’s claim that there is no state of exception. Where Agamben failed is in not noticing that the expression ‘necessity knows no law’ (necessitas non subditur legis) goes far beyond this specific case. In Aquinas’s social thought, the state of necessity is, first and foremost, the objective state of a deprived person who needs assistance. In this respect, extreme necessity does suspend

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and ground human law, and it is exactly the state of exception that rules and legitimates civil life. It is not only the decision of the sovereign that grounds civil life. That is just a ref lection of a general attitude of all the citizens of a city (civitas) who, before an extreme necessity, are called to intervene in helping and assisting the needy. To provide examples, Aquinas argues that the precept to assist the person in extreme necessity (1) is more important than one’s status (IIa–IIae, q. 32, a. 6); (2) allows the needy person, if not assisted, to expropriate other people’s property (IIa–IIae, q. 32, a. 7; q. 66, a. 7);6 (3)  precedes family ties and duties (IIa–IIae, q. 31, a. 3); (4) allows the monk who is not in charge of the administration of the monastery to use superf luous resources for almsgiving without the permission of the Abby; (5) allows people to obtain eternal life (IIa–IIae, q. 43, a. 7); (6) abolishes private property (IIa–IIae, q. 66, a. 7); (7) requires that, when no other help is possible, the lawyer assists needy people free of charge (IIa–IIae, q. 71, a. 1); (8) allows a person to receive money from a usurer (IIa–IIae q. 78, a. 4); (9) allows even changing the law, if this promotes the state of absolute necessity (IIa–IIae, q. 97, a. 2); and (10) requires the promotion of good even of enemies. This mix of precepts coming from Greek, Roman, and Christian traditions gives unequivocable proof of what Aquinas saw as the real foundation of civil life. The doctrine of the state of exception is useful because it allows making a distinction between the foundation of civil life and its normal course. The f low of civil life is not a continuous state of extreme necessity. Equally important, Aquinas made clear that the foresight of future states of extreme necessity should not bring people to suspend the general rules that characterize their everyday life. Still, the legitimacy of political power and the rules of civil life are both grounded on the mutual assistance that emerges in a state of extreme necessity. This can also be seen from Aquinas’s doctrine of what the optimum of civil life is—the common good. Among the many meanings Aquinas included under the umbrella term ‘common good of society’ (e.g., prosperity, justice, peace, virtuous life), friendship is often overshadowed. This is strange because friendship is arguably the ground of all the others. Aquinas took and elaborated on the lessons from his master Aristotle, who defined political friendship as the common good of society. Due to the translation from the Greek politikòn to the Latin civilis, Aquinas spoke of civic friendship. According to Aristotle, political friendship closely coincides with a kind of friendship of utility. Certainly Aristotle, and later Aquinas, did not reduce the common good to a web of utilitarian relations, since, as is known, the term they used for utility (utilitas) cannot be equated with its modern definition and use. Nevertheless, forms of friendship founded on utility are characterized as instrumental and short-lived, giving rise to uncertainty in Aristotle’s theory of common good and virtues. How can a stable society be founded on something of such short duration? How can a life based on virtue be established upon instrumental relationships? Aquinas’s answer emerges from Quaestio 105 in which he stated that ‘the purpose of the Law was to accustom men to its precepts, so as to be ready

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to come to one another’s assistance: because this is a very great incentive to friendship’ (Summa Theologiae, Ia–IIae, q. 105, a. 2, ad. 4). The translator chose the word ‘incentive’ to render the Latin fomentum, thereby losing its semantic richness. The ancient Latin fomentum had a double meaning—it is the log to light the fire, but it also means relief or comfort. Aquinas very carefully chose the word to show that mutual assistance, in both material and spiritual needs, is the basis on which different kinds of friendship can propagate, and, at the same time, it illustrates its comforting effects. Civic friendship can be conceived of as the common good of society, not only in an extrinsic sense, namely, as an element capable of holding together its heterogeneous parts and guaranteeing peace and wealth, but also in a constitutive sense, as an element intrinsically linked to the exercise of virtues and to human f lourishing (as well as other kinds of friendship). Thus, the condition of being in need and the mutual help and utility that arise from association are the factors that initially ground (formally and temporarily) civil society among men. Indeed, Aquinas, commenting on Aristotle, states, ‘All men can live together because they do for one another what they themselves seek’ (Aquinas 1964, V, 8, 973). Aquinas compares the human inclination towards virtue to that towards the city or state (civitas; see Finnis 1998), as they are both related to friendship: There is in all men a certain natural impulse toward the city, as also toward the virtues. But nevertheless, just as the virtues are acquired through human exercise, as is stated in Book II of the Ethics, in the same way cities are founded by human industry. Now the man who first founded a city was the cause of the greatest goods for men. (Aquinas 2007, I, 40) In this respect, Gilson rightly noted that mutual assistance is connected to Aquinas’s account of natural law, as developed in Ia–IIae of Quaestio 94: The third devolves upon us as rational beings and enjoins upon us the task of seeking whatever is good according to the order of reason. To live in society in order to unite the efforts of all and to help one another. (Gilson 2002, 304) Civil life must be understood as a network of relationships of mutual assistance between citizens, and friendship constitutes its excellence, that is, the common good. Aquinas explained that the adjective ‘common’ has two principal meanings: that which is common through predication (commune per praedicationem) and that which is common in the manner of a cause (commune per modum causae). Something common in the former sense, like something universal (universale) or a genus (genus), ‘is found in many things according to one intelligible character’ (Aquinas 1952, De Veritate, VII, q. 6, ad. 7). In contrast, something common to many things in the manner of a cause has the special

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characteristic of both being the cause of those parts (or effects) and, at the same time, remaining numerically one and undivided. Aquinas further distinguished between external and internal common good: As the Philosopher says (Metaph. xii, text 52), a multitude, as an army, has a double good; the first is in the multitude itself, viz. the order of the army; the second is separate from the multitude, viz. the good of the leader, and this is better good, since the other is ordained to it. (Summa Theologiae, Ia–IIae, q. 111, a. 5, ad. 1) Adopting this taxonomy, civic friendship is the internal common good of the city that promotes both the external good through predication—the virtuous life of each of the citizens—and the common good in the manner of a cause, which is the common path towards God. The link between mutual assistance, friendship, and common good emerges also in Aquinas’s treatment of political power—the role of the king. In the first book of De Regimine Principuum (1997), also known as De Regno, a work full of advice for the ruler of Cyprus, Aquinas made clear that the social hierarchy, with the king at the top, is legitimized only by its effectiveness in promoting the common good of society (Aquinas 1997, I, Chap. 2). It is important to read Aquinas’s advice for the king who, as a reward for his activity fostering the common good, received Heavenly beatitude: Among all worldly things there is nothing which seems worthy of being preferred to friendship. It is this which unites the virtuous and conserves and promotes virtue. It is this which all need to transact any of their affairs; it does not inf lict itself importunely on them in prosperity, nor desert them in adversity. It is this which produces the greatest pleasure, so much so that whatever is delectable becomes tedious without friends. […] Although tyrants desire the good of friendship, they cannot get it. Since they do not seek the common good, but their own, there is little or no communion between them and their subjects, but all firm friendships depend on some communion! We see that friendships are entered into by those who have something in common, either natural origin, similarity of customs, or communion in any society. Therefore, there is little, or rather no, friendship between a tyrant and a subject […] But the many love good kings who zealously intend the common profit, since the subjects feel that they receive many benefits from this zeal and since the kings demonstrate that they love their subjects. (Aquinas 1997, 88–89) There can be friendship between the king and his people. Overemphasis on the hierarchical structure of society advocated by Aquinas7 hides the very basic fact that mutual assistance and civic friendship are the very sources of the legitimacy

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of political power. In other words, the political is subject to the social, and the social is determined by the anthropological and theological elements characterizing human life. The economic sphere is no exception.

Commerce and wealth Commerce held an important place in Aquinas’s social view (Tozzi 1970; Manselli 1976; Spicciani 1977; Baeck 2012). Among the goods mentioned by Aquinas, wealth—both in terms of basic necessities (food, house, tools) and riches—pertains to different parts of society. Besides the sphere of economy (oikonomos, the governing of the house), the distributive justice of the State, in which the benefits are distributed on the grounds of a proportional equality among the people, there are voluntary exchanges. Generally, these kinds of transactions are characterized by arithmetical equality in which something is exchanged with its equivalent, and the observance of contracts (contractus) is guaranteed by their compelling strength (ratio debiti legalis). As fully explained by Arangio-Ruiz (1954), Roman jurists tended to link the moment of buying and selling to the written instrument of a contract. If the buyer and the seller believed that an oral agreement was not enough to conclude the transaction under fair conditions, they could opt for a written agreement, before or during the real exchange of goods. In the classical age, this juridical instrument was widely used: normally, the two parties wrote a preliminary contract that represented their intentions and their mutual consensus to the terms of transaction, but this consensus became juridically binding when the contract was completed. Due to the confusion of discipline in the post-classical period, the emperor Justinian, in the Corpus Iuris Civilis, in particular in the part named Institutiones, established a precise discipline of contracts related to buying and selling, according to which the contract had juridical value only if the notary wrote a final clause in which he declared that he had completed (completio) the contract and had given the final version to the parties (absolutio) after the subscription of the parts. Through this arrangement, the intentions written in a contract correspond exactly to the real transaction. As is known, the Corpus Iuris Civilis had a central place in medieval thought for lawyers, philosophers, and theologians. On this issue, Aquinas reached a long and varying tradition that included Aristotelian insights, Roman and Canon Law (Decretum Gratiani), the Roman authors (especially Cicero), and the Patristics. Moreover, he took into account the analyses of his immediate predecessor, legal theorists, and theologians, above all those of his master, Albert the Great. More precisely, Aquinas assigns the fields of buying and selling (negotium) to the cardinal virtue of commutative justice, which is defined as the constant will to provide to each his own, on the basis of equality. According to Aquinas, commerce is inscribed in the acts of social life ruled by mutual assistance. In this respect, the commentary to Aristotle’s Politics gave important hints:

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Here it should be noted that every human association is an association according to certain acts. Now among human acts some are performed every day, such as eating, warming oneself at the fire, and others like these, whereas other things are not performed every day, such as buying, fighting, and others like these. Now it is natural for men to communicate among themselves by helping one another in each of these two kinds of works. (Aquinas 2007, I, 26) Is Aquinas including commerce among merchants in this picture? Or, conversely, is he adopting the Aristotelian idea that there is good commerce that resembles household economy, in which people exchange necessary things and the pursuit of gain is excluded? The Latin term mercari chosen for translating ‘buying’ seems to include all kinds of commercial activity in this picture. The semantic scope of Aquinas’s anthropological and social view, rooted in gift, need, and mutual assistance, recurs in his economic teaching: ‘Buying and selling seem to be established for the common advantage of both parties, one of whom requires (indiget) that which belongs to the other, and vice versa’ (Summa Theologiae, IIa–IIae, q. 77, a. 1, corp.). In his commentary on Aristotle, in fact, Aquinas explained that if man were not in need (nullo indigeret), there would be no exchange, or if they did not have a similar need, i.e. of these things, exchange would not be the same because men would not exchange what they have for something they did not need. (Aquinas 1964, V, 9) However, one of the most quoted passages of Aquinas’s economic teachings from the Summa Theologiae seems to go in another direction (Summa Theologiae, IIa–IIae, q. 77, a. 4). There, Aquinas distinguished a good exchange from a bad exchange, one commendable and one blameable. To describe the distinction in Marxian terms, the first exchange follows the cycle goods–money–goods, whereas the latter is money–goods–money. The former is done to provide people with the necessities of life, while the latter is focused on gains for the merchants. Does this mark a tension in Aquinas’s economic teachings? It can hardly be denied that the judgement of usefulness and morality of commerce is a complex matter. However, Aquinas understood that commerce for profit was gaining importance during his times (see Chapter 3). Moreover, as he did for most human activities, he believed it was more important to envisage a good way to approach commerce between merchants rather than applying blame to all economic practices. Das Neves (2000) suggests that Aquinas may have adopted Aristotle’s distinction between natural wealth (material goods) and artificial wealth

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(money) in his earlier works while rejecting it in the Summa Theologiae. Conversely, Hirschfeld (2018) drew on this distinction and its connection with happiness: After rejecting natural wealth as a possible end, Aquinas goes on to argue that artificial wealth is an even less likely candidate for final end than is natural wealth since it is (properly) sought for the sake of natural wealth […] it is an instrumental good in service of an instrumental good. (148) Although these analyses of Aquinas’s economic teachings have many merits, in this specific point they overlooked the key element of mutual assistance. In other words, for Aquinas, the relationship between human beings and the object exchanged, a typical product of modernity (Dumont 1992), was far less relevant than the relationship between people in which the object is included. This is valid especially as far as the nexus of wealth–virtue–happiness is concerned. That wealth is connected to virtue and happiness via mutual assistance is explicitly recognized by Aquinas: As a matter of fact, external riches are necessary for the good of virtue; since by them we support our body and give assistance to other people. Now, things that are means to an end must derive their goodness from the end. So, external riches must be a good for man; not, of course, the principal one, but as a secondary good. (Aquinas 1956, IIIa, Chap. 133, par. 1) The term subvenio employed here by Aquinas is often confined to the realm of beneficence, called charity or philanthropy today. Reading Aquinas’s thought as a whole, it is evident that assistance means much more: It is an anthropological mode at the base of every human relationship, including the economic and political. As rank (nobilitas) and power (potentia), riches (divitiae) help man in his virtuous path (Summa Theologiae, IIa–IIae, q. 145, a. 1, ad. 2). The term employed by Aquinas to express the role of riches with respect to virtue is coadiuvant, with the prefix ‘co’ implying that riches are not something totally different or external from virtue and happiness. To go in depth into this particular view of wealth and commerce, it is important to frame Aquinas’s in the Christian tradition he inherited. A fundamental moment for the definition of the Christian attitude toward riches was in the Pelagius–Augustine debate of the fifth century AD (Bruni and Santori 2021).8 A significant episode occurred in Rome between 404 and 405 AD. A young Christian married couple from the aristocracy, Valerio Piniano and Melania the Younger, had a substantial patrimony. Attracted by the ascetic life, they began to dispose of their enormous wealth to live a life of poverty,

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in Sicily, then in Jerusalem, to emulate the poor life of the first Christians. They freed 8,000 slaves and sold off their properties, but the slaves protested and revolted over this decision because they found themselves without any protection during a period of great political uncertainty, and many of the lands ended up abandoned (see Brown 2012, 291–298). This episode contributed to the debate on poverty and wealth, which involved many theologians between the fourth and fifth centuries. Pelagius and Augustine took opposite sides in the controversy. Thanks to Peter Brown’s fundamental work Through the Eye of a Needle (2012), it is known that Augustine was very interested in the political events happening in the cities of Hippo and Carthage after the sacking of Rome (410 AD). There, a popolus made up of merchants, artisans, manufactures, and beggars protested against the rich and the Church hierarchy. The bishop of Hippo was very interested in the unity and peace of the Christian people, to the extent that this ‘passion for unity imposed a reticence on him in his dealings with the rich’ (Brown 2012, 348). Augustine understood that the rich were necessary for the management of power and good government. This political motive was intertwined with a theological one. Riches were among the many goods God freely bestowed upon humanity. Hence, wealth in itself is good but is subject, like all goods, to corruption. For Augustine, the attribute of ‘evil’ had moved from riches to the passions aroused by riches. Avarice, greed, lust—all these passions related to riches—are bad, not the riches themselves. Hence, rich families could have good relationships with their own estates and properties. This corresponds to a good use of wealth, framed in the logic of gift: So what next? Let them be rich in good works… This is not something you do behind closed doors. Either it is done, and is visible to all, or is not done… Let them be rich in good works, let them give readily, let them share (I Timothy 6:18)… If rich people are like that, they need have no worries; when the Last Day comes, they also will be found in the Ark. (Augustine in Brown 2012, 352) Conversely, Pelagius and his followers developed, also from the inf luence of the stoic philosophy, a radical, negative vision of wealth, which took root particularly in the Roman elite. As a consequence of the Pelagian theology of salvation linked to meritorious works, the rich people had to renounce all their possessions in order to obtain salvation. Not surprisingly, Melania and Piniano were strongly inf luenced by the theologian Rufinus from Nola, whose positions were very close to those of the Pelagians. A famous treatise on riches (De Divitiis), attributed to Pelagius, circulated among the noble families of Rome. The theses expressed were radical and unequivocal: It is not in vain, then, that the Lord uses every opportunity to criticize and condemn riches, knowing, as he does, that greed for riches is the

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seedbed of all crimes […] Nor was it without due cause that he as good as closed the entrance to the heavenly kingdom to rich men. (Pelagius in Bradstock 2002, 27) It is the voluntary renunciation of wealth only that can save people. And then it is added, clearly in controversy with Augustine: ‘I do not want you to defend your avarice on the pretext of compassion or with the excuse of helping the poor’ (Pelagius in Bradstock 2002, 23). He also attempted an analysis of the morphology and origin of wealth, arriving at very strong conclusions: riches ‘can hardly be acquired without some injustice’ (Pelagius in Bradstock 2002, 17). For Pelagius, it is precisely the logic of merit that brings him to reject riches as possible contents of meritorious action. The theological battle was won by Augustine; Pelagius’s theology, his vision of wealth, was defeated. And so, the Pelagian motto—‘Take away the rich and there will be no poor either’—was supplanted by the Augustinian one: ‘Take away pride, and wealth will not harm you’ (Augustine in Brown 2012, 349). In Augustine’s thinking, the logic of merit is imbued with that of gift-giving. As God freely donates every good, above all the grace through which good works can be accomplished, so humanity can meritoriously dispose of these goods. As far as riches are concerned, merit lies in almsgiving, sharing with the poor—‘give readily’—and so on. Augustine’s position left open a big space in which, many centuries later, Aquinas, among many others, will admit the possibility for man to direct moderate gain which he seeks to acquire by trading for the upkeep of his household, or for the assistance of the needy: or again, a man may take to trade for some public advantage, for instance, lest his country lack the necessaries of life. (Summa Theologiae, IIa–IIae, q. 77, a. 4, corp.) As this passage explains, profit is well-ordered when the merchant consciously directs it to the common utility (commune utilitate) of different persons, namely, his family, the poor, the society in which he lives, himself (stipendium laboris), or, finally, his partner in the exchange. Mutual assistance has to rule even the exchanges for profit between merchants. In the next paragraph, the most famous economic doctrine advanced by Aquinas, the theory of just price, will be interpreted through the anthropological and social lens developed so far.

Just price and mutual assistance Aquinas depicted a society in which mutual concern for the good of others is a pillar alongside concern for one’s own. The personal and common good are intertwined in the notion of civic friendship, which is the form of friendship characterizing social life. It is also how the dimension of gift (donum) manifests

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itself in society through mutual assistance. In the last section, it was shown that Aquinas holds a complex position regarding the presence of gift and mutual assistance in the economic sphere. He seemed to acknowledge the presence of gift within the boundaries of contract when he mentioned the moderate gain (lucrum moderatum) of merchants. Still, to fully understand if gift and friendship do characterize economic exchanges, and to enquire whether this produces a peculiar economic anthropology in Aquinas’s view, it must be asked whether he believed that mutual concern affects the parties’ behaviour in establishing the just price of a good (Dierksmeier and Celano 2012). Some commentators saw no role for gift and mutual concern in the doctrine of just price (De Roover 1955, 1958; Gallagher 2013, 2018). The field of buying and selling (negotium) is assigned to the cardinal virtue of commutative justice. Since ‘in commutative justice we consider chief ly equality between goods’ (Summa Theologiae, IIa–IIae, q. 77, a. 1, ad. 3), Aquinas seemed not to judge the subjects’ identities as relevant for the just execution of the exchange. All that matters is that the price of the good not exceed its value, and vice versa. Common utility represented by the just price must always be based on a contract (contractus) between two people and, when necessary, the equality in the exchange has to be enforceable through the law. Commenting on Aristotle and the Aristotelian tradition, Polanyi made exactly the opposite case: The rate at which all the shared services (or, eventually, the goods) are exchanged follows from the requirement of philia, ie., that the good-will among the members persist. For without it, the community itself would cease. The just price, then, derives from the demands of philia as expressed in the reciprocity which is of the essence of all human community. (Polanyi 1957, 80) Aristotle excluded whatever form of profit from this picture of the exchange (Gallagher 2018), whereas, as stressed in the previous section, according to Aquinas, moderate profit could be lawful and even directed to virtuous ends. Is the Aristotelian understanding of the economic exchange as a place of good-will and reciprocity present in Aquinas? Does moderate profit undermine the role of mutual concern between the buyer and the seller? To answer, one should look at Aquinas’s commentary to Nicomachean Ethics. There, trying to interpret Aristotle’s thinking, he wrote: Justice in exchanges includes reciprocation according to proportionality. This can be shown by the fact that the citizens live together amicably because they have proportionate kindliness towards one another. Accordingly, if one does something for another, the other is anxious to do something in proportion in return […] men live together because one makes a return to another for the favours he has received. (Aquinas 1964, V, 8)

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Here Aquinas is saying that instead of arithmetical equality—equality between goods—justice in the voluntary exchanges has to be based on proportional equality—equality between goods whose value is established in referring to the persons involved in the exchange. It is known that Aquinas included in commutative justice both corrective and reciprocal justice considered by Aristotle. This was probably due to problems with the translation of the texts of the Stagirite in Latin. However, the necessity of proportional equality is affirmed by Aquinas, not only in the case of injuries and punishments but also in other spheres of voluntary exchanges, as commercial transactions between buyer and seller. The question of just price is tied to the question of the value of things. Augustine taught that the value of an exchanged good is different from the intrinsic value (gradum naturae) of the good. The latter is tied to the place the good has in the Divine creation, whereas the former is determined by other factors. When Aquinas had to deal with these other factors, he adopted two positions. On the one hand, he stated that value depends on the quantity of work (labour) employed to produce something. On the other, he ascribed to human need (indigentia) the role of determinant of the value of an object. The ambivalence is tied to a linguistic question (Kaye 2000). When Aquinas read the Aristotelian text translated in Latin, he made use of the translation of his Dominican brother William of Moerbeke. There, he read Aristotle’s word for describing what determines the value of a thing—Chreia—translated as need (indigentia). Very differently, his master, Albert the Great, employing the Aristotelian translation of Robert Grosseteste, associated value with chreia— work (opus). The misunderstanding is of the utmost importance. Since the just price is determined by the value of the goods, and since they are tied to the people involved in the exchange, then, it is fundamental to understand whether it is the need or the work of one person involved that informs the value of the good that has to be exchanged. Reading Aquinas’s texts reveals that the need is the greater determinant than the work in establishing the value of the things exchanged. Then, all the research that tried to connect Aquinas’s theory of labour-value to Smithian, Ricardian, and Marxian theory should be seriously problematized (Tawney 1926; Wilson 1975, Baeck 2012).9 In parallel, saying that the value of things is related to human need should not lead to seeing Aquinas as a predecessor of the neo-classical theory of value rooted on subjective need (Schumpeter 1954, De Roover 1958, Baldwin 1959). Authors supporting this view state that the just price must be interpreted as the normal competitive market price. In Schumpeter’s words, ‘St. Thomas was as far as Aristotle from postulating the existence of metaphysical or immutable “objective value”. His quantitas valoris is not something different from price but is simply normal competitive price’ (Schumpeter 2006, 89). The just price falls within a range of prices set by a supra-individual meeting of demand and supply in the community. In those authors’ accounts, the subjective need (indigentia) and the market mechanism are the broader context in which the Thomistic view of just price becomes fully intelligible.

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Both interpretations, labour theory and subjective need theory, misinterpret Aquinas’s thought. The need Aquinas was referring to is a ‘social’ need which is very different from the subjective one theorized by neo-classical authors. In Aquinas’s view, each person holds a specific place and status in society. To each status is attached a role and certain tasks to fulfil. The structure of society ref lects divine hierarchy and is shaped by the divine plan (Todeschini 2000). The aim of this plan is the promotion of the common good of society. Therefore, the need a person has for an object has to be determined by looking at his role in the social hierarchy and the means he needs to accomplish his specific task in order to contribute to the common good of society. The farmer’s needs are different from the knight’s, as the priest’s are from the king’s. In this picture, subjectivity finds no place. During or before a market exchange, when the just price must be settled, the individuality of the people exchanging does not matter. What does matter is their role in society. In the market square, it is not important to know that you are exchanging with Luca, Francesco, Paolo (the male predominance is due to the times of Aquinas’s society when it was uncommon to find women merchants), but rather with Luca the knight, Francesco the priest, Paolo the merchant. From this understanding of need as the source of value, Aquinas’s view of just price can be inferred. As shown by Monsalve (2014), an important stream of commentators (Hollander 1965) has tried to find a synthesis of the social need theory and the labour-value theory. In their view, the just price is anchored to the cost of production, meaning that the recompense for one’s labour should allow the producer to procure the goods necessary to maintain his and his family’s status in society. The just price is thus a fixed measure that results from the social needs of the exchangers and the cost of production of the goods exchanged. As proof, these commentators recall the role of the prince who can restore or fix the prices in the market to guarantee proportional equality. Once more, mutual concern of the parties involved in the market exchange seem to have little role in establishing the just price. More precisely, it seems that the only ‘concern’ the buyer could have is in fixing the price according to the social need of the seller, and vice versa. Developing this last idea, Lapidus (1994) argued that for Aquinas, the parties to an exchange ‘in itself ’ (secundum se) do not need to grasp their respective identities. The aim of the parties is common utility (commune utilitate), but the transaction is characterized by reciprocal anonymity. Lapidus describes this kind of exchange as follows: The objective dimension of the virtue of justice here plays a determining role: the critical value above or below which a party can consider himself cheated does not depend on any subjective appreciation. When Thomas Aquinas explains that the buyer would consider himself cheated if he had bought something for ‘more than it is worth’ (Summa Theologiae, IIa–IIae, q. 77, a. 1, sed contra), he does not refer to any deterioration in the buyer’s situation, but to a deviation from commutative justice—i.e. from the

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just price—the rules of which, exterior to the individuals, are supposed to be known by everyone. (Lapidus 1994, 15) This is entirely true: There is no subjective consideration in calculating the just price. Still, it must be stressed that the mutual concern, for which ‘the buyers and sellers thereby retain as acceptable prices the very prices that would be acceptable to them if they were in their partners’ position’ (Lapidus 1994, 12), is the cornerstone of this kind of transaction. If so, while there is no subjective evaluation, the mutual concern between the parties in the transaction remains crucial, along with the search for their own utility, and this concern is inherent in the features of the just price. Is this the only dimension in which gift (donum) manifests itself in the boundaries of the contract (contractus)? The answer is no. Aquinas made clear that mutual concern (mutual assistance) and gift are the cornerstones of commercial exchange when he discusses the exchange ‘by accident’ (per accidens): Secondly, we may speak of buying and selling, considered as accidentally tending to the advantage of one party, and to the disadvantage of the other: for instance, when a man has great need of a certain thing, while another man will suffer if he be without it. In such a case the just price will depend not only on the thing sold, but on the loss which the sale brings on the seller. And thus it will be lawful to sell a thing for more than it is worth in itself, though the price paid be not more than it is worth to the owner. Yet if the one man derive a great advantage by becoming possessed of the other man’s property, and the seller be not at a loss through being without that thing, the latter ought not to raise the price, because the advantage accruing to the buyer is not due to the seller, but to a circumstance affecting the buyer. Now no man should sell what is not his, though he may charge for the loss he suffers. (Summa Theologiae, IIa–IIae, q. 77, a. 1) In determining the just price, the objective factor of ‘social’ need is subjectivized by the concern of the buyer and the seller of their respective conditions during the transaction. In other words, the buyer considers if, through the exchange, the seller may better his initial condition, which means the condition prior to the proposed exchange, and vice versa. This evaluation goes hand in hand with the consideration of one’s own good, giving rise to the dimension of mutual assistance. This double concern, which is neither reciprocal altruism nor reciprocal self-sacrifice, is how gift is manifested in the economic sphere.10 What matters in exchanges by accident is not only the status of the parties involved but also their respective identities. Aquinas refused, in fact, to identify the just price as a fixed, immutable value. Instead, he argued that the just price cannot be determined with precision. Aquinas stated that human law permits as licit that buyers and sellers

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distort the equivalence of price and value within certain limits, and that, conversely, divine law punishes all that is contrary to virtue; but then he adds an important consideration: Hence, according to the Divine law, it is reckoned unlawful if the equality of justice be not observed in buying and selling: and he who has received more than he ought must make compensation to him that has suffered loss, if the loss be considerable. I add this condition, because the just price of things is not fixed with mathematical precision, but depends on a kind of estimate, so that a slight addition or subtraction would not seem to destroy the equality of justice. (Summa Theologiae, IIa–IIae, q. 77, a. 1; emphasis added) As noted by Kaye, here, within the constraints of reconciling economic observations with theological requirements, Aquinas visualizes a true and just equality, one pleasing to God and consistent with the requirements of justice and virtue, not as a precise arithmetical point but as a range along a continuum of value. (Kaye 2000, 99–100) Adopting a range of values as the just price and not as a deviation from virtuous behaviour allowed by law, Aquinas implicitly admitted that the dimension of gift plays a crucial role. This implies, in fact, that in evaluating the ‘justness’ of a price, the parties should ask themselves if it falls on that continuum of values that procures mutual advantage for the buyer and the seller, since ‘whatever is established for the common advantage, should not be more of a burden to one party than to another’ (Summa Theologiae, IIa–IIae, q. 77, a. 1). If the market mechanism can secure proportional equality, it can be qualified as just, but it is not the emblem of justice as implied in the aforementioned neo-classical interpretations. To sum up, among the motivations that drive the buyer’s and the seller’s actions, gift coexists with profit. The mutual concern of the parties involved in the transactions ‘moderate’ their pursuit of gain. This is how Aquinas conceived and depicted the market, and this is what constitutes the uniqueness of his economic anthropology. The same can be seen in recalling Aquinas’s view of common good. Market exchanges do not take place in an abstract place. They are part of the life of the city (civitas). The citizens are called upon to promote the common good of society, fulfilling the divine plan. In the previous section it emerged that among the many meanings of common good, the notion of civic friendship is of the utmost importance. Hence, the citizens, in determining the just price, fulfil the divine plan if they care about the good of the other parties involved in the exchange. The divine plan, in fact, is more deeply connected

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to the spread of ‘friendly’ relations among citizens than to other ends. In Aquinas’s philosophy, contributing to the common good means not only increasing the material wealth of society, but also fostering relations of civic friendship among citizens. With regard to market exchanges, this means encouraging the buyer and the seller to go beyond the initial partial anonymity of the exchange ‘in itself ’ which, as has been shown, already contains traces of mutual assistance in the way in which the just price is determined. Aquinas seems to go in this direction when he argued that exchanges by accident resemble the logic of the friendship based on utility, ruled by the ‘equality of usefulness’, and vice versa, since ‘this friendship seems to be a kind of business affair’ (Aquinas 1964, VIII, 6). Need determines exchange, but people usually exchange quod haberent, that is, their surplus derived from the domestic economy (Leshem 2013; Milbank 2017). According to Theocarakis’s thesis on Aquinas’s thought, ‘the condemnation of profit in a transaction is explicit. The exchange is an exchange of equivalent values’ (2008, 20). Conversely, Aquinas saw mutual assistance as the rule, not just for the exchange of goods in which the pursuit of gain is excluded. Mutual concern can emerge also between merchants, and, in this respect, Aquinas spoke about the common good of merchants (bonum commune mercatorum). As he remarked in his letter to the friar James of Viterbo, in fact, the common good of merchants is pro expediendi mercationibus, that is, what facilitates commerce (Friedman 1980, 1987). This reveals that Aquinas was an attentive observer of the reality of his time, for example, of the development of contracts called commenda. In this kind of contract one merchant (tractor) receives a sum of money from one or more individuals (stans or stantes) to use for his commerce (often overseas or in another country). At the end of a journey, the merchant shares proportionally the profits with his stans. According to the Cambridge Economic History of Europe, there were many variants of this kind of contract, such as the societas maris or the commendae, in which we can detect the embryonic form of associations between merchants. Cipolla remarks that the diffusion and circulation of commenda contracts would not have been possible without the prerequisite of a spirit of mutual trust and a sense of honesty in business […] It was a widespread sense of honesty, strengthened by the feeling of belonging to an integrated community as well as by specific laws, which made possible the participation of many individuals using their savings to support and finance entrepreneurial activity of the merchants. (Cipolla 1974, 210) The market can be conceived of as a place of virtue and mutual assistance, even markets that extend beyond the boundaries of the city. One might object that the interpretation advanced here goes beyond Aquinas’s intended meaning. After all, if Aquinas meant to depict commerce as a place where civic friendship can be experienced, then he would not

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have proposed the distinction between the exchange in itself and the one by accident. In other words, the features of the exchange in itself are the essence of commerce, whereas the others are just accidents, something that does not pertain intrinsically to the economic sphere. By framing this economic teaching within Aquinas’s ontological view, it will be shown that the objection is misplaced. What is the meaning of ‘by accident’? Aquinas considered the nature and existence of accidents in his work On Being and Essence (De Ente and Essentia. Aquinas 1965) but also in a small pamphlet, attributed to him but probably spurious, named De Natura Accidentis (LaGarde Pauson 1953). For the purpose of the present research, it must be stressed that in both works, Aquinas specified that since all human knowledge begins from the senses, and the proper objects of the senses are accidents, it follows that accidents make a great contribution to the knowledge of the essence of a thing (ad cognoscendum quod quid est). In Aquinas’s words, ‘in sensible things even the essential differences are unknown to us, and so they are signified through accidental differences that arise from the essential ones, just as a cause is signified through its effect’ (Aquinas 1965, 60). As has already been stressed, the voluntary exchanges that pertain to the economic sphere do not take place in a neutral sphere. Even foreign trades can be connected to the promotion of the common good of society. Exchanges by accident do reveal the essence of the exchanges in themselves: mutual assistance. As in the exchange itself, people put themselves in another’s status to determine the just price, and this motivation cohabits with their self-interest; the same happens in exchanges by accident in which people are asked to go beyond status and also consider the particular circumstances of the party involved in the exchange. What Schumpeter, Baldwin, and De Roover failed to recognize is that there is room for subjective need in Aquinas’s view, although not in the neo-classical sense of the term. In Aquinas’s view of commercial exchange, there is a ‘social subjective need’ that emerges thanks only to the mutual concerns of the parties involved in the commercial transactions. Therefore, the market can be a place where people experience the relational virtue that is connected to their happiness, where gift f lourishes within the boundaries of the contract, and where mutual assistance that is the ground of civil life holds a central role. At the end of this chapter it is important to stress that, so far, only the ‘virtuous’ side of the commercial transaction has been described. What if the buyer and seller choose to deceive one another? Can foreign merchants be trusted to supply things for the common good of the cities? Can people seek to better their status through commerce? All these questions and others will be addressed in the next chapter. Answering them will be of paramount importance for the general project of this book. To trace a line from Aquinas’s thought to civil economists’ thought, in fact, means to understand whether their social and economic views, very distant in time, are comparable to one another. Much will depend on whether we will be able to refute or at least problematize some criticisms put forth on the interpretation of Aquinas’s

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social and economic teachings as compatible with the social and economic thought of Modernity. The risk of anachronism is behind the door. Therefore, the next chapter tries to avoid it through a careful consideration of all the problematic arguments, starting from the aforementioned questions.

Notes 1 I will use this formula rather than referring to the edition of the Summa Theologiae consulted (Aquinas 1947). 2 Moreover, Thomas affirms, it is man’s privilege to be the only creature capable of loving beauty and enjoying it for itself. Thomas proves the difference between these two kinds of pleasures, following Aristotle, using the example of the voice of the deer. The voice of the deer, he says, is relished both by the lion and the man, but for different reasons: it attracts the lion because it represents a promise of nourishment, whereas it is appreciated by man for its harmony (‘propter convenientiam sensibilium’). The lion enjoys auditive sensations because he links them to other sensations, biologically important for him, but man enjoys them for their autonomous value; the pleasure that man experiences from harmonious sounds has no connection with preservation of life; even if it has its source in sensible perception, in colour or sound, its origin has no relation to biological activity. Aesthetic sensibilities are not purely sensible, just as some sensibilities that are important from a biological point of view are not purely intelligible as such: they are situated halfway between the two (Tatarkiewicz 1979, 284). 3 ‘There is in the virtues a certain likeness to and participation of future happiness, as stated above (in virtutibus est quaedam similitudo et participatio futurae beatitudinis)’ (Summa Theologiae, IIa–IIae, q. 129, a. 7, ad. 3). 4 Recently, Pinsent (2012) reopened the debate on Aquinas’ virtue ethics. In Pinsent’s opinion, Aquinas’ account on virtues must be considered in contrast with Aristotle’s, because, while the latter gives predominance to virtue intended as a habitual disposition by which a person uses his capacity of self-direction through reason, the former emphasizes the role of virtue (theological and moral) infused by God. Hence, Aquinas sustains a second-person perspective on virtue ethics, based on the relation between man and God. To prove his point, Pinsent enquires into the relationship between virtues and gift, in which the seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit become the pre-conditions. As well summarized by Ryan, the gifts, as second personal dispositions, are perfections disposing a person to be attuned to, and to follow, the divine impulse or instinct of Holy Spirit. These dispositions surpass all the Aristotelian or divinely infused moral virtues. Where the theological virtues are the ultimate foundation, the gifts are the penultimate basis […]. (Ryan 2014, 50) Somehow, our analysis of gift as a fundamental moment of charity proves to be more in depth than Pinsent’s interpretation, since, as he himself stated, ‘Aquinas argues that the gifts are foundational to the infused moral and intellectual virtues, beatitudes, and fruits, the unifying principle of which is love which Aquinas describes as “friendship” with god’ (Pinsent 2012, 50). 5 Cima and Schubeck capture this nuance: ‘Charity puts strength in a person’s ability to uphold the other virtues of prudence, temperance, fortitude and justice. It nourishes and transforms the lover, who in turn nourishes and transforms the beloved’ (2001, 218–219). 6 If considered on such basis, the Thomistic doctrine of private property finds a proper explanation, particularly regarding the superfluum. According to Aquinas,

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7 8 9 10

in fact, a man must share the sum of surplus money coming from his work (superfluum) with the poor, with the exception of the amount necessary to sustain himself and his family, to pay debts, and to continue his business. This point will be discussed in Chapter 3 of this book. I thank Luigino Bruni for these part on Augustine. According to Hagenauer (1931), the labour-value theory characterizes the position of both Albert and Aquinas. For a critical discussion, see De Roover (1958). Harvie recognized the connection between love, friendship, charity, and commutative justice: Thomas then associates the logic of justice with another way of engaging in human relations: love. […] The societal structuring of love is in the register of caritas, charity. For Thomas, charity takes the Aristotelian mode of friendship, in which one person wishes well for the other (Summa Theologiae, IIaeIIae, 23.1). Friendship binds persons together in such a way that each partner reciprocally works for the betterment and f lourishing of the other. […] Thomas recognizes that economy, in the Greek sense of oeconomia (management of the home), requires another mode of discourse for its own intelligibility. It requires an account of justice predicated upon the social matrixes comprising concrete relationships. It requires the language of morality and a recognition that the aims of a functioning economy are not internal to its own discourse. (Harvie 2013, 81)

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62 Aquinas’s social and economic teachings Godbout, J.T., and A.C. Caille. 1998. World of the gift. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Press-MQUP. Hagenauer, S. 1931. De “iustum pretium” bei Thomas von Aquino. Ein Beitrag Zur Geschichte der Objektiven Werttheorie. Struttgart: W. Kohlhammer. Harvie, T. 2013. Thomas Aquinas, Amartya Sen and a critical economic discourse. In Philosophy, culture and traditions. ISSN 1609-2392, vol. 9. Hirschfeld, M.L. 2014. On the relationship between finite and infinite goods, or: How to avoid f lattening. Econ Journal Watch, 11, no. 2: 179–185. Hirschfeld, M.L. 2018. Aquinas and the market: Toward a humane economy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Hollander, S. 1965. On the interpretation of the just price. Kyklos 18, no. 4: 615–634. Kaye, J. 2000. Economy and nature in the fourteenth century: Money, market exchange, and the emergence of scientific thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kimbriel, S. 2014. Friendship as sacred knowing: Overcoming isolation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. LaGarde Pauson, M. 1953. De natura accidentis attributed to Saint Thomas Aquinas. Montreal: Université de Montréal. Lapidus, A. 1994. Norm, virtue and information: The just price and individual behaviour in Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae. The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought 1, no. 3: 435–473. Leshem, D. 2013. Oikonomia redefined. Journal of the History of Economic Thought 35, no. 1: 43–61. MacIntyre, A.C. 1996. Natural law as subversive: The case of Aquinas. The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 26, no. 1: 61–84. MacIntyre, A.C. 1999. Dependent rational animals: Why human beings need the virtues (Vol. 20). Chicago: Open Court Publishing. Manselli, R. 1976. Storia medioevale. Studi Romani 24, no. 3: 391. Marion, J.L. 2011. The reason of the gift. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Maspero, G. 2014. Life as relation: Classical metaphysics and Trinitarian ontology. Theological Research 2, no. 1: 31–52. Mauss, M. 2002. The gift: The form and reason for exchange in archaic societies. London: Routledge. McCormick, W. 2018. The role of the natural law in politics according to Thomas Aquinas. History of Political Thought 39, no. 4: 591–605. McGrath, A.E. 2005. Iustitia Dei: A history of the Christian doctrine of justification. New York: Cambridge University Press. Milbank, J. 2003. Being reconciled: Ontology and pardon. London: Psychology Press. Milbank, J. 2017. Oikonomia leaves home: Theology, politics, and governance in the history of the West. Telos 178: 77–99. Miner, R. 2009. Thomas Aquinas on the passions: A study of Summa Theologiae, 1a2ae 22–48. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Monsalve, F. 2014. Scholastic just price versus current market price: Is it merely a matter of labelling? The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought 21, no. 1: 4–20. Nussbaum, M.C. 2003. Upheavals of thought: The intelligence of emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nygren, A. 1953. Agape and Eros. London: S.P.C.K. Pasnau, R.C. 2002. Thomas Aquinas on human nature: A philosophical study of Summa Theologiae, 1a 75–89. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Aquinas’s social and economic teachings 63 Pinckaers, S. 1962. Virtue is not a habit. CrossCurrents 12, no. 1: 65–81. Pinsent, A. 2012. The second-person perspective in Aquinas’s ethics. New York: Routledge. Pizzorni, R.M. 1999. Diritto naturale e diritto positivo in S. Tommaso d’Aquino (Vol. 15). Bologna: Edizioni Studio Domenicano. Polanyi, K. 1957. Trade and market in the early empires, Glencoe (Ill). Free Press and Falcon’s Wing Press Porter, J. 1990. Recovery of virtue. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press. Porter, J. 2016. Justice as a virtue: A Thomistic perspective. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. Ronila, M. 2013. Leibniz and the Amor Pur controversy. Journal of Early Modern Studies 2, no. 2: 35–55. Ryan, T. 2014. Second person perspective, virtues and the gifts in Aquinas’s ethics. Australian eJournal of Theology 21, no. 1. Saint Bernard of Clairvaux. 1952. Saint Bernard on the song of songs: Sermones in Cantica Canticorum. London: A.R. Mowbray. Scalzo, G. (2017). A genealogy of the gift. In Perspectives on philosophy of management and business ethics, ed. by. J. D. Rendtorff, 31–45. Cham: Springer. Schmitt, C. [1934] 1985. Political theology. Cambridge: MIT Press. Schumpeter, J.A. [1954] 2006. History of economic analysis. New York: Routledge. Seneca, L.A. [1956–1962] 2011. On benefits. Trans. by M. Griffin and B. Inwood. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Sherwin, M.S. 2005. By knowledge & by love: Charity and knowledge in the moral theology of St. Thomas Aquinas. Washington: Catholic University of America Press. Spicciani, A. 1977. La mercatura e la formazione del prezzo nella riflessione teologica medioevale. Roma: Accademia nazionale dei Lincei. Stump, E. 2012. The non-Aristotelian character of Aquinas’s ethics: Aquinas on the passions. Tópicos (México) 42: 27–50. Tatarkiewicz, W. [1970] 1979. Storia dell’estetica. Volume secondo. L’estetica medievale. Torino: Einaudi. Tawney, R.H. 1926. Religion and the rise of capitalism. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company. Theocarakis, N.J. 2008. Antipeponthos and reciprocity: The concept of equivalent exchange from Aristotle to Turgot. International Review of Economics 55, nos. 1–2: 29. Todeschini, G. 2000. Ecclesia e mercati nei linguaggi dottrinali di Tommaso d’Aquino. Quaderni Storici 35, no. 3: 585–622. Torrell, J.P. 2003. Saint Thomas Aquinas, Volume 2: Spiritual master (Vol. 2). Washington: The Catholic University of America Press. Tozzi, G. 1970. I fondamenti dell’economia in Tommaso d’Aquino. Milano: Ugo Mursia. Uffenheimer-Lippens, E. 2003. Rationalized passion and passionate rationality: Thomas Aquinas on the relation between reason and the passions. The Review of Metaphysics, 56, no. 3: 525–558. Van Houdt, T. 1999. The economics of art in early modern times: Some humanist and scholastic approaches. History of Political Economy 31(Supplement): 303–331. Viner, J. 1978. Religious thought and economic society. History of Political Economy 10, no. 1: 9–189. Wawrykow, J.P. 2012. The theological virtues. In The oxford handbook of Aquinas. https:// www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195326093.001.0001/ oxfordhb-9780195326093-e-23

64 Aquinas’s social and economic teachings Wawrykow, J.P. 2016. God’s grace and human action: Merit in the theology of Thomas Aquinas. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Wilson, G.W. 1975. The economics of the just price. History of Political Economy 7, no. 1: 56–74. Young, J.T., and B. Gordon. 1992. Economic justice in the natural law tradition: Thomas Aquinas to Francis Hutcheson. Journal of the History of Economic Thought 14, no. 1: 1–17.

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Sed contra: four objections to the Aquinas–civil economy link In the previous chapter, Aquinas’s social and economic teachings were extensively analysed. The manner in which certain features of the Mediterranean spirit of capitalism characterized Aquinas’s thought emerged. The ideas of gift, relational virtue, mutual assistance, and many others were shown to be determinants in understanding the economic ideas of the just price or the role of commerce in society. The attentive reader will have noted that the terms ‘spirit of capitalism’ and ‘economic thought’ have not been mentioned along the course of argumentation of Aquinas’s philosophy. Franks (2009) is right in claiming that when one approaches Aquinas’s ref lections on economics one should not employ the term ‘economic thought’ but rather ‘economic teachings’. This is because Aquinas did not mean to produce a complete and stand-alone economic theory, as happened from the Modern schools of economic thought onwards. To elaborate more on Franks’s legitimate claim, it could be affirmed that Aquinas’s social and economic ideas were elaborated in a world and a society very different from the Modern ones. Hence, an attempt to compare, for example, the theory of just price, read through the lens of mutual assistance, with civil economists’ eighteenth-century theory of price appears to be destined to fail. This incompatibility could be an insurmountable barrier for the project of reconstructing the history and the main traits of the Mediterranean spirit of capitalism. The present chapter problematizes the conclusion that Aquinas’s ideas cannot be compared to the modern school of economic thought and, in turn, defends the legitimacy of the theoretical project attempted in this book. In the following, all the main reasons, widely present in literature, that prevent seeing Aquinas as elaborating economic teachings comparable to the modern ones will be listed and analysed. Then, each will be scrutinized to see to what extent it captures the essence of Aquinas’s thought. The aim of this chapter is not to argue that Aquinas advanced a pure economic theory, nor that his thought is modern. Very differently, the expected outcome is that some of his anthropological, social, and economic teachings can be compatible with those

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of civil economists. Moreover, having a clear picture of some controversial points of his thought constitutes a fundamental step to take before approaching the next chapter. There, in fact, the analysis will move toward the four centuries separating Aquinas and civil economy tradition, exploring some patterns followed by Aquinas’s ideas, differently interpreted by various authors, before arriving at the Italian civil economists of the eighteenth century. The first objection is related to Aquinas’s judgement of foreign trade and its role in society. The objection is two-fold. On the one hand, commentators argue that the role of trade in the cities and territories of the thirteenth century was confined and limited. For sure, it was not comparable to the role the markets developed between the eighteenth and nineteenth century when political economy and civil economy were theorized. On the other hand, Aquinas held a negative view of international trade and foreign merchants. According to him, they are both dangerous because of the behaviour of foreign merchants in the public spaces of the city. Not being tied to the common good of the city in which he is trading, in fact, the merchant shows the worst of his economic behaviour during the exchange, taking advantage of the ingenuous seller or buyer whenever possible, and also the worst of his normal behaviour: drinking, gambling, and leaving a dissolute life open to many forms of vices. In the third chapter of the second book of De Regimine Principuum, Aquinas warned the cities about the presence of foreign merchants and seemed to praise cities that were self-sufficient in procuring the goods necessary for the life of their citizens. In the literature, this part of Aquinas’s argument has been fully acknowledged (Fanfani 1934; Barbieri 1940; Pribram 1983). According to Irwin, ‘Aquinas warned that contact with foreign people would disrupt civic life’ (1998, 19). Trebilcock et al. (2005, 1) also argued that ‘dominant strands in medieval scholastic thought (ref lected, for example, in the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas) continued to be suspicious about commercial activity and to worry that contact with foreigners would disrupt civic life’. This understanding of Aquinas’s economic teaching passed across centuries, as shown by nineteenth-century Italian economist Ulisse Gobbi, who argues in a work significantly titled ‘Foreign Competition and the Historic Italian Economists’ (La concorrenza estera e gli antichi economisti italiani, 1884) that in the pamphlet titled De Regimine Principum, Saint Thomas […] contemplates it with a certain diffidence or mistrust with regard to the supplies of the country, due to a reason of dignity, due to the lack of security of trade, especially in case of war, due to the corruption of customs caused by contacts with foreigners and by the very exercise of trade by citizens. (Gobbi 1884, 2; The translation has been made by the author of this book) Given these premises, how can one pretend to compare Aquinas’s economic view with modern theorizations that generally praise the beneficial effects of

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foreign trade? To answer, the two sides of the first objection will be considered separately (“Commerce in the Middle Ages” and “Aquinas on merchants”). The second objection regards Aquinas’s social and political view. As Bobbio (1993) pointed out, there are substantial differences between the ‘Aristotelian model’ of society and the modern one rooted in the ‘conceptual Natural Law theory’, which finds one of its most complete formulations in Thomas Hobbes. In the Aristotelian model, there is no place for individuals. Each of these two big paradigms ‘concerns the origin and foundation of state, or of political (that is, civil) society’ (Bobbio 1993, 1). Among the many differences, there is one of particular importance for our purpose. In the Aristotelian model, in fact, since individuals live in families from the time of their birth, the prepolitical condition is not one of freedom and equality […] it’s rather a condition in which the fundamental relationship existing in a hierarchical society, such as family is, are between superior and inferior. (Bobbio 1993, 8) The person is conceived starting from family and civic ties (Fanfani 1934; Gilson 2002, 2013; Bruni 2012; Barbieri 2013). These define the person who cannot be conceived apart from these bonds. As far as the structure of society is concerned, that man is a social animal means mostly that he holds his specific place in the social hierarchy (Gustafson 1981, 1992) that finds its legitimization through reference of divine hierarchy (McDonald 1939; Archibald 1949; Scholz 1996). The common good held precedence over individual good (Vanni Rovighi 1973; Chalmeta 2000). In Chapter 2, Aquinas’s usage of the metaphor of the body to describe the vertical structure of society and the legitimacy of political power was mentioned: For in the physical universe all bodies, by divine body, are ruled by the primary bodies—namely the heaven—and all physical bodies are ruled by rational creatures […] in an individual, the soul rules the body […] Therefore in every multitude there must be a ruler. (Aquinas 2002, 194) This seems to be a recurrent theme in Aquinas’s thought since, even when he has to describe the condition of men in the ‘State of Innocence’, he describes them as unequal in many respects (righteousness, knowledge, bodily capacity, sex), and he affirmed the necessity of one guiding the others towards the common good (Summa Theologiae, Ia, q. 96, a. 3–4). In contrast, the distinctive trait of Modernity lies in all the images of the ‘state of nature’ wherein man, as in the famous words of Thomas Hobbes, emerges as mushrooms ( fungorum more, Hobbes 1998) from the ground. In the ‘Natural Law Theory’, individuals are conceived at first as free and equal, before any social determination. John Locke’s polemics against Robert Filmer’s

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Patriarcha, or The Natural Power of Kings (1680) are well known. Locke accused Filmer of deriving the legitimacy of the political power of kings from the parallel with ancient family hierarchies and counterposed his social contract theory based on the natural, pre-political rights of the individual (Locke 1947; Rawls 2008). Modernity, in fact, sees the birth of the individual. Modern social contract theories aimed to explain the legitimacy of political power originating from the individual rather than from any form of hierarchy (Rawls [1971] 2009; Scanlon 1982; Veca 2010). Therefore, one can object that Aquinas’s anthropological and social views cannot be compared to those of the civil economists, the latter being supporters of the Italian Enlightenment founded on individual rights and on a horizontal rather than vertical model of society. The hierarchical and vertical structure of the society that Aquinas seems to envisage is connected to the third objection, namely social immutability. Man must be content with his place in society. He must work all his life according to his place, fulfilling his task in the divine plan, without seeking to change his fixed status: ‘State, properly speaking, denotes a kind of position, whereby a thing is disposed with a certain immobility in a manner according with its nature’ (Summa Theologiae IIa–IIae, q. 183, a. 1, corp.). The desire to better one’s condition, which Adam Smith saw, to a certain extent, as among the main impulses towards the advent of commercial society (Rasmussen 2006; Paganelli 2009; Bee 2018), finds no place in the static picture of society drawn by Aquinas. Supporters of this interpretation (Fanfani 1934; Bruni 2012; Barbieri 2013) often quoted or referred to this passage from the Summa Theologiae, in which Aquinas deal with the sin of presumption: Now it is established throughout all natural things, that every action is commensurate with the power of the agent, nor does any natural agent strive to do what exceeds its ability. Hence it is vicious and sinful, as being contrary to the natural order, that any one should assume to do what is above his power: and this is what is meant by presumption, as its very name shows. (Summa Theologiae, IIa–IIae, q. 130, a. 1, corp.) In the economic sphere, it is a vice for men to seek riches and wealth above the fixed means needed to accomplish their task in the social mechanism. If  Aquinas had held this view, his economic anthropology would differ significantly from that adopted by modern economists. The last, broader objection regards the normative dimension of Aquinas’s theory. Modern schools of economic thought emphasized the descriptive moment over the normative. The analysis of commerce and the doctrine of just price in the last chapter seem to have done the opposite. Is there a place in Aquinas’s economic teachings for a non-normative description of the behaviour of sellers and buyers? Is this kind of behaviour seen as relevant for the promotion of the common good of society, or is it irremediably classified as

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sinful and therefore irrelevant? Was Aquinas interested in the observation of reality before and after its theorization? Addressing this last objection, the role of institutions in sustaining civil life, including the market, will emerge. This is one of the main features of the Mediterranean spirit of capitalism that was considered in the Introduction and intentionally set aside in the last chapter.

Commerce in the Middle Ages While it is right to affirm that the role of markets and merchants in the thirteenth century was far less important than in the eighteenth, the distinction should not be stretched too far. Ninth-century Europe saw strong demographic growth and the foundation and re-f lowering of many urban centres. To cope with increased food needs, farmers and rural inhabitants worked to extend arable land through deforestation and reclamation. Agricultural production, aided by continually developing techniques, increased enough to leave surpluses that were sold in local markets. Some of these activities began to be regularly organized to the extent that they began to assume regional and then interregional relevance. From the end of the seventh century on the coasts of northern Europe, emporia appeared and soon became important commercial hubs (Wickham 2009). The emporium is a new type of coastal urban centre that developed between the seventh and eighth centuries intended for interregional exchange and long-distance trade. Among the most important centres were Qentovic (Montreuil), Dorestad (Wijkbii Duursted, the main centre), and Domburg on the northern coast of France; York (located outside the Roman city walls), Ipswich, Hamwic (Southampton), and London (Lundenwic, built outside the Roman city walls) in England; Ribe and Hedeby in Denmark; and Birka in Sweden, the most important trading post in the Scandinavian region. Other emporia were found along the Baltic coasts. From the eleventh century, large-scale trade in the Mediterranean basin was reactivated. As trade increased, scheduled market events developed— fairs. One of the oldest, though of inter-regional scope, is that of Saint Denis just outside Paris, probably established in the mid-seventh century and then moved inside the city walls. From the eleventh century, Italian merchants began to impose themselves. The Amalfi people traded with Egypt and Byzantium from the tenth century, and by mid-century had their own neighbourhood. After the year 1000, supremacy in trade with the East passed to Venice. In the Mediterranean, Genoa and Pisa established themselves as commercial powers. From the thirteenth century, merchants from Catalán, Provençal, and Languedoc were added to the Italians. The most valuable commodities were spices imported from the East. Between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, there was progressive integration of the two main commercial areas, the Nordic and the Mediterranean.1 From the twelfth century to the end of the thirteenth, one of the major business centres of the overland trade network was the Champagne fair.

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It  was a regular series of six market events held in succession in the cities of Provins, Lagny, Troyes, and Bar-sur-Aube. Merchants (mercatores) from various regions of France, Flanders, Germany, and Northern Italy converged there from Florence, Siena, and Rome. The Italians were the real rulers of these markets. Their supremacy was due to the vast sums of capital at their disposal and their ability to extend their range of action, thanks to exchange contracts and having representatives scattered throughout the main commercial centres. In these markets, there were all kinds of goods from all over Europe and the East. At Champagne fairs, Italian merchants bought huge quantities of cloth processed in Italy, especially in Tuscany and Lombardy, and then resold throughout the Mediterranean. The fairs were generally organized in three phases. The first was for the arrival and preparation of goods, the second for carrying out various negotiations, and the last for payments. Each state had its own markets, and there were still many other smaller ones at the regional or village level, often set up in the main squares of the cities or in locations specifically dedicated to the purpose (Sapori 1972; Menant 2015). The protagonist of these exchanges was the merchant, ‘which, in the Middle Ages, does not mean only merchant; it also means manufacturing entrepreneur, possibly banker, and above all—in the first three centuries of the new millennium—adventurer, especially in the maritime cities’ (Cipolla 1995, 8). In the Middle Ages, the protagonists of the mercantile sector sometimes gathered in companies, such as craft artisans, guilds, and hanse, with their own statutes and internal organization. As Maire Vigueur (2004) has accurately observed, in thirteenth-century municipal, public, and private documentation, the term societas often indicates groups of individuals linked by common rules or interests who intend to act together in a specific sector. The function of societas, legally defined best by medieval jurists, as Pecorella has already studied (1990), is of a commercial or banking nature, the business company. This particular attention led jurists to ignore other forms in which the patrimonial element did not occupy as prominent a place as in business companies. Some historians (Volpe 1970; Marie Vigueur 2004) have analysed another very important form of society in municipal Italy: popular armed societies. The military role was one of the main reasons for many societates’ existence. In Italian municipal society, acting on different levels to improve the chance of increasing one’s earnings was apparently not marginal or infrequent behaviour. Some societates militum could also carry out military enterprises on their own initiative. In addition to organizing the war enterprise, these associations had to manage the expenditures for maintaining equipment, from the organization of the enterprise or from unsuccessful military action, often raids, and profits deriving from the loot, the redemption of prisoners, and any territorial conquests. These sums could also be reinvested in other war or commercial actions. This type of association made it possible to raise capital and men for these two activities as different as war and business. The same person could belong to several societates, which could also be temporary and of a different nature. In some cases, women could also join the societates.2

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Some historians, such as Prodi (2009), believe that the novelty of these new collective subjects lies in the fact that, unlike previous associations, they held parts of the sovereignty or power that had traditionally belonged to political and sacred power. These new corporate forms very often required sworn membership from their members, which in any case constitutes a stable collective entity. In some cases, the economic power of these societies tended to control ‘political power’. In confirmation of his thesis, Prodi (2009, 47) recalls that this novelty was also noted by some contemporaries, such as Enrico da Susa, who observed that the formation of these first commercial and financial societates took place as collective bodies ‘ad exemplum rei publice’. In Piacenza, for example, the collective body of merchants was the hegemonic corporation, and its statutes, in addition to regulating its own activity, also tended to regulate aspects of the entire economic life of the city, replacing, at times, the municipal bodies. The birth of these large commercial companies—just think of the Bardi in Florence; dei Salimbene and Tolomei in Siena; dei Frescobaldi, Frangipane, Orsini, and Colonna in Rome; and many others that could be cited—served the purpose of raising the necessary capital that a single family was unable to put together to finance commercial activities and meet the costs deriving from the maintenance of collaborators in the various market areas. Italian merchants, particularly between the end of the thirteenth and the beginning of the fourteenth century, managed to overcome the borders of the various states and small towns by organizing the free circulation of goods, or at least some of them, on a large scale. Agricultural commodities played a principal role in this sector. Among the luxury goods in great demand were fabrics for clothing, such as wool, leather, and textiles. The arms trade also played an important role. To manage this complex system of traffic and operations, adequate tools were needed. The recording of contractual transactions often took place through notarial deeds. One of the most frequently used by merchants was the exchange letter. This instrument that would revolutionize trade was already attested in the fairs of the twelfth century and was well established by the second half of that century. Furthermore, registers, memorials, zibaldoni, memoirs, and other instruments were developed, the most complex of which was the trading manual in which merchants noted the commercial customs of the various markets, the trend of prices, and exchange rates, and, from the end of the thirteenth century, also their own personal experiences. To be able to maintain such a complex and articulated activity, the great merchants needed solid and important preparation (Menant 2015). The various warehouses of merchant companies were very distant from each other and from the main office. From the thirteenth century, elementary schools were spreading to all the main cities. Those who wanted to prepare for a career in commerce had to attend the ‘school of abacus’ where they learned to count on the counting table, the abacus, or to use the recently imported system, arithmetic, based on Arabic numerals and the use of the number zero.

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A budding merchant continued his apprenticeship3 in a company or shop, often far from home. Trading required continuous training, which included learning both theoretical subjects, such as geography, foreign languages, and accounting, and practical subjects, in particular an in-depth knowledge of products, markets, and exchange systems. When a commercial network was organized, it became necessary to be familiar with the important factors that could affect the prices and costs of the company. Transportation of goods and people was very complicated (Sapori 1937; Le Goff 1997; Menant 2015). Travelling involved numerous risks and obstacles: the widespread lack of adequate roads and infrastructure, bad weather, overnight stays, banditry, piracy, and many others. The bulk of the traffic was overland. Communication routes consisted of paths, woods, passes, and rivers that required a varied system of conveyances that could be chosen from time to time according to the need. It is likely that some parts of Roman paving must have remained. Each state sought to ensure road safety and to reimburse merchants who were victims of banditry. In Italy, it fell upon the villagers to guarantee security in their territory. Italian municipalities took care to fix the road network, widening the paths, digging channels on the sides of the paths for drainage, filling holes, and covering the paths with gravel. Most goods circulated on the backs of animals, but carts could be used. It is probably from these transport systems that the carretta and soma became units of measure. The former as a transport system that had a specific cost and for this reason was dedicated to goods of a certain value, such as spices, fabrics, weapons, and metal objects. A soma consisted of two bales formed by wrapping large pieces of waterproof fabric around goods for transport. A loaded horse could travel about thirty kilometres a day. Trade by sea, though more dangerous than by land, facilitated the transport of greater quantities of goods. Merchants sailed along the coasts, sometimes making numerous intermediate stops, which lengthened travel time. From the end of the thirteenth century, connections had begun to develop between Flanders, England, and Genoa, continuing, in some cases, to Asia Minor. From these notes, the reader can infer to what extent trade affected everyday thirteenth-century life. The late Middle Ages did not see the development of market societies but, without doubt, saw significant extensions of market practices in social life. Therefore, the impact of the first half of the first objection is significantly diminished. What about the moral judgement of merchants?

Aquinas on merchants To fully understand Aquinas’s judgement of foreign merchants, the role of the merchants in the medieval context must be recalled. The feudal society did not find a place for the figure of the merchant within its structures (Fanfani 1964; Piergiovanni 2012a). Early merchants were simple people who facilitated the delivery of products into the possession of the lords they served,

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sometimes enriching them. Over time, they became professionals in the exchanges of various types of goods. In papal legislation, especially from Gregory VII to Alexander III, the merchant appears as an ambiguous figure. On the one hand, their usefulness is supported, and they are to be protected for their fruitful collaboration in the commercial activity of the lords and various organs of the church, such as rich monasteries; on the other hand, they are regarded with suspicion because the profits earned from their activity do not provide particular benefits to the communities to which they belonged (Todeschini 2004). At that time, trade was authorized when it was in the service of others and provided well-being to the community, while it was forbidden when it was based solely on personal profit (Le Goff 1997). Over time, the ref lections brought forward by various canonists led to a re-evaluation of this figure. It was believed that the risks incurred by the merchant could justify his earnings and interest he got from the money he invested; but it was also understood that his work was useful for society, and this characteristic was what justified his activity more than anything else. The merchant’s utility therefore began to be recognized, in particular for his activity of circulating goods by bringing products from countries where they were abundant to countries where they were lacking. Merchants began to be represented through positive images. At first, the merchant was compared to the peasant in that both were subject to the weather and the cycle of the seasons in their professional activity (Le Goff 1997, 12). Another distinction is between the merchant (mercator) and the divine merchant (mercator coelestis) (Todeschini 2012, 2013). Christ was like a heavenly merchant who paid the price of his Body to save humanity (Todeschini 2004). So ‘if Christ had been a mercator coelestis’, even the merchant could be considered a good Christian as long as the purpose of his business was not personal profit but that of society or, as will be shown, especially from the thirteenth century, that constituted the common good of the res publica (Todeschini 2013, 40). Although commercial activity could hardly be compared to the perfection of the exchange made by Christ as a merchant, the merchant ‘had everything to gain […] from not being understood as a replica of the pessimus mercator par excellence, Judas of Iscariot’ (Todeschini 2012, Encyclopaedia). In the Middle Ages, however, another very interesting comparison spread that not only involved theological and philosophical aspects but also the practical—legislative codification. It concerns the comparison between the merchant and the pilgrim (Piergiovanni 2012a, 2012b). Up to the twelfth century, the practice of trading was associated with ambiguous characters who did not fit precisely within the divisions of medieval society. In addition, their activity did not involve performing a stable job within a specific community. For this reason, they were considered pauperes, that is, ‘poor in power and stability’, figures not included in a ‘family guaranteed by the power of a lord’ (Todeschini 2012, Encyclopaedia). In ecclesiastical circles, the comparison between the figure of the pauper Christ and the pilgrim began to spread.

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Merchants, like the poor, set out on a difficult path of salvation, exposing themselves to various dangers and difficulties. They were a group of people who needed special protection. Further, it should not be overlooked that during the early Middle Ages, the roads were used above all by clergy and pilgrims who travelled very long journeys to visit other communities and places of worship (Sapori 1972; Piergiovanni 2012b). Often these groups were associated with merchants who availed themselves of pilgrims’ hospices to rest and refresh themselves and of the services and protection granted to pilgrims, even if the merchant, at least in the Carolingian age, did not have the right to hospitality, and in Italian municipalities, they were not exempt from tax burdens, but nevertheless enjoyed, like the pilgrims, the prohibition of retaliation against them. Later, merchants set up their own areas dedicated to refreshment, accommodation, and the care of their transport and travel animals. Traces of the equation between merchants, pilgrims, the poor, and other defenceless figures are found in canon law. Interesting examples are Canon 14 of the Lateran council of 1123 and Canon 22 of the third Lateran council of 1179. The inclusion of merchants among the defenceless was the final step on a path that places the figure of the merchant in the lower strata of society by denying any purpose of public utility to his activity, assimilating him into ‘miserabiles personae, that is, to the weakest and most in need of protection’ (Piergiovanni 2012b, 623). The comparison between merchant and pilgrim continued even after the process of revaluation of the merchant mentioned in previous paragraphs that recognized his usefulness and brought him into the upper levels of society. In the thirteenth century, the complexity and consequences of the juxtaposition between pilgrims and merchants in legislation was analysed by Enrico da Susa. Enrico specified the need for papal protection for these figures to guarantee peace; the protection had to be valid only in the exercise of the functions of merchants, as was true for other categories of people. Baldo degli Ubaldi, however, proposed a particular classification of peregrinationes distinguishing between negative and positive motivation. Among the latter, the most important is the peregrinatio optima of those who travel for reasons of faith, followed by the peregrinatio melior of those who travel for reasons of study, and the peregrinatio bona, that of merchants (Piergiovanni 2012a, 2012b). In the late Middle Ages, the stories of pilgrims increased. Pilgrims no longer travelled only for purely religious reasons. Some merchants also travelled not only for commercial purposes but also for reasons of faith. An interesting example is Lionardo di Niccolò Frescobaldi, exponent of an important family of Florentine merchants. At the age of sixty, between 1383 and 1385 he undertook, with other Tuscan companions, a long pilgrimage to the East. Before leaving, he received, through his confessor, the bishop Onofrio Dello Steccuto Visdomini, an assignment from Charles III of Carlo d’Angiò Durazzo, King of Naples, to examine the strategic possibilities of the places he would visit in view of a crusade. During his trip, he kept a diary in which he noted carefully the local economic realities (Bartolini and Cardini 1991).

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Divine, pilgrims, poor but also wicked, miscreants—merchants were depicted in many different, sometimes contradictory ways in the Medieval imagination. As the second part of the first objection affirmed, Aquinas seemed to have taken the negative side of this image. However, things are more complicated than the quote implies. As is known, Aquinas was a member of the Order of Preachers (Ordo Praedicatorum), later the Dominican order. The order was instituted from the beginning for the ‘preaching and salvation of souls’ through preaching aimed at teaching the truths of the faith and fighting heresy and vices. The correction of errors and deviations of society also entered into this orientation. Dominic realized that the preaching of his time was ineffective and that Christian people were not well-educated in religious matters, hence, the idea of forming a group of trained preachers. The birth of the order can be traced back to Toulouse when two citizens, Pietro Seila and a certain Tommaso, offered themselves with their estates to Domenico to help him in his initiative. The order was immediately supported by Folco, bishop of Toulouse, verbally approved by Innocent III and definitively by Honorius III on 22 December 1216. The thinking of the preachers on the practice of trading can be traced within their program of salvation of souls, in the summe, in canonical texts, and in the effective new tool that was spreading in that period, precisely by the mendicant orders: the modern sermon (Gaffuri 1991). This also helps explain Aquinas’s interest in economic matters. The second part of the first objection (i.e., that Aquinas held a negative view of international trade and foreign merchants) is mostly founded on the third chapter of the second book of De Regimine Principum (mentioned above). It is known, in fact, that De Regimine Principum was completed by Ptolemy of Lucca, Aquinas’s disciple. It is still uncertain whether the author of the second book was Aquinas or Ptolemy of Lucca. In the introduction to De Regimine Principum written by Blythe (1997), after a survey of studies on this topic, the author ends with a noteworthy declaration: ‘I feel that the question of whether Book I and the beginning of Book 2 were written by the same person, and whether this person was Thomas Aquinas, is still open’ (Aquinas 1997, 5). Blythe was not persuaded by Walter Mohr’s (1974) claim that the concepts developed in various books uphold the existence of different authors. Rather, Blythe was inf luenced by a philological issue raised by Antony Black in his book Political Thought in Europe, 1250–1450 (1992). In a personal letter addressed to Blythe, Black argued that, stylistically, the De Regimine Principum was very different from other pieces by Aquinas. As a result, Blythe proclaimed his intention to enquire into word usage across Aquinas’s numerous works to prove Black’s point. It is uncertain whether Blythe accomplished this difficult and noble project. Nonetheless, it is clear that this thorny issue cannot be resolved (only) by a philological work. The economist Jacob Viner, who in his lifetime did an outstanding body of research on pre-modern authors favourable to international trade, which he labelled ‘universal economy’, explicitly argued that there is no proof in

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Aquinas’s texts that make the case for his inclusion among the universal economists (Viner 1991; Irwin 1998). Conversely, Viner saw Aquinas in continuity with an old tradition that condemned foreign trade and praised economic self-sufficiency. In doing so, Aquinas seemed to embrace an Aristotelian ontological thesis, according to which the degree of perfection is determined by the degree of self-sufficiency.4 Viner argued that Aquinas included economic judgement on trade within the ontological view (Viner 1972). However, this might not be the case. In the last chapter, it has been extensively shown that Aquinas’s relational ontology also affects his anthropological and social account. Aquinas did praise self-sufficiency, but he praised more highly the mutual assistance between people in the path towards perfect beatitude. The needy nature of humanity asks for the development of relational virtues, which is far from exaggerating the role of self-sufficiency. This can be seen from Aquinas’s rejection of Aristotle’s definition of the magnanimous as an imperturbable, self-made man. Rather, Aquinas sustained that even the magnanimous, who deserves great honours and accomplishes great things, needs the help of other people. The distance for Aristotle is clearly established: As the Philosopher says (Ethic, iv, 3), it belongs to the ‘magnanimous to need nothing’, for need is a mark of the deficient. But this is to be understood according to the mode of a man, hence he adds ‘or scarcely anything’. For it surpasses man to need nothing at all. For every man needs, first, the Divine assistance, secondly, even human assistance, since man is naturally a social animal, for he is sufficient by himself to provide for his own life. Accordingly, in so far as he needs others, it belongs to a magnanimous man to have confidence in others, for it is also a point of excellence in a man that he should have at hand those who are able to be of service to him. (Summa Theologiae, IIa–IIae, q. 129, a. 6, ad. 1) Therefore, it is unlikely that Aquinas would have applied an ontological thesis that he did not fully embrace to the economic sphere, as Viner seems to suggest. The last chapter proved that, in Aquinas’s view, there can be virtuous economic activity grounded in mutual assistance and that merchants can contribute to the common good of society through their economic action. Therefore, now it must be established whether, according to Aquinas, common good is a notion that pertains to community with precise boundaries so that foreign merchants are immediately excluded from it, or if even foreign merchants are not necessarily extraneous to it. Aquinas did not hold a static notion of common good, and this can be proven from a social and theological perspective—one connected to the other. As Casadei (2013) observed, when Aquinas explained that the political community is directed to the common good of society, he uses the Latin verb coniectatrix, which comes from cum-iacio, meaning an enterprise which is

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in continuous movement: ‘Communitas politica est ergo coniectatrix principalissimi boni inter omnia bona humana: intendit enim bonum commune’ (Aquinas 2007, I, 19). Moreover, when he described the city (civitas), he often mentioned the communication (communicatio) of its members as its nucleus. But the act of communication is dynamic, continuously evolving. The subsequent message is that the common good is not something given once for all; it is a common enterprise in continuous movement. It is not surprising, then, to read that Aquinas admitted the possibility of friendship even between different cities (civitates). Finnis attributed this part of Aquinas’s teaching to a misunderstanding in William of Moerbeke’s translation of Nicomachean Ethics; when Aristotle ‘was talking about friendship between citizens (cives), the translation used by Aquinas read civitates in lieu of cives’ (Finnis 1998, 136, fn. 54). The author of this book is less convinced that Aquinas would not have corrected something that, if Finnis or Viner were right, would have appeared to him as an error in Aristotelian philosophy. On the contrary, he fully embraced that doctrine, as this passage shows: Second [b, ii], at ‘But we do’, he shows the matters within concord’s competence. First [ii, x] he explains in general that it is concerned with things to be done. He remarks that citizens of a state are said to have concord among themselves when they agree on what is useful, so that they vote for the same measures and work together on projects they consider for their interests. Thus, it is evident that concord deals with things to be done. (Secundo ibi: sed civitates etc., ostendit circa quae sit concordia. Et primo ostendit in generali, quod est circa operabilia. Et dicit, quod civitates dicuntur concordare sibiinvicem quando consentiunt circa utilia, ita quod eadem eligunt, et communiter operantur ea quae opinantur esse utilia. Et sic patet, quod concordia est circa operabilia.) (Aquinas [1271–1272] 1964, IX, 6) All these things considered, Aquinas would not have believed the common good to be something with precise boundaries to be protected from strangers. This argument could have made more sense in the Aristotelian philosophy of his disciple Ptolemy of Lucca, who is probably the real author of the second book of De Regimine Principuum in which there is a condemnation of foreign merchants. But the argument does not hold in the whole of Aquinas’s thought, as further and incontrovertibly proven by the reference to the theological virtue of charity. Charity relates directly the love towards God to the love towards human beings: You can love a person in two ways. First, in itself; and in that sense you cannot have friendship for a friend. Second, you can love someone because of another person, as when, for the friendship that one has towards a friend, he loves all those who belong to him, be they children, servants,

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or otherwise joined to him. And love can be so great as to embrace the friend who belongs to him, even if he offend and hate us. (Summa Theologiae, IIa–IIae, q. 23, a. 1, corp.) The dimension of charity includes, in the range of love of friendship (amor amicitiae, see Chapter 2), not only those who are similar as virtuous and therefore capable of reciprocity, but all men as such, that is, as loved by God: ‘And do not matter we are talking about the neighbour or brother, as does St. John [1 Jn 4, 20, 21], or even friend, as shown by Lv 19, 18, because all these voices indicate the same affinity’ (Summa Theologiae, IIa–IIae, q. 47, a. 7, corp.). According to Aquinas, the perfection of charity requires the predisposition of the soul to love singularly (singulari) even the enemy, the stranger, and the odd, if the circumstances require so (si necessitatis occurreret). However, a person who loves through charity also has a special affection for their closest friends. Aquinas uses the beautiful image of fire that increases in intensity, burning its neighbouring things more vigorously, in order to reach distant things. According to Taylor, this expresses very clearly the physiognomy of the Christian community: this active charity, stepping beyond the bounds of community, can be placed in the context of a super-community of all the children of God, thus replicating something close to the Stoic cosmopolis. But this is seen more as something to be built, an eschatological concept. (2007, 246) The merchant can be a positive, active part in the promotion of common good. He can provide the city with the goods it lacks but also foster relations of civic friendship based on mutual assistance. This is not equal to affirming that merchants cannot be dangerous for society. Like all other roles, from the king to the peasants, the merchant can act beyond his status and consequent duty. A discussion cannot be avoided of what precisely constitutes the status of a person and, more broadly, what are the features of the society described by Aquinas.

The misunderstanding of status In this section, the second and third objections will be addressed together. The precept not to go beyond one’s status, in fact, is the individual maxim that ref lects a static view of a hierarchical and vertical society. It has been shown that, as far as the adjective ‘static’ is concerned, Aquinas seemed to adopt a dynamic view of society based on the dynamic notion of the common good. The same cannot be argued for the other two adjectives. Aquinas, inf luenced by the vertical structure of the feudal society of his times, did support a hierarchical view of society and, in turn, taught that a person should not seek to surpass his status in it. Nonetheless, at a closer look, the kind of

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hierarchy and the meaning of status render Aquinas’s view original and very different from the feudal one dominant during his times. The social and political hierarchy is always justified by reference to the common good. If someone holds a higher place in society, if someone is the king of the others, it is just because he can promote the common good better than the others. This could be interpreted as further confirmation that, in Aquinas’s view, personal responsibility is undermined by the schema of mutual assistance. Some people at the top of the hierarchy work for the common good; others at the bottom are assisted and thus do not try to improve their situation—what is called a moral hazard in economics today. But this is not how Aquinas understood the functioning of society. Promoting the common good is something that concerns all members of society. Aquinas’s preference for kingship as the political form, for example, was based more on the bad examples given by the degeneration of the Roman Republic rather than from a law grounded in the nature of things. This appears evident from a passage of De Regimine Principuum, Book I (written by Aquinas), often ignored in commentaries of Aquinas’s political thought: It often happens that persons living under a king strive for the common good rather sluggishly, inasmuch as they reckon that that which they devote to the common good does not benefit themselves but the king, under whose power they see the common goods to be. But when they see that the common good is not in the power of one, each attends to it as if it were their own, not as if it were something pertaining to someone else. For this reason, experience seems to show that one city administrated by rectors chosen for a year can sometimes do more than one king who has three or four cities, and small services that kings exact weigh more heavily than great weights imposed by the community of citizens. (Aquinas 1997, 71) Aquinas was not considering modern forms of democracy, and he made clear in the rest of the book that government of the king was best suited for his times. Nonetheless, the general point he made in this passage remains, as the common good concerns all the people, and it is better pursued when many govern together. Aquinas’s preference for the vertical structure of political power could be inscribed in the law of people (ius gentiuum), where human institutions are favoured with respect to others because, in that historical moment, they are more useful in promoting the common good (Summa Theologiae, Ia–IIae, q. 94). But Aquinas made clear that nothing prevents those rules from being changed according to the circumstances or even the customs (Summa Theologiae, Ia–IIae, q. 94, 97; Chroust 1941; Gilson 2002). The same can be observed from a different angle. It is curious, although not uncommon, that Aquinas chose to use the metaphor of the body to describe the political order. The curiosity lies in the role of the king, who, as would be normally expected from a vertical and hierarchical view, is not the

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head of the body. Here, Aquinas took the cardiocentric view typical of the Aristotelian tradition, which sees the heart as the first and more fundamental part of the animal, while rejecting the more vertical Platonic view, which poses the head at the centre (Congiunti 2017). These arguments cannot prove that Aquinas did not hold a hierarchical and vertical structure of society. On the contrary, they show that there are some elements of ‘horizontalization’ that are more or less hidden in his thought. Another could be observed from an ontological point of view. The image of a fixed and immutable society seems to imply that each part has inscribed in its essence the role that it will assume in the social sphere. But what does ‘essence’ mean in Aquinas’s philosophy? It is known, in fact, that Aquinas was interested in the existence (esse) of a particular being (ens in actu) even before focusing on essence (essentia). The essence is the compound of matter–form, in which matter stands in potency to substantial form. Saying that something is ‘in potency’ in the Aristotelian tradition implies that it realizes its full potentialities with the coming of the thing to which it is in potency. The form is what renders matter something and what differentiates it from something else. In turn, the composite matter–form is in potency to the act of being/existence (esse). The particular being is the result of this double process of actualization. In this respect, Pabst (2012) made a remarkably interesting case. He argued that the principle of individuation, that is, the criteria that attest both the uniqueness of an individual and their difference from another individual, in Aquinas, is inexorably tied to relationality. This is because the essences receive the act of being from God. God, in fact, gifted humanity with the common being (esse commune), which is the very first pure act of being inscribed in His essence. What Pabst interestingly noted is that the esse commune is not something in between God and the world; neither is a gift separated from the Giver. Instead, all things in creation participate in God’s being, and in their aptitude to be actualized by common being, they are related to one another. Therefore, the principle of individuation presupposes relationality, the one between created things that participates in esse commune among themselves and the one between created things and God. Pabst’s reading not only confirms and metaphysically reinforces the interpretation of Aquinas anthropological ideas advanced in the previous chapter but also says something interesting on the vertical–horizontal issue. Creation is hierarchically related to God and in God, but this kind of hierarchy does not necessarily have to be applied in the horizontal relations between created things that share common being. Human beings’ social roles, in particular, are ‘equalized’ by their spiritual and vertical relations with God.5 Two examples can be posited. On the one hand, Aquinas often specified that, even if the common good of society has precedence over the individual good, the same does not apply when the individual good is of a spiritual nature. In Aquinas’s words, ‘Man is not ordained to the body politic, according to all that he is and has’ (Summa Theologiae, Ia–IIae, q. 21, a. 4, ad. 3); therefore, ‘the common good takes precedence of the private good, if it be of the same genus: but it

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may be that the private good is better generically’ (Summa Theologiae, IIa–IIae, q. 152, a. 4, ad. 3). The latter case is when the common good is compared to the divine good. This is what led modern commentators such as Maritain (1994) or Novak (1989) to envisage an innovative, even liberal, idea of the common good in Aquinas, rooted in his personalism. On the other hand, the argument becomes even more complex when the nature of women is considered. In some passages of the Summa Theologiae, women are relegated to a subordinate role: ‘As regards the individual nature, woman is defective and misbegotten’ (Summa Theologiae, Ia, q. 92, a. 1), or ‘so by such a kind of subjection woman is naturally subject to man, because in man the discretion of reason predominates’ (Summa Theologiae, Ia, q. 92, a. 1). In other passages, conversely, Aquinas states that there is no distinction between men and women because ‘the image of God belongs to both sexes, since it is in the mind, wherein there is no sexual distinction’ (Summa Theologiae, Ia, q. 93, a. 6) and, consequently, ‘women do not differ from men in matters pertaining to the soul’ (Aquinas in Finnis 1998, 172). This could seem a concession of little significance, because in actual practice, women, often defined by their status as wife, remain naturally subjected to man. But considering that in Aquinas’s anthropology the soul has predominance with respect to other parts of the human being, it could have been stated that between the two sexes there is no absolute inequality. So far, some tensions present in Aquinas’s social and political view have been stressed. To conclude this section, the argumentation addresses the most important reason that should prevent us from seeing a fixed, hierarchical and vertical structure in Aquinas’s thought: the meaning of status. Here, it is important to quote Aquinas’s texts, because on this issue they are often mentioned but rarely quoted in their entirety. The first important passage follows the aforementioned (“Sed contra: four objections to the Aquinas–civil economy link”) definition of status: Consequently, matters which easily change and are extrinsic to them do not constitute a state among men, for instance, that a man be rich or poor, of high or low rank, and so forth. Wherefore in the civil law [*Dig. I, IX, De Senatoribus] (Lib. Cassius ff. De Senatoribus), it is said that if a man be removed from the senate, he is deprived of his dignity rather than of his state. But that alone seemingly pertains to a man’s state, which regards an obligation binding his person, in so far, to wit, as a man is his own master or subject to another, not indeed from any slight or unstable cause, but from one that is firmly established; and this is something pertaining to the nature of freedom or servitude. Therefore, the state properly regards freedom or servitude, whether in spiritual or in civil matters. (Summa Theologiae, IIa–IIae, q. 183, a. 1) What emerges from this passage is that Aquinas did not include rank and riches under the label of status. His argument was about servitude and freedom,

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which is quite different from the positions that people held within society. The latter are described as mutable and extrinsic (variantur et extrinseca sunt), as the means necessary to acquire them. But then a tension seems to emerge with another passage from Aquinas that, as will be shown in the next chapter, had a long echo in the history of ideas. The reference is to Quaestio 118 of the second part of the second part of Summa Theologiae, in which Aquinas dealt with the vice of covetousness: Hence, it must needs be that man’s good in their respect consists in a certain measure, in other words, that man seeks, according to a certain measure, to have external riches, in so far as they are necessary for him to live in keeping with his condition of life. Wherefore it will be a sin for him to exceed this measure, by wishing to acquire or keep them immoderately. This is what is meant by covetousness, which is defined as ‘immoderate love of possessing’. (Summa Theologiae, IIa–IIae, q. 118, a.1) Here, Aquinas seems to affirm that external riches should not be sought exceeding the quantity necessary to maintain one’s condition in life. But the reader will have noticed that, in this passage, the term immoderate (immoderatus) and its derivates often recur. This is not surprising, given the meaning of moderate gain (lucrum moderatum) that, according to Aquinas, should characterize the intentions of the buyer and the seller in market exchanges. As has been extensively argued in this chapter and the last, between moderate gain and no gain, there is a space in which the economic agent can seek his own good and that of other parties involved in the exchange. When the love of possessing totalizes the motivation of a person, and the desire for social climbing becomes the only objective, then for Aquinas we are in front of the sin of covetousness. As Sister Frances A. Richey already proved (1940), an equal, if not worse, sin envisaged by Aquinas is the sin of pusillanimity: Now just as presumption makes a man exceed what is proportionate to his power, by striving to do more than he can, so pusillanimity makes a man fall short of what is proportionate to his power, by refusing to tend to that which is commensurate thereto. Wherefore as presumption is a sin, so is pusillanimity. Hence it is that the servant who buried in the earth the money he had received from his master, and did not trade with it through fainthearted fear, was punished by his master (Mt. 25; Lk. 19). (Summa Theologiae, IIa–IIae, q. 133, a. 1) Even if the metaphor from the Bible should not be taken in the literal sense, the economic f lavour of the quote perfectly expresses the sense of Aquinas’s teaching. If someone wants to argue that a justification of self-interest as a

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motor of economic life cannot be found in Aquinas, as, for example, in Smith or Ricardo, no complaint can be admitted. Aquinas adopted a very different anthropology founded on gift and relational virtue, and in which economic self-interest is reconsidered, although not integrally absorbed, within the promotion of the common good of society. Furthermore, if it is true that divine providence arranged society so that a man born with different abilities and talents is therefore able to contribute differently to the common good of society, this does not entrap him in the duties of his roles. As Weber rightly commented, the phenomenon of the division of labour and occupations in society had, among others, been interpreted by Thomas Aquinas, to whom we may most conveniently refer, as a direct consequence of the divine scheme of things. But the places assigned to each man in this cosmos follows ex causis naturalibus and are fortuitous (contingent in the Scholastic terminology). (2005, 106) Saying that self-interest has to be referred to the common good does not mean that it is always like that. The next and final section will deal with cases in which the behaviour of buyers and sellers deviates from the virtuous. Aquinas’s thought in these cases will be relative in opening room for the role of imperfect behaviours in markets but also to the important presence of institutions for restoring them towards the common good.

Commerce and institutions Aquinas gave significant space to non-virtuous behaviour in the economic sphere. Not only the Quaestio 78 of the second part of the second part of Summa Theologiae is dedicated to the sinful practice of usury (usura); Quaestio 77 also, which was addressed in part in the last chapter, is titled ‘Of Cheating, which is committed in buying and selling’ (de fraudulentia quae committitur in emptionibus et venditionibus). Aquinas’s observations on this matter will not be described below. Rather, the enquiry will be into whether he admitted a positive role connected to the virtuous practice of commerce as mutual assistance for cases in which mostly the pursuit of gain motivates the behaviour of economic actors. The present book does not enquire in depth into the sources of Aquinas’s economic thought (Kaye 2000). Nonetheless, the traditions Aquinas received and commented on are also important to understand the novelty of some of his ideas. Consider the paradigm of the merchants who sold corn in a city affected by famine, discussed by Cicero in the third book of On Duties (De Officiis, Cicero 2003).6 The merchant brought corn from Alexandria to Rhodes, where, due to the famine, its price is very high. He knows that other merchants will soon follow his example, and sees an opportunity

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for gain. He starts selling his corn without advising the population of the arrival of other merchants, information which would have lowered the price of the corn, and therefore his profit is considerable. The most important message from this story, Cicero suggests, is that the merchant put the useful before the good, and therefore, merchants, as dishonest, self-interested individuals, cannot be trusted. According to Cicero, the merchant should have told the truth in that situation. His silence ruined the mutual advantage (commune utilitate. See Aquinas in Chap. 2) on which the commercial transaction should be built. Aquinas unequivocally recalled Cicero’s example, without quoting him directly (Summa Theologiae, IIa–IIae, q. 77, a. 3, ad. 4). He also significantly omitted the particular of the famine, but the story and the way in which he described it leaves no room for doubt. However, the conclusion reached was significantly different. For Aquinas, the merchant did not act unjustly by not advising the buyers of the arrival of other merchants. He could have reduced the price of the goods, and in this case he would have been extremely virtuous (abundantioris esset virtutis). But the virtue of justice on which exchanges are built did not require either action of him (lowering the price or informing the buyers). What can be deduced from this comment? Aquinas has often been accused of not recognizing the importance of commerce for creating wealth (Fanfani 1934; Barbieri 2013). The vulgate interpretation of his economic teachings sees him as recognizing commerce only as a means to distribute the surplus created through work and as a surplus generator itself. Although this vision contains traces of truth, the examples of merchants just examined prove that Aquinas also sees a positive role of commerce practiced for self-interest. His acceptance of the boundaries of the virtue of justice in the merchant’s behaviour condemned by Cicero, in fact, implies that he also acknowledged the importance of the outcomes of commerce—bringing corn where needed—before the reasons, i.e., selfinterest rather than promotion of the interests of the others. In other words, Aquinas feared that being too strict on man’s behaviour, which, it should not be forgotten, is continuously diminished by Original Sin, would have produced at least the chance that no merchant brought the corn where it was most needed. It should also be noted that Aquinas did not fall into the virtuous/otherregarding and non-virtuous/self-interest dichotomy. Consider that he listed as exceedingly virtuous behaviour that of merchants lowering prices which, nonetheless, includes a profit for the sellers. One could have expected that abundant virtue, in this case, could imply an act of pure gratuitousness. However, as shown in the previous chapter, Aquinas saw an important role for gift not only beyond the boundaries of a contract, but also within them. Mutual assistance and self-interest can coexist in the market exchange. The same can be observed in the careful distinctions Aquinas made about usury. He knew that reproaching any kind of loan as usurious would have

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deprived the civil life of an important element. Recall the passage of mutual assistance as a fomentum of friendship analysed in the previous chapter: The purpose of the Law was to accustom men to its precepts, so as to be ready to come to one another’s assistance: because this is a very great incentive to friendship. The Law granted these facilities for helping others in the matter not only of gratuitous and absolute donations, but also of mutual transfers: because the latter kind of succour is more frequent and benefits the greater number. (Summa Theologiae, Ia–IIae, q. 105, a. 2, ad. 4) This is the intended meaning when, for example, Aquinas separated loans given for commercial activities from usurious practices, or when he taught that the lawyer is not bound to assist people for free, except in the case of extreme necessity (extrema necessitate). Gift, friendship, relational virtue— Aquinas understood that all these elements were too important to leave them outside the economic sphere. As the titles of the Quaestiones above express, Aquinas was far from being naive in conceiving the economic sphere. Just as political and social institutions must sustain the course of civil life towards the common good by sanctioning and repressing unlawful behaviour, the same is valid for economic institutions. For this reason, Aquinas assigned the field of buying and selling to the virtue of justice (iustitia). The object of this virtue, in fact, is the right (ius) of every person to have what is due (reddere unicuique quod suum est). For Aquinas, the right has the function of ‘adjusting’ (iustari). In the specific case of buyers and sellers, the right ensures that one does not suffer enormous damage from the other—the ancient doctrine that Aquinas adopted of the laesio aenormis. Hence, if the buyer suffers a loss from unlawful behaviour of the seller, then the right established by the contract adjusts the situation by imposing on the seller the restitution due to the buyer. The same is valid for the power of the political authority to intervene in economic controversies and, in particular cases, those who govern the state must determine the just measures of things saleable, with due consideration for the conditions of place and time. Hence it is not lawful to disregard such measures as are established by public authority or custom. (Summa Theologiae, IIa–IIae, q. 77, a. 2, ad. 2) For the prominent role he assigned to institutions in controlling economic life, Aquinas has been classified among voluntarist authors in the history of economic ideas (Fanfani 1942). Moreover, too much control by church institutions over the sacred and social life and too little on economic life was one of the main complaints of Luther and the Reformers. These, among

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many other topics, will be addressed in the next chapters, in which the various paths that brought Aquinas’ socio-economic ideas to eighteenth-century Italian civil economists will be explored.

Notes 1 To go more in depth into these issues, see Todeschini (2004), Menant (2015), and Cipolla (1995). 2 An example is reported in a deed registered by the Genoese notary Guglielmo Cassinese on March 8, 1191 Alde et Ermelin e et Sibilie Confitetur Manfredus de Rovereto de Sancto Donato se portare in societate de rebus Alde uxoris quondam Ottonis Guercii lib. xii, et de rebus Ermeline de Turri lib. xii, et de rebus Sibilie de Poma lib. xii, et de societate quam habet cum Oberto de Aquabona, eius voluntate et presentia, lib. xviii, Tunexim, causa negociandi. Inde Januam reducere promittit in potestate earum vel certi missi earum proficuum quod Deus dederit cum capitali. Et salvo capitali, proficuum per medium debet partiri. Et hanc confessionem facit Iohanni Longo recipienti pro feminis[…]. Notai liguri (1938, 111) 3 Apprenticeship was an important step in learning a mainly craft job. Apprenticeship contracts were registered by the notaries and included obligations for both the master and the apprentice. There are numerous examples of this contract generation. Here are some passages from a Ligurian case, drafted on June 21, 1191, in which Belluco di Carrara, Bonvicino marmorario, Guido di Canizo, Durante son of Gordiano di Carrara entrust Ubertino son of Bonsignore di Miseja to Guidone Reja to stay with him and serve him. Guidone Reja undertakes to stay with Ubertino «[…] annos vi, et causa serviendi ei de omnibus serviciis que sciat et possit facere, bona fide, et quod salvabit et custodiet res eius et personam et quod dampnum restituent […]. » Ubertino doveva […] attenderet et quod contra non veniet. Et si contrafaceret penam lib. x ei stipulanti spondent in solidum, rato manente pacto, abrenunciantes iuri solidi et iuri quo cavetur principalem debitorem primo conveniri et omni iuri. Et cum fuerit in tempore, Ubertinus debebit iurare attendere ut supra, et salvare et custodire res eius et personam, et quando placuerit Widoni […]. Lo stesso giorno in un altro atto ma davanti agli stessi testimoni Guido Reja si impegna anche a tenere con se Ubertino usque ad annos vi et quod docebit eum bona fide de suo officio, et quod dabit victum et vestitum preter quod non dabit vestitum in primo anno. Et quod in sine termini dabit martellum I, ferra IIII grossa, cazolam I, scopellos II, acas duas. Et ita promittit attendere, sub pena lib. x stipulata, rato manente pacto […]. Notai Liguri (303–304) 4 Martha Nusbbaum (2001) would disagree with the overemphasis on selfsufficiency in Aristotle’s thought. Aristotle’s eudaemonic anthropology, in her view, is more fragile and vulnerable than this caricature of self-sufficiency seems to acknowledge. 5 This does not apply to the role of the Church in religious matters. To Aquinas, the mediation of Church institutions was fundamental for the common good of society.

Aquinas and economic thought 87 6 I had an interesting discussion with Robert Sugden on this passage from Cicero to Aquinas. He thought that this example, especially Aquinas’ comment, could also be applied to the similar example that opens Michael Sandel’s book What Money Can’t Buy (2012) on the behaviour of innkeepers after a storm.

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The karstic rivers To describe the development of the tradition that inf luenced eighteenthcentury civil economy, Bruni and Zamagni (2016) employed the suggestive view of karstic rivers. The term applies to rivers that f low underground for part of their length and emerge a great distance from their spring. The same image can be applied to Aquinas’s ideas in at least two respects. On the one hand, Thomistic ideas were imbued with and developed in different geographical and cultural contexts. One underground path starts from the School of Salamanca and arrives at classical and neo-classical economy; another relates to the Protestant Reformation. The third, germane to the object of this book’s research, tracks Aquinas’s inf luence on the Italian cultural context up to civil economy. To explore this last pattern, on the other hand, the distinction will be made between the interpretations of Aquinas’s social and economic ideas that became dominant and those that remained hidden like a karstic river. The outcome can be anticipated. All the objections analysed in the previous chapter depicting Thomism as a weltanschauung opposed to the development of markets and suspicious of the economic sphere ruled the period before and after the Counter-Reformation (anti-commerce Aquinas). Conversely, the elements that render Aquinas a forerunner of civil economists survived in the Dominican tradition, in Italian civic humanism of the first half of the fifteenth century, and into the confessional practice that involved the merchants. Hence, this section will focus on two of the three paths followed by Aquinas—the third Italian path is bifurcated, as has just been sketched. After Aquinas’s death in 1274, adopting his ideas meant mostly defending them from the attacks and censures coming from the Christian world. The most famous antagonist was the bishop of Paris, Etienne Tempier, who, in 1270, condemned 15 propositions (13 Averroistic and 2 of Aquinas) and in 1277, a wider list (219 propositions) that included many non-Averroistic theses, some relating to Avicennism and others belonging to Thomas. The order of Preachers (Dominicans) slowly embedded Thomism into their canons, first asking every member of the order to defend and promote his doctrine,

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and then, in 1309, to teach Aquinas’s thought in the Studia Generalia and in the chairs related to the most important universities (Paris, Cologne). Finally, in the late fourteenth century, the order recommended that each of their libraries procure Aquinas’s works (Kristeller 1974). Every Dominican student had to learn Aquinas’s theology and philosophy, even though the more studied works were his commentaries on the Bible and the sentences of Peter Lombard. Crucial to the development and spread of Aquinas’s thought was his canonization in 1323 by Pope John XXII and the implicit revocation of Tempier’s condemnation. This gradually led the Dominicans to employ the Summa Theologiae as the main text. A sign of the Thomistic soul assumed by Dominicans was the famous commentary and defence of Aquinas’s ideas by John Capreolus1 in Toulouse in 1432. Leaving aside for the moment the inf luence of Aquinas’s social and economic ideas on Humanism and the Renaissance, his inf luence on the Spanish Scholastic developing between the universities of Salamanca and Coimbra (Francisco de Vitoria, Domingo de Soto, Luis de Alcalá, Martin de Azpilcueta, Tomás de Mercado, Francisco Suárez, Luis de Molina) in the sixteenth century and beyond is well known. The Spanish commentators inherited mainly Aquinas’s moral and legal theory, which they developed principally in their famous treatises on the law of nations. Concerning economic ideas, Schumpeter remarked, ‘The very high level of Spanish sixteenth-century economics was due chief ly to the scholastic contributions’ (Schumpeter [1954] 2006, 161), and in a note, he added significantly, Señor Larraz speaks of a Spanish school—the “school of Salamanca”—of sixteenth-century economists. There is indeed some justification for this. But the core of this school was made up of late scholastics, many of the most eminent of whom happened to be Spaniards. (Schumpeter [1954] 2006, 161) The Spanish Scholastic made important contributions and significant developments to Thomistic economic ideas on just price, value, and monetary theory (De Roover 1955; Rothbard 1976; De Soto 1996; Gómez Rivas 1999; Chafuen 2003). Some authors (Young and Gordon 1992; Chaplygina and Lapidus 2016) stressed an interesting pattern in the development of the doctrine of price, from the revival of Thomism within the School of Salamanca during the XVI century, to the foundation of what was later called “modern” theories of natural law in the works of Grotius and Pufendorf […] to the dissemination of their ideas in Great Britain, at the very origin of the School of Glasgow, by Gerson Carmichael and Francis Hutcheson—Adam Smith’s most admired predecessor. (Chaplygina and Lapidus 2016, 27)

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The intent was not to say that Aquinas was the founder of political economy or that his economic teachings on just price are the source of Smith’s concept of natural price but to stress the inf luence of his ideas on modern authors. Similarly, other scholars (De Roover 1955; Rothbard 1976; De Soto 1996) saw the Spanish Scholastic developments in the subjective theory of value as the ‘prehistory of the Austrian school of Economics’, according to the efficacious expression employed by Rothbard (1976). This also involved a possible convergence between Aquinas’s and Hayek’s legal theories (Van Drunen 2002). It is not the intent of the present research to further explore these paths, which nonetheless constitute important modern and contemporary echoes of Aquinas’s social and economic ideas. In the history of economic thought, in fact, not only has homo oeconomicus (ruled by individualism and utilitarianism in a mechanical–social context) replaced homo iustus (ruled by morality and laws), but, with regard to Aquinas’s theories, the focus of scholars on homo iustus has also overshadowed the role of naturaliter homo homini amicus est, which is the main object of research in this book. The second path one could explore in retracing Aquinas’s inf luence on modern economic thought intersects the Protestant world. Was Aquinas a reference author for Luther or Calvin? Were his economic teachings adopted by the Reformers? Contrary to what might be expected, the answers to the two questions are opposite. While rejecting his theological insights, the Reformers (Luther, Calvin) shared Aquinas’s economic teachings. From a theological standpoint, Luther read Aquinas’s theology as mediated by the via moderna of Gabriel Biel and paired with Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt’s polemic against the Scholastic theology as a form of new Pelagianism (Steinmetz 2002). Against the authoritative interpretation of John Capreolus, who showed that Aquinas’s notion of virtue is intrinsically connected to the intervention of God’s grace, Biel undermined the latter. He emphasized the role of human will, which prepares man for receiving grace, as well as the possibility of sinners to merit justifying grace. For the reader well-versed in Theology, it can be noted that Biel distanced Aquinas from Augustinianism and brought him towards Pelagianism. Therefore, it is not surprising that Luther, in 1519, condemned Aquinas together with Duns Scotus, both main exponents of the principal trends of Scholastic thought: For it is certain that the moderni (as they are called) agree with the Scotists and Thomists in this matter (namely on grace and free will) except for one man, Gregory of Rimini, whom they all condemn, who rightly and convincingly condemns them of being worse than Pelagians. (Luther, in Steinmetz 2002, 57) Moreover, Luther confronted theologians of the Roman Church, such as Sylvester Prierias and Thomas De Vio Cardinal Cajetan ( Janz 1983; Steinmetz 2002), who strongly defended Thomistic doctrine. Calvin, who was less

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trained in Scholastic theology than Luther (Donnelly 1976), was inf luenced more by Scotist than Thomistic doctrine. The same is not valid with regard to economic ideas. The young Luther adopted the vulgate of Aquinas’s attitude towards the desire for gain as base (turpitudo), whereas both Luther and Calvin were inf luenced by the idea of sterility of money tied to usurious practices2 (Langholm 2009).3 Today it is not controversial to argue that the Reformation was connected to the rise of capitalism, although Reformers were very strict and ‘Medieval-minded’ with regard to economic ideas (Fanfani 1934; Gregory 2012; Bruni 2020). Aquinas’s economic ideas were embraced by the Protestant world in their anticommerce and anti-merchant forms from which, as will be shown below, they were also developed in the Italian context. Nonetheless, being entirely under the general umbrella of Scholastic theology and philosophy, it is not easy to distinguish which of Aquinas’s specific ideas, or interpretations of his ideas, were linked to Luther’s and Calvin’s doctrines. More interestingly, Aquinas was a constant reference author for the Protestant world in Middle and Southern Europe after the founders (Luther and Calvin). Donnelly (1976) spoke of a Calvinist Thomism having as its champions Theodore Beza, Jerome Zanchi, or Peter Martyr Vermigli (Rehnman 2012). Lutheranism also looked favourably on Thomism, as shown by Martin Bucer and Philip Melanchthon and, for the seventeenth century, by John Gerhard or John Dosch, the latter writing, in 1656, a work significantly titled Thomas Aquinas dictus doctor Angelicus exhibitus confessor veritas Augustana Confessione repetitae. These ideas spread and developed mostly in Central (Germany) and Southern (Italy, Switzerland) Europe. It would be interesting to examine whether this Thomistic inf luence on Protestantism is connected to the spread of the German social market economy (Peacock and Willgerodt 1989) or, more generally, to the differences between the spirit of capitalism developed in Northern Europe and the United States from the ones developing in other parts of Europe. As specified in the Preface and Introduction, this book is interested in the spirit of capitalism that f lourished in Southern Europe, specifically in the Italian cultural context. For this reason, the course of argumentation now turns to the third path followed by Aquinas’s ideas, the one related to the Italian cultural context from the thirteenth to the eighteenth century. The aim is to individuate some hints that contain features of the Mediterranean spirit of capitalism, as developed in Thomistic philosophy, and interpretations of Aquinas’s social and economic ideas that contrast with the Mediterranean spirit.

Theological voluntarism and economic voluntarism In considering the development of Thomistic economic ideas from the Middle Ages to Modernity, reference to the Franciscan movement and Franciscan economic teachings is unavoidable, but the similarities and differences should

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not be stretched too far, because Aquinas and the late Franciscan School (Duns Scotus, Ockham, Olivi, Bernardino da Siena)4 began their theorizing from very different theological and ontological perspectives. In his volume on the history of economic thought, Fanfani (1942) classified Aquinas among the voluntarist authors. This designation might be surprising for scholars versed in theology since, in their discipline, Aquinas is seen as an opponent of the voluntarist account—prerogative of Franciscan authors (McGrath 2005)— from the theological perspective. A clarification of this apparent paradox can help shed further light on Aquinas’s economic ideas and their relationship with those of the Franciscans. As scholars have shown (Bruni and Milbank 2019; Bruni 2020), Fanfani classified as voluntarist all those economic doctrines that see human behaviour as mainly egoistic and sinful, but who preached the possibility for man to overcome his instincts through his will, with the help of secular and sacred institutions. In the economic sphere, this refers to efforts to direct individual actions intentionally towards the good of society and, when this moral attempt fails, to try to control the sinful behaviour through the intervention of institutions such as the Law. According to Fanfani, Aquinas should be included in Voluntarism because ‘he pointed to the instinctive human tendency towards egoistic economic action and counterposed it with the ideal behaviour of Christians that spontaneously observes injustice and rectifies with charity the numerous cases in life in which justice is inadequate’ (Fanfani 1942, 83. The translation has been made by the author of this paper). Voluntarism, characterized by the economic doctrines from the Greek world towards pre-modernity, is counterposed with naturalism, which emerged mostly in the seventeenth century. Naturalist authors see human inclinations as perfectly balanced and converging towards the good of society. Under this label can be placed, for example, the theories of the Scottish philosophers and Adam Smith in particular. A common theme of Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and The Wealth of Nations (1776) is the endowment of natural sentiments, which, during human interactions, tend to produce good consequences. In the Theory of Moral Sentiments, the natural sentiments of sympathy and resentment produce codes of morality and justice (Smith 1984, 85–91; Sugden 2002). In The Wealth of Nations, the natural sentiment of self-love and a natural propensity—the impulse to truck, barter, and exchange—produce, via the invisible hand, the wealth of nations (Smith 1976, Chap. I–II). Hence, there is no space for evil: Smith proposes a natural religion with the implicit assumption that the universe is (or is as if ) designed to lead to good outcomes through spontaneous processes. According to Fanfani, Aquinas is on the opposite side of this naturalist view of the market, which finds its best expression in the theory of spontaneous order (Sugden 1989). In the theological sphere, Aquinas is classified as an opponent of voluntarism in the dispute between intellectualists and voluntarists. Generally speaking, the voluntarists contrasted the belief that God’s intellect has pre-eminence over His will (voluntas intellectum sequitur) and that, consequently, the structure

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of reality according to the divine plan, knowledge, and wisdom (sapientia) has precedence over God’s will. The dispute was about the ultimate source of reality but also about God’s relation to Creation. If God’s intellect created reality, then the ontological structure of Creation, grounded on God’s wisdom, binds Him—it would be better to argue that God’s wisdom binds itself—to generally follow its order. Somehow, theological intellectualism gives ontological relevance to the world because, being the result of divine wisdom, the structure of reality is perfectly harmonized and realized. This, in turn, gives precedence of the intellect over the will in human beings. To know the essence of the world as created by God, one has to start by enquiring into the nature of things (ex natura rei). It is not by chance that Aquinas’s proof of God’s existence always starts from man’s experience. Voluntarism argued that Creation is grounded in God’s free act of will. In this way, voluntarist theologians believed they had fully understood the line of the Creed in which God is defined as omnipotent: God is not subject to any external constraints, including the order His free act impressed upon Creation. As a consequence, they ontologically separated the essence of Creation from the essence of Creator. If reality is the fruit of God’s will and secondarily of his intellect, this weakens the ontological structure of reality. This understanding brings voluntarist theologians to emphasize the role of faith and illumination over intellect and experience in understanding the essence of things. Whereas Aquinas is listed among the intellectualists, Duns Scotus, Ochakam, and generally the second Franciscan school are listed among voluntarists. This position has profound theological and ethical implications. As McGrath has shown (2005), the intellectualists–voluntarists dispute involved different understandings of the topic of God’s justice (Iustitia Dei). One issue is about the ‘necessity’ of Christ’s sacrifice: was it a necessary satisfaction, that is, an adequate response to restore the order of Creation after the disorder wrought by Original Sin? Against Anselm of Canterbury, Aquinas argued that even according to the order of His justice, God was not strictly bound to ask satisfaction for the crime of Original Sin committed by humanity. He did so because it was the most appropriate (convenientius) means according to His divine plan. Conversely, Scotus saw no essential connection between Christ’s sacrifice and the divine plan: should God have willed, for example, the sacrifice of an angel, it would have reached the same result. This is because, in the voluntarists’ account, all is centred on God’s will and decision. Things become even clearer if one approaches the Scotus doctrine on predestination. How do God’s will and intellect interact in choosing who is ordained for grace and glory? According to intellectualist authors, God’s intellect informs His will about the people who will be granted grace and therefore obtain eternal glory. Scotus rejected this view because, to him, it did bind God’s gratuitous act of predestination either to a particular means, that is grace, or to an intellectual foresight of merits that should be the ratio of their election. Conversely, God’s will freely predestines people to glory,

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and after this decision of the will, and only after, can the intellect play a role, predisposing the means for that end established by God’s will. Grace is just a mean; it cannot contain in itself the reason for predestination. In McGrath’s words, this is the ‘difference between Aquinas and Scotus: for the former, God predestines first to grace and subsequently to glory; for the latter, God predestines first to glory and then to grace’ (2005, 167). The overemphasis on God’s will and decision over the course and structure of reality not only undermines the intelligibility of the latter but it also creates an ontological gap between Creation and its Creator. This can also be seen from the sharp distinction between the moral and meritorious value of an act, proposed by William of Ockham, whose seeds are traceable to Scotus’s ideas and to be fully developed by the via moderna of Gabriel Biel. The meritorious value of an act is connected to its significance for salvation, whereas its moral value relates to its intrinsic worth. In the intellectualistic framework, these two realms coincided ontologically. For the second Franciscan school, this association is not ontological and should not be taken for granted. According to Ockham, in freely creating the world, God entered into a covenant (pactum) with humanity. He freely and willingly entered into this covenant as He freely and willingly created the world. Moreover, Ochkam proposes the distinction between God’s absolute power (potentia absoluta) and God’s ordained power (potentia ordinata). All these things considered, for voluntarists, the meritorious value of an act coincides with its moral value only because it entered into the terms of the covenant between God and humanity. For this reason, they did not speak of an ontological causality but rather of covenantal causality. The reason for meritorious value lies in divine acceptance (divina acceptation), that is, the value that God freely chooses to impose on it, not in the intrinsic worth of the act performed upon which God has no power. As to the terms of the covenant, the link between the moral and the meritorious is contingent, being only God and His will the permanent and necessary elements of the world. The only connection between moral and meritorious is given by God’s decision, the expression of its absolute power, to enter into the pact in which He deals with humanity through His ordinate power. McGrath showed how Ockham and other voluntarist authors of the Middle Ages employed an economic metaphor to express this concept: […] in the Middle Ages the king appears to have been regarded as entitled to issue “token” coinage, often made of lead, which had a negligible inherent value, but which would be redeemed at its full ascribed value at a later date. In the meantime, the ascribed value of the coins was vastly greater than their inherent value, on account of the promise of the king expressed in the covenant regulating the relationship between the valor impositus and valor intrinsecus. Just as a major discrepancy could arise within an economic system between bonitas intrinseca and valor impositus, given a firm and binding contract on the part of the king, so a similar

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discrepancy could arise between the moral value of an act (i.e., its bonitas intrinseca) and its meritorious value (i.e., valor impositus), given a comparable covenant on the part of God. Although human acts have negligible inherent value in themselves by God’s absolute standards, God has nevertheless entered into a pactum with humanity, by virtue of which such human acts have a much greater contracted value […] Just as a king might issue a small leaden coin with negligible inherent value and a considerably greater ascribed value which permitted it to purchase goods, so human moral acts, although in themselves incapable of meriting grace, have a much greater contracted value adequate for this purpose. (2005, 113–114) These theological, ontological, and ethical differences between intellectualism and voluntarism should prevent the researcher from finding too easy parallels between Scotus’s —and in general Franciscan—economic teachings and Aquinas’s —in general Thomistic—ones. One may be tempted to find a similarity between Scotus’s concept of latitude (latitudo) and Aquinas’s idea of a range of value, as far as just price is concerned. Similarly, the presence of gift in Scotus’s ideas (Langholm 1998) is undeniable, as this passage shows: Sometimes, however, it is left to the contracting parties themselves, namely, when in view of mutual needs they both consider that they give and receive from one another equal value. Exchange between men would be difficult if the parties did not intend reciprocally to remit some of that rigorous justice, so that, insofar as they do, a gift may be said to accompany every contract. And if this is the way that contracts are concluded, as though founded on the law of nature which says, “Do to another what you would have done to yourself,” it is sufficiently probable that the parties, if they are mutually satisfied, intend to mutually remit the difference if something is lacking from the justice which they seek. (Scotus 1894, 283–284) Aquinas’s idea of just prices, as interpreted in the second chapter, echoes Scotus’s words, but the parallel is ill-posed. For Scotus, these elements are not the essence of commerce, nor are they ontologically tied to the structure of reality. The presence of gift in just price is a configuration suitable for the ends to be reached and explicable through covenantal causality. Conversely, for Aquinas, gift (donum) is inscribed in the ontological essence of reality, and its presence in commerce expresses the fullness of the realization of the divine plan. The difference is not in the contents, but in their ontological value.5 All things considered, one should be cautious in identifying Thomistic and Franciscan economic teachings as one common source of civil economy. It is true that Franciscans’ economic ideas overlap with interpretations of Aquinas’s ideas; just think about the inf luence of Franciscan Bernardino da Siena on the Dominican Antonino of Florence (De Roover 1967). It is also true that

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Counter-Reformation theologians were imbued with Thomistic and Scotistic theological ideas (Waltz 1951). Nonetheless, there are important theological and ontological differences that should prevent from seeing an identity in these sources of civil economy. The next two sections will focus specifically on different interpretations of Thomistic economic ideas in the Italian cultural context of Humanism, the Renaissance, and the Counter-Reformation to arrive at the civil economy tradition of the eighteenth century.

Anti-commerce Thomism The first and dominant interpretation of Aquinas’s teaching portrays him as a champion of the reaction against the spread of commerce. Some objections analysed in the previous chapter recur here, adopted and emphasized by authors who wanted to restore order in social life by reducing the role of trade and merchants. Especially in the Counter-Reformation period, coming back to Aquinas meant coming back to the model of Medieval society, statically and hierarchically determined, wherein everyone had their own fixed status and should be content with it. This understanding of Aquinas’s social and economic teachings was first adopted by members of his own order. Among the Preachers (Dominicans) who took care of moralizing the society of the time, the figure of Blessed Ambrogio Sansedoni, born in Siena around 1220, is worth remembering. Unfortunately, most of his texts have been lost. Ambrose was a disciple of Albert the Great and a schoolmate of Aquinas. From 1266, he resided in Siena, where he dealt with both internal and external political issues. From testimonies of the time, we know that he worked so hard to combat usury that, according to hagiographers, during a sermon against usury, he ruptured a vein in his chest and died of the consequent haemorrhage a few days later, on 20 March 1286 (Redon 2015). Caterina da Siena, in her works, offered a great deal of advice to the laity on how politicians, merchants, and artisans should live properly. Daughter of a Sienese dyer, Caterina was born in Siena in 1347. In 1363, she received the Dominican habit of the Third Order. In the last years of her life, she engaged in intense political pacification of an Italy involved in a series of internal struggles: for the return of the Pope from Avignon to Rome, for the expedition of the crusade to the Holy Land, and for the internal reform of the church. She died in Rome in 1380. St. Caterina, as the daughter of a dyer, knew the artisan and mercantile environment well. In her writings, she encouraged merchants to be detached from their goods despite their being the fruit of their own work. Well-being and difficulties are in the hands of God’s providence. Various references to the correct conduct of a ‘professional’ can be found, for example, in Letter 258 written to Piero Canigiani (Caterina da Siena 2002). Politicians and merchants should not aspire to political and ecclesiastical offices; they had to live peacefully forgiving offenses and honouring their debts. They could ask for what was theirs, but they had to meet the needs of the poor (Caterina da Siena 1970).

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These two authors shared with others, Reformers included, a scholastic economic understanding often tied to the name of Aquinas: the sterility of money. Money does not generate money, so every usurious practice had to be banished and condemned. They also emphasized the role of institutions in controlling civil life, including the market. This can be seen from the role the saints had in the lives of the people or from the cult of relics (Taylor 2009). In the medieval world, it was believed that some objects had a life of their own, a divine scent, or a soul, and that as such, they should be venerated, consulted, and possibly listened to. Medieval Christianity and its cult of relics became fully intelligible from this point of view, as well as in the rejection that much of Modernity would later make of this ‘spiritual’ universe in the name of scientific certainty and a mechanistically understood world (Taylor 2009). An important experience of the role of mediators came from the experience of assistance for the needy— proto-forms of the welfare state—in the Italian cities of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. When a person in need, attended in the hospital in critical condition, was healed, the common belief was that the healing was a miracle due to the intervention of an invisible saint. It is known that Luther and the Protestant world reacted against this over-presence of saints, encouraging the advent of a market society where another ‘invisible hand’ substituted in the role of the mediators typical of the Southern Mediterranean Catholic world. That Aquinas’s economic teachings were against commerce and merchants can also be deduced from their interpretations by Thomistic authors. In this respect, the most famous example is Thomas De Vio Cardinal Cajetan’s comment (1517) on IIa–IIae Quaestio 118 of Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae, in which Aquinas dealt with covetousness and, more specifically, argued that people should seek external riches in keeping with their status. Cajetan commented that a person can accumulate money in harmony with his own strength (qui cumulant pecuniam ut habeant statutum consonum suæ virtutis) but that ‘isti post quam ascenderint ad gradum suæ virtuti consonum, puta comitatum, quiescent et non cumulabunt iterum, ut ascendant ad regnum, utpote excedens virtutem suam’ (Cajetan 1906, IIa–IIae Quaestio 118, a. 1). Cajetan here opposed the static view of society that is usually attributed to Aquinas. Scheler criticized Sombart for not having understood this crucial point: If Sombart quotes Cardinal Cajetan who, in his commentary on Thomas, rejects the interpretation that ‘a rusticus has always to remain a rusticus, an artifex always an artifex, and a civis always a civis’ and who, in opposing such an interpretation of Thomas, notes that everyone should rise above his station in life to the extent to which he possesses the requisite virtues and talents, then this interpretation is not only strictly Thomistic—instead of being a considerable expansion of the Thomistic doctrine—but it also corresponds in its essence entirely to the traditional doctrine of Great Greek Philosophy. (Scheler 1964, 8)

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Cajetan felt the need to overcome an impasse in Aquinas’s thought that, in his view, could not stand for his times in which commerce was highly developed and fundamental for cities. This point has already been problematized in the previous chapter. Moreover, it is significant that Cajetan expressed precisely that individuals should undertake only once an attempt at accumulation; otherwise, they are guilty of striving without limits for money and power. However, what counts now is that many authors saw in this comment a sign of how Aquinas’s economic ideas were received in the period of the Counter-Reformation (Brants 1895; Fanfani 1934; Barbieri 1961, 2013; Scheler 1964; Gregory 2012; Bruni 2020).6 They are right. Leaving aside some audacious commentators such as Cajetan or Menochio, the general attitude of this period was to return to the authority of Aquinas to restore the static social order of the Middle Ages against the spread of commerce and trade that characterized the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. This reading of Aquinas’s teaching was not limited to Italian soil. Aquinas’s condemnations of foreign trade in the third chapter of the second book of De Regimine Principuum were very inf luential throughout Southern Europe. For example, this attitude can be found in the important work De’ negotii, et contratti de mercanti, et de negotianti (1591) of the Spanish Dominican friar Tomas de Mercado. There, having initially praised commerce for its beneficial nature (27–29), Mercado shows that Aquinas considered trade to be among the morally indifferent acts with the appearance of evil (30–31). Mercado argues that as the main purpose of merchants is no longer to spread news to various people and countries but to accumulate gold and silver, being a merchant no longer meant caring about the public good of the country but to be a greedy man. (Mercado 1591, 30. The translation has been made by the author of this book) The rest of Mercado’s book is built upon this negative view of commerce, while the former more positive view was put aside. The Council of Trent (1545–1563) and the authors of the CounterReformation (Castiglione, Salutio, Segneri, Gattioli) adopted Aquinas’s social and economic teachings in precisely this way. The authority of Aquinas on the council works (Colish 1975; Bouwsma 2002) is well-expressed by the Pope who established Aquinas’s doctrine as the core of Christianity, Leo XIII, in his famous encyclicals Aeterni Patris (1879): The chief and special glory of Thomas, one which he has shared with none of the Catholic Doctors, is that the Fathers of Trent [1545–1563] made it part of the order of conclave to lay upon the altar, together with sacred Scripture and the decrees of the supreme Pontiffs, the Summa of Thomas Aquinas, whence to seek counsel, reason, and inspiration. (Aeterni Patris, 22)

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As reported by Barbieri (1961), every form of credit and finance was condemned by the Council theologians, inspired by Cardinal Cajetan. Even the Franciscan Monti di Pietà and Monti Frumentari were seen with suspicion7 because, with the excuse of helping the poor, they allowed loans with interest. Equally severe were the condemnations of the societies of capital and work (società di capitale e lavoro), whereby the borrower (a usurer in the view of Christian theologians) financed enterprises, creating a bridge between the capital and the workforce, pronounced by the Milanese Provincial Council and Sorrentino Provincial Council, respectively, in 1565 and 1584 (Barbieri 1961, 46–47). To this picture of the Counter-Reformation period, some counterposed the great emphasis that Catholic theologians put on the importance of work for a Christian life (Fanfani 1934; Barbieri 2013; Bruni 2020) and on the topic of a just wage (iustam mercedem). However, these two arguments confirm the view of Aquinas’s teachings as anti-commerce and anti-merchant. Both, in fact, are reactions to the development of commercial activities in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. On the one hand, the kind of work praised most is agricultural work (Fanfani 1934; Bruni 2020). Arguments on the importance of work and against otium (idleness) were not meant to encourage people to join commercial activities and enterprises. Conversely, the daily effort put into the agricultural life plus weekly church attendance became the archetype of a good Christian life. This doctrine of the Counter-Reformation had an enormous impact on the Italian economic system, replacing the f lourishing commerce of Italian cities of the Renaissance (Siena, Florence, Venice) with the agricultural industry based on big landowners, rent, and revenue. The next chapter will address the objections that Neapolitan civil economists raised against this situation. On the other hand, the emphasis on just or fair wages was meant by Counter-Reformation authors as a return to Aquinas against the commercial discipline that had f lourished during Humanism and the Renaissance. While Aquinas inscribed the feature of just wages within that of just price (Summa Theologiae IIa–IIae, q. 71, a. 4), in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the contractual discipline between employer and employee—typical of commercial activities—became more and more antagonistic (Barbieri 1961, 2013). A symbol of this contrast was the work of Giovan Domenico Peri titled Il Negoziante (1638), in which the focus of just wages was intended more as a virtuous act by the employer towards the employees than as a common practice. Therefore, the emphasis on just wages has to be reconsidered within the efforts against the development of commercial society. This argument is not intended to diminish the instance of social justice contained in the works of Christian authors such as Cardinal Borromeo and the Jesuit Paolo Segneri. Instead, the intention is to understand a historical process that changed the physiognomy of Italian Catholic society after the Counter-Reformation. Bruni and Milbank (2019) raised the importance of this passage in the history of civil economy:

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We cannot begin to comprehend the eighteenth century and the major antifeudal shift that took place in Southern Europe, where a reconsidered Providence became central to the view of the market and commerce, if we do not consider the special context of Catholic Europe. After the sixteenth century and for the following two or three hundred years, the path to the “civil” market seemed lost. The civil and commercial virtues of Siena, Florence, Venice, Barcelona, and Lisbon were replaced by the desire for land and revenues. A renewed Civil Economy was what was needed. If this did not happen right away, it is because the economic impact of the Counter-Reformation was not immediately perceived. It was not until the second half of the sixteenth, and into the seventeenth century, that its characteristic traits became manifest, in terms of “refeudalization” and the return to the land. (Bruni and Milbank 2019, 227–228) In this respect, civil economy can be seen as a reaction to rather than a continuation of a certain Thomistic economic ethic. But the previous chapter made clear that the anti-commerce soul of Aquinas’s economic teachings does not capture the real nature of his thoughts on the matter. Therefore, before seeing what the Thomistic roots of civil economy are in the next section, the focus now shifts to the elements of Aquinas’s social and economic views that have been stressed in this book as peculiar to his thought and that make him a forerunner rather than an adversary of eighteenth-century civil economists. In other words, attention will be devoted to understanding whether some features of the Mediterranean spirit of capitalism developed and survived in the five centuries separating Aquinas from Civil Economy.

Hints of Aquinas’s ‘civil economy’ teachings from the thirteenth to the eighteenth century In their book on Civil Economy (2016), Bruni and Zamagni pointed to Italian civic humanism as one of the sources of civil economy. The season of Coluccio Salutati, Leonardo Bruni, and Poggio Bracciolini, coinciding with the first half of the fifteenth century (Bruni 2006), was a period in which some key elements of civil economy f lourished. The emphasis on civic virtue, on a person f lourishing within the social context of civil life, on the active life over the contemplative life, and on Aristotelism over Platonism (Baron 1955; Garin 1964; Bruni 2006)—these elements were theorized by humanists and lived in the great urban centres of which Florence constituted the undisputed pearl. The periodization regarding civic humanism involved many important authors writing in the last century, from Hans Baron to J.G.A. Pocock, from Eugenio Garin to Quentin Skinner. As Baron (1955) and Garin (1964) argued, in contrast with Jacob Burchkardt (1869), the first half of the fifteenth century in Italy was characterized by the cultural moment of civic humanism. Italian humanists advanced a new idea on merit (Rabil 1991; Bruni

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2006; Haskins 2014): this was connected to a view of human f lourishing that emphasized the Aristotelian category of the common good and the Roman emphasis on civic virtues. Later in that century, this tradition was almost lost due to the advance of Neoplatonism, esoterism (Cacciari 2019) and individualism (Burchkardt 1869). Therefore, when looking for traces of Aquinas’s social and economic ideas that anticipated civil economists, the civic humanism seems to be a good place to start. Giuseppe Toniolo was of the same opinion. The Italian Catholic economist inaugurated the academic year at the University of Pisa (1886–1887), where he taught ‘Economia Sociale’ (Social Economy). The title of his inaugural address is significant: Scolastica ed Umanismo nelle dottrine economiche al tempo del rinascimento in toscana (Scholastic and Humanism in economic doctrines at the time of the Renaissance in Tuscany). This little-known manuscript by Toniolo contains interesting remarks for the scope of the present research. Toniolo tries to refute those scholars who see an irremediable contrast between scholasticism and humanism, the former imbued with theological insights and the latter being disinterested in them. He was even less convinced that humanism, with its emphasis on a return to Greek and Roman classics, integrally replaced scholasticism in the Italian cultural scene. He believed conversely that humanism and scholasticism coexisted in the fifteenth century, neither including the other. To understand this point, it might be good to recall the concept of polar opposition theorized by Romano Guardini. Refuting the Hegelian Dialectic, which envisaged reality structured by the dialectic between thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, Guardini believed that reality was the product of an unresolved and constant tension between two opposite poles: ‘This peculiar relationship in which two moments exclude each other and yet connect with each other, this relationship that appears in every quantitative, qualitative and formative determination, I call opposition’ (Guardini 1997, 29). Then, Guardini clarified that the opposition is not a “synthesis” of two moments in a third. And not even a whole in which the two represent the “parts”. Even less mixing in view of some compromise. On the contrary, it is a question of an original relationship, in all and for all particular, of an original phenomenon. The one of the opposites can neither be made to descend nor to ascend from the other. (Guardini 1997, 41) This ontological concept perfectly captures what Toniolo meant in arguing that humanism and scholasticism both informed the last decades of the fourteenth and the entire fifteenth century. The polar opposition of scholasticism and humanism brought the latter to focus on a particular aspect of the former. Humanists inherited Scholastics’ theorizations on legal, social, political, and even economic matters. In this encounter, Toniolo saw the appearance of civil economy, recalling the

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agreement of his contemporary scholars (Brants, Roscher, Cusumano, and Cossa)8 who all agree in recognizing and esteeming the great merits of the Scholastic towards the science of Economia Civile, which, indeed, came by virtue of that school, not only to put in place the sumptuous relations between profit and honesty but still to begin occasionally to carry out a number of investigations with precision and subtlety about concepts, relationships, arrangements and problems inherent in the fact of wealth. (Toniolo 1886, 25, 26, 27) Toniolo here refers to both Franciscans and Dominicans but in his treatise, Aquinas is the most quoted author. While the link between Aquinas’s esteem for ancient authors and the programmatic return of civic humanism to the Classics cannot be shared with Toniolo, it could be an important exercise to wonder which Aquinas teachings inf luenced the Humanists and where this happens. Spatially speaking, there was a connection between humanism and scholasticism. Thanks to a papal decree, the faculties of theology (collegia doctorum theologiae) managed by Dominicans and Franciscans were founded near the fourteenth-century Italian universities. This was the case in Boulogne, Florence, Padua, and Pavia. In fifteenth-century Padua, for example, two courses in metaphysics and theology were established, one held by a Dominican in via Thomae and one by a Franciscan in via Scoti (Kristeller 1974).9 Moreover, in Padua in 1436, Aquinas was chosen as Patronus of the Faculty of the Arts, and every year, students and professors—laity and clergy—took part in the ceremony in his honour.10 More evidence can be adduced but, as stressed above, Aquinas’s theology and philosophy became the cornerstone of theological teaching in the Italian context after the Counter-Reformation, due also to the inf luence of Jesuits (Bellarmino). In the next chapter, it will be shown that Neapolitan civil economists, Antonio Genovesi in particular, inherited Aquinas’s anthropological and social ideas more than his economic views. The same can be argued for civic humanism; Kirsteller claimed that a chapter in Coluccio Salutati’s work was inspired by Aquinas, despite a lack of evidence in the text.11 Instead, a connection that found little space in the literature is one between Leonardo Bruni’s and Aquinas’s thoughts on the matter. Scholars (Hankins 2004; Baron 2014) believed that Bruni’s emphasis on the importance of civil life—that a person f lourishes within the civil society (societas civilis) whose common good he helps to promote—was connected to the study of Aristotle’s Politics.12 Bruni’s famous translation of this text, in fact, has been considered an improvement with respect to the ones available before, for example, that by Willielm of Moerbeke used by Aquinas. What has been overlooked is the importance for the fifteenth century and, for Bruni in particular, of Aquinas’s commentary on Aristotle’s text.

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This point can be appreciated by looking at the end of the fifteenth century. There, many versions of the translation made by Bruni were accompanied by Aquinas’s commentary. There was a version made in Barcelona in 1478 by Juan Ferrer, but the most famous version circulated was engraved in Rome by Eucharius Silber alias Frank by commission of the nephew of Pope Pio III (Franco Tedeschini Piccolomini). This version is very famous because scholars proved that Machiavelli read it, absorbing Aristotle’s teaching with Bruni’s translation and Aquinas’s commentary (Walker 2013). This is because their positions were remarkably close, Aquinas being a fine commentator of Aristotle, according to Bruni: ‘From the medieval period that preceded Dante he [Bruni] picked up only one figure, Thomas Aquinas […] Bruni argued that Aquinas should be ranked with Aristotle and Theophrastus—Aristotle’s disciple, nephew, and successor as scholar of the Lyceum’ (Field 2017, 157). Italian civic humanists shared with Aquinas the idea of civic friendship as the real common good of society and, in their time, saw the market as one of the places of civil life where people can express their virtues. In the Italian cities of their time, civic humanists met Dominicans who spread Aquinas’s ideas. One of them was Antonino Pierozzi, known as Antonino da Firenze. Born in Florence in 1389, he entered the order of Preachers at not yet sixteen years of age. He became a priest in 1413 and archbishop of Florence in 1413. Florence was in the midst of humanism, and the Medici family was asserting its power. Elected archbishop Antonino engaged in shrewd pastoral activity, paying close attention to the problems of society (Barile 2003; Bazzichi 2003). The practice of trading had to be undertaken by honest people far removed from greed and selfishness. In his works, he was concerned with the rights of workers and their wages, which should be just as valued as any other asset and not paid in gratuities (Barbieri 1960). For issues relating to fair price, interest, investments, contracts, and usury, Antonino referred to the economic calculations of Bernardino da Siena, taken up in turn and above all by Pietro di Giovanni Olivi and Duns Scoto. But Thomas too was a point of reference for Dominican thinkers. According to Antonino, the merchant performed a useful job for society and therefore, his profit, if obtained honestly, was not to be condemned. However, the real locus of survival and development of Aquinas’s economic teachings was the practice of confessions by Dominicans and in the various Summa de paenitentia and Summa Confessorum (Langholm 2003). This is a heritage from the late Middle Ages (Colish 1975), in which Aquinas’s moral theology was adopted and popularized to serve as a guide for priests in the practice of confession. This also applied to merchants who, unsure of the righteousness of their activities, sought counsel, comfort, and forgiveness in the confessionals. One Summa was particularly relevant, revised and commented in Italian for centuries: the Summa de peanitentiae written by Raymond of Peñafort, also known as Summa Raimundi or Raimundina, realized in 1224. Raimondo was born between 1175 and 1180 in Barcelona to a noble Catalan family.

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He  specialized in civil and canon law in Bologna. In 1219, he returned to Spain, where he became canon. In 1222, he asked for the Dominican habit. From 1238 to 1240, he was master general of the order. In his pastoral activity, he was very attentive to the needs of the poor and committed to missionary activity, so much so that he founded an Arabic school in Tunis and a Hebrew school. He asked Aquinas to write a work to facilitate the preparation of missionaries. It is probably the Summa Contra Gentiles. During his life, he fulfilled numerous roles and preached the crusade against the Moors in France. He was a friend and confessor of James I of Aragon. Gregory IX appointed him penitentiary and his confessor. Why is the Raimundina relevant for the analysis of the Mediterranean spirit of capitalism? Before answering, a few words need to be spent on the contents of the Summa. The Summa de poenitentia was a manual for confessors in which Raymond addresses various issues, including the problem of usury and the lawfulness of the various types of contracts that were used at the time, a very delicate matter debated by theologians and canonists. For most of them, it was legitimate to obtain compensation in conjunction with a loan for failure to achieve a gain. In contrast, the loan was considered usurious if the value of the interest was fixed at the time of signing the loan agreement and not after having suffered damage. In this regard, Gregory IX also intervened with the decree Naviganti, drawn up between 1227 and 1234, which later became part of the collection of decretals from which he declared any type of profit as usury-motivated by the simple fact that the merchant assumed an unspecified and unpredictable risk. Raymond, while remaining in agreement with the papal condemnation, elaborated a higher form of repayment of the non-usurious loan, an exception not accepted by all theologians, including the future Pope Innocent IV. For Raymond, it was permissible for two businessmen to agree on a repayment greater than the loan in the event that one of the two asked for a loan when the lender was about to make an investment, because in this case the money could make its owner a profit. The theme of profits gained from trade also drew the attention of Aquinas. In accordance with him, Raymond of Peñafort listed some potentially profitable forms of trade that are above reproach: planned provision for the good of the community against a foreseen shortage, sale of an unexpected surplus of goods bought for consumption, and regular commerce for the maintenance of the merchant and his family (item added by William of Rennes). (Langholm 2003, 47) These insights show accordance between the Dominicans on the nature of the market, but the real core of Raymond’s (and Aquinas’s ) commercial view lay in the doctrine on just price. When asked by Gregory IX to copy and comment on some chapters of his own Decretals, Raymond discussed the case of a merchant who keeps a large stock stored expecting a period in

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which the prices may increase. The merchant can lawfully do so, according to Raymond, but when he decides to bring his own merchandise to the market, he has to sell it according to ‘the common course of sale’ (Langholm 2003, 36). In an important footnote on this passage, Langholm commented: In the modern edition of the Summa the line in question is rendered secundum communem cursum venditorum (“of the sellers”), but the variant venditionis is noted from two of the manuscripts on which the edition is based, and it seems to me much more likely to be the original one. (Langholm 2003, 36) Philologically speaking, Langholm could be right. However, there is an enormous conceptual difference between venditionis (sale) and venditorum (of the sellers). The choice of one of the two terms radically changes the meaning of the term communem. If one chooses venditionis, then communem stands for common, usual, universally practiced. But if one chooses venditorum, then communem stands for the market behaviour that expressed Aquinas’s view of just price, that is, mutual assistance. The sellers enter into a commercial relation caring for their own advantage but also for the advantage of the party involved in the exchange. The just price, then, does not coincide with normal market price because it entails the intentional pursuit of mutual advantage, that is, mutual assistance (see Chapter 2). Not by chance, a commentator and follower of Raymond of Peñafort, John of Freiburg, distinguished between ‘common’ and ‘usual’ market price (quam in mercato communiter venditur vs quam in mercato vendere possunt), choosing the former instead of the latter, which was used in ancient ninth-century Carolingian texts. The idea of common estimation to determine the just price is not an invention of Aquinas, nor of Dominican or Christian doctrine. Still, it finds its fullest expression in the Christian framework. The idea that in market exchanges people can be virtuous, f lourish as human beings, and promote the common good alongside their own good is the Mediterranean spirit of capitalism that Aquinas expressed and that survived, at least in the confessionals. To sum up the findings of this chapter, in fact, it could be stated that in the five centuries separating Aquinas from civil economists, two versions of Aquinas’s social and economic teachings circulated: one, against commerce and merchants, praised agricultural life and a static-hierarchical view of society and advocated the control of institutions on civil life; the other, in line with the Mediterranean spirit of capitalism described in this book, emphasized the social nature of human beings and their natural f lourishing in the context of civil life, with a particular role for markets as places where civic virtues and civic friendship could find expression. It emerged also that the first version dominated the larger part of this historical period, whereas the latter remained hidden, with the exception of periods such as civic humanism. This claim is based on a non-exhaustive analysis. It has focused

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on some periods, authors, and concepts that may suggest dominant and less dominant tendencies present in the Italian cultural context. Civil economy streamed from both versions of Aquinas’s thought as a reaction to the anticommerce Thomistic framework and as a fulfilment of the Mediterranean spirit of capitalism which has its forerunner in Aquinas.

Notes 1 This defence earned Capreolus the name Princeps Thomistarum. 2 Interestingly, Bruni noted that the condemnation of usury remains strong in Calvinist countries where the pursuit of profit in real economy is preferable to finance (Bruni 2016). 3 For a critical interpretation of Luther’s doctrine on usury with regard to Thomism, see Singleton (2011). 4 Different from the early Franciscan school, as developed by Bonaventure or Alexander of Hales. On this distinction, see McGrath (2005). 5 The same can be applied to Duns Scotus’ doctrine of haecceitas. According to Scotus, analysis should focus on individuality of the substance rather than type or species. One should be interested in horsiness rather than the horse. This methodological approach is fundamental for economic science, concerned with individuals rather than their status. However, the epistemic value of this knowledge, in Scotus’ voluntarist framework, is limited to the world created de potentia dei ordinata. 6 Jacob Viner (1978, 65) argues that Louis Molina should go further in eliminating any moral judgement of the merchant’s possibility to improve his social position. 7 Barbieri (1961) criticized Gothein (1928) because, in describing the CounterReformation attitude towards Monti, he argued for the Catholic theologians of the seventeenth century the Monti were just a compromise for covering the useful behind the layer of charity. 8 Further emblematic is the debate surrounding the work of Ulisse Gobbi (1859–1940). As a young economist, he won the ‘Cossa Prize’, an award instituted by the inf luential economist Luigi Cossa (1831–1896) to encourage the best research on economic theory. The directives of the contest were very precise: ‘Propose a historical-critical exposition of economic theory on international trade’. Gobbi won with a dissertation later published under the title Foreign Competition and the Historic Italian Economists (La concorrenza estera e gli antichi economisti italiani, 1884). In his preface, Gobbi noted the judgement of the commission (including Cossa himself ), which stated that his interpretation of Aquinas was incorrect. However, the judgement of the commission seriously problematized Gobbi’s assumption: With regards to St. Thomas, principal among the authors of that period, the contestant—Ulisse Gobbi—does not consider that the book De Regimine Principum is entirely, or at least partly, apocryphal, and neglects his principal theological and philosophical works. (Gobbi 1884, VIII–IX. The translation has been made by the author of this book) 9 Kristeller’s concern (1974) about the presence of Aquinas’ own teachings in Padua’s Aristotelism is applicable, for lack of an appropriate philological analysis. 10 The same happened in Rome, where Lorenzo Valla eulogized Aquinas in 1457 (Kristeller 1974).

From Aquinas to civil economy 109 11 Salutati quoted Aquinas’ commentary on the Book of Job in his epistle to Giovanni Innamorati from Ascoli (Salutati 1891). 12 In this author’s opinion, the novelty of Bruni’s usage of this expression is overemphasized (Colas 1997). The transition of real importance was from the Greek politikon to the Latin civilis, which happened long before Bruni and even Aquinas.

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Chaplygina, I., and A. Lapidus. 2016. Economic thought in scholasticism. In Handbook of the history of economic analysis, Vol. 2, schools of thought in economics, eds. G. Faccarello and H.D. Kurz, 20–42. Cheltenham: Edward-Elgar. Colas, D. 1997. Civil society and fanaticism: Conjoined histories. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Colish, M. 1975. St. Thomas Aquinas in historical perspective: The modern period. Church History 44: 438–443. De Roover, R. 1955. Scholastic economics: Survival and lasting inf luence from the sixteenth century to Adam Smith. The Quarterly Journal of Economics 69, no. 2: 161–190. De Roover, R. 1967. San Bernardino of Siena and Sant’Antonino of Florence: The two great economic thinkers of the Middle Ages. Baker Library, Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration. De Soto, J.H. 1996. New light on the prehistory of the theory of banking and the school of Salamanca. The Review of Austrian Economics 9, no. 2: 59–81. De Vio, T. (Cajetan). 1906. Commentaria in Summam Theologiae St Thomae (1507–1522). Rome: Edizioni Leonine. Donnelly, J.P. 1976. Calvinist Thomism. Viator 7: 441. Duns Scotus, J. 1894. Quaestiones in quartum librum Sententiarum. In Opera Omnia, ed. J. Wagging. Paris: Apud Ludovicum Vivès. Fanfani, A. [1934] 2003. Catholicism, protestantism, and capitalism. Norfolk: IHS Press. Fanfani, A. 1942. Storia delle dottrine economiche. Il volontarismo. Milan: Giuseppe Principato. Field, A. 2017. The intellectual struggle for Florence: Humanists and the beginnings of the Medici regime, 1420–1440. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Garin, E. 1964. L’umanesimo italiano: Filosofia e vita civile nel Rinascimento (Vol. 3). Rome: Laterza. Gobbi, U. 1884. La concorrenza estera e gli antichi economisti italiani. Milan: Hoepli. Gómez Rivas, L. 1999. Business ethics and the history of economics in Spain. “The School of Salamanca: A bibliography”. Journal of Business Ethics 22, no. 3: 191–202. Gothein, E. 1928. L’Età della Controriforma. Venezia: La nuova Italia. Gregory, B.S. 2012. The unintended Reformation: How a religious revolution secularized society. Boston: Harvard University Press. Grice-Hutchinson, M. 1952. The School of Salamanca. Readings in Spanish monetary theory 1544–1605. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Guardini, R. 1997. L’opposizione polare. Saggio per una filosofia del concreto vivente. Brescia: Morecelliana. Hankins, J. (Ed.). 2004. Renaissance civic humanism: Reappraisals and reflections (Vol. 57). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Haskins, J. (2014). Machiavelli, civic humanism, and the humanist politics of virtue. Italian Culture XXXII, no. 2: 98–109. Janz, D. 1983. Luther and late Medieval Thomism: A study in theological anthropology. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Kristeller, P.O. 1974. Il tomismo e il pensiero italiano del Rinascimento. Rivista di filosofia neo-scolastica 64: 841–896. Langholm, O. 1998. The legacy of scholasticism in economic thought: Antecedents of choice and power. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Langholm, O. 2003. The merchant in the confessional. Trade and price in the pre-Reformation penitential handbooks. Leiden and Boston: Brill.

From Aquinas to civil economy 111 Langholm, O. 2009. Martin Luther’s doctrine on trade and price in its literary context. History of Political Economy 41, no. 1: 89–107. Leo XIII. 1879. Aeterni Patriis. http://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/ documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_04081879_aeterni-patris.html Machiavelli, N. 2013. The discourses of Niccolò Machiavelli. Ed. F. L. J. Walker. New York: Routledge. McGrath, A.E. 2005. Iustitia Dei: A history of the Christian doctrine of justification. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mercado, T.D. 1591. De’ negotii, et contratti de mercanti, et de negotianti. Brescia: Pietro Maria Marchetti. Peacock, A.T., and H. Willgerodt (eds.). 1989. Germany’s social market economy: Origins and evolution. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Rabil, J.A. 1991. Knowledge, goodness and power: The debate over nobility among quattrocento Italian humanists. Binghamton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies. Redon, O. 2015. Una famiglia, un santo, una città. Rome: Viella. Rehnman, S. 2012. Virtue and grace. Studies in Christian Ethics 25, no. 4: 472–493. Rothbard, M. 1976. New light on the prehistory of the Austrian School. In The foundations of modern Austrian economics, ed. G. Dolan, 36–48. Kansas: Sheed and Ward. Salutati, C. 1891. Epistolario di Coluccio Salutati. Rome: Instituto Storico Italiano. Scheler, M. 1964. The Thomist ethic and the spirit of capitalism. Sociological Analysis 2: 4–19. Schumpeter, J.A. [1954] 2006. History of economic analysis. New York: Routledge. Singleton, J.D. 2011. “Money is a sterile thing”: Martin Luther on the immorality of usury reconsidered. History of Political Economy 43, no. 4: 683–698. Smith, A. [1759] 1984. The theory of moral sentiments. Eds. D.D. Raphael and A.L. Macfie. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. Smith, A. [1776] 1976. The wealth of nations. Ed. E. Cannan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Steinmetz, D.C. 2002. Luther in context. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Sugden, R. 1989. Spontaneous order. Journal of Economic Perspectives 3, no. 4: 85–97. Sugden, R. 2002. Beyond sympathy and empathy: Adam Smith’s concept of fellowfeeling. Economics & Philosophy 18, no. 1: 63–87. Taylor, C. 2009. A Secular Age. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Toniolo, G. 1886. Scolastica ed Umanesimo nelle dottrine economiche al tempo del Rinascimento in Toscana. Firenze: Leo Olsinki. Van Drunen, D. 2002. Aquinas and Hayek on the limits of law: A convergence of ethical traditions. Journal of Markets & Morality 5, no. 2: 9–189. Viner, J. 1978. Religious thought and economic society. In History of political economy. Durham: Duke University Press. Waltz, A. 1951. La giustificazione tridentina: Note sul dibattito e sul decreto conciliare. Angelicum 28, no. 2: 97–138. Young, J.T., and B. Gordon. 1992. Economic justice in the natural law tradition: Thomas Aquinas to Francis Hutcheson. Journal of the History of Economic Thought 14, no. 1: 1–17.

5

The Thomistic soul of civil economy

Prelude Civil economy is a philosophical and economic tradition that spread in Italy in the eighteenth century (Pii 1979; Bruni and Porta 2003; Zamagni 2003; Bruni and Zamagni 2009, 2016; Milbank and Pabst 2016; Bruni and Santori 2018). Words matter, and in this case the adjective ‘civil’ expresses the peculiarity of the economic thought elaborated by Italian thinkers with respect to other modern schools of economic thought, such as the classical political economy elaborated by Adam Smith and David Ricardo. As the roots of political economy can be traced back to the Scottish Enlightenment, so was the Italian Enlightenment the background of the tradition of civil economy (Robertson 2005). Some key moments of this tradition are the appointment of Antonio Genovesi to the Chair in Commerce and Mechanics of the University Federico II of Naples in 1754—one of the first chairs in economy in Europe (Bruni and Zamagni 2016)—the publication of Genovesi’s Lezioni di Commercio o sia di Economia Civile (Lessons of Civil Economy. Genovesi 2013) between 1765 and 1767, the publication of the pamphlet by Giacinto Dragonetti, Delle Virtù e dei Premi (On Virtues and Prizes, 1766. Dragonetti 2018) two years after Cesare Beccaria’s Dei Delitti e Delle Pene (On Crimes and Punishments 1764), and the creation of the first chair on Civil Economy, held in Modena by the poet and humanist Agostino Paradisi (1772). The two major schools of civil economy were based in Milan with Pietro Verri and Cesare Beccaria (Porta and Scazzieri 2002; Bruni and Porta 2003; Wahnbaeck 2004; Porta 2018) and in Naples with Antonio Genovesi and his disciples (Zambelli 1972; Di Battista 1985, 1989; Bellamy 1987; Pennisi 1987; Galasso 1989; Guasti 2006; Jossa et al. 2007; Milbank and Pabst 2016; Bruni and Santori 2018; Dal Degan 2018; Pabst 2018; Rao 2018). The former school, which should better be called political (civil) economy (Reinert 2018) rooted in Milanese enlightenment, has as its main traits a proto form of utilitarianism,1 the emphasis on creativity as an asset important as monetary capital, and the idea of market as a tool for civilizing society. The epigones of this school have to be found in the nineteenth century, with Giandomenico Romagnosi, Melchiorre Gioja, and Carlo Cattaneo. However, this chapter is interested in

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the school developed within the Neapolitan enlightenment (Pagden 2000), thanks to the work of Genovesi and his disciples.2 The economic theories of Neapolitan civil economists had no luck in the nineteenth century due also to the harsh judgement on Genovesi expressed by Francesco Ferrara (Bruni and Zamagni 2016). But, as Bruni and Zamagni rightly noted, this judgement could be misleading in two senses. On the one hand, the economic theory developed by Genovesi was not just a less-refined version of the economic theories developing in France or Scotland. On the other hand, the novelty of the civil economy approach must be found in anthropological and social theory also, which, as this chapter will show, is highly indebted to Aquinas’s approach. But they were also based on a reaction to that anticommerce Thomism that spread during the Counter-Reformation. Therefore, civil economy is a feasible place to look for the fullest theorization of the features of the Mediterranean Spirit of Capitalism. Below, it will be shown: (1) how civil economy was born as a reaction to the feudal, hierarchical, and static society realized also by the CounterReformation theory (based on anti-commerce Thomism); (2) how Genovesi, founder of the Neapolitan school, was deeply inf luenced by the economic and social thought of Aquinas. This will involve the theological debate on theodicy that Genovesi addressed, adopting Aquinas’s thought, but also a bibliographical analysis of the recurrences of Aquinas’s ideas in Genovesi’s texts; and (3) analysis of civil economy as the science of pubblica felicità (public happiness), that is, as the study of the market as a place of mutual assistance directed to the common good of society. As stated in the Introduction, the intent is to prove that Aquinas was one of the main sources for civil economists, alongside others examined in the literature (Bruni 2006, 2017; D’Onofrio 2015; Bruni and Zamagni 2016; Martino 2020).

Civil as incivilmento One of the two meanings of the adjective ‘civil’ that Genovesi chose to place close to economy is related to what the philosopher Romagnosi would later define as incivilmento. Commerce and markets are tools to bring people out of a feudal, hierarchical, vertical society towards a horizontal, equitable society. Neapolitan civil economists were reformers from the Italian enlightenment (Venturi 1998) and, like their French, German, and Scottish colleagues, they aimed to ground society on the three pillars of the French Revolution— Freedom, Equality, and Fraternity. Feudal society expressed an uncivil economy in which economic relationships were based on neither freedom nor equality. The relationship between feudal landlords and their peasants was the expression of that static view of the world that, as shown in the previous paragraph, was one of the main effects of the Counter-Reformation. For Neapolitan civil economists, markets were antidotes to this illness that affected especially the Kingdom of Naples. They wanted to educate people to bring society out of preferential interests and privileges, and they appreciated that

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in the market people can act on the basis of their self-interest, this being an expression of their freedom to do so. Here lies the great similarity between political economy and civil economy, Smith and Genovesi, Scottish Enlightenment and Italian Enlightenment. For this very reason, it could be claimed that one way Aquinas’s social and economic teachings, as expressed in the interpretation called anti-commerce Thomism analysed in the previous chapter, inspired civil economists was by contrast. Italian civil economists of the eighteenth century shared a common target: the feudal society. Given the weight of agriculture in the Italian socioeconomic context of the time (Cipolla 2004; Luzzatto 2013), it can be easily understood why they focused on legal and economic reforms in the rural sector. Indeed, the population of farmers in Italy grew from 13 to 18 million from 1700 to 1800. This demographic growth led to an increase in internal demand for agricultural products (Farolfi and Fornasari 2011). Furthermore, if one considers the so-called ‘agrarian revolution’ underway in Europe at the time (especially in England and France), it is clear that all the conditions were in place for economic development stimulated by the agricultural sector. However, the feudal structures and the concentration of land ownership in the hands of a few noble families and ecclesiastical institutions (especially in the Kingdom of Naples) was a strong obstacle to economic development (Villani 1966). This is the context in which Italian civil economists focused on agricultural issues (Di Battista 1990). The criticism of rural landowners and their privileges and of rentiers and their rents was part of a broader project of social reform aimed at bringing the people out of the hierarchical and static structures of feudalism and leading them towards a free and equal commercial society. This project corresponds with the idea of civilization (incivilmento) that characterized Italian culture until the Risorgimento. Around this f lag, economists and philosophers from different schools of thought (Milanese, Neapolitan) converged; from there, they developed their critiques of rents and rural estates. First, rent was criticized based on moral and cultural grounds. Genovesi discussed rent in relation to virtue and labour ( fatiga) or the lack thereof: ‘declared enemies of virtue are all those who are enemies of labour and the Arts’ (Genovesi 1772, 263). Genovesi considered rent a sum of money or goods that is obtained with or without labour. The former is a form of ‘good’ rent and is to be encouraged, whereas the latter corresponds to ‘bad’ rent linked with vice and laziness (oziosità). Being an enlightened reformer, Genovesi believed that a commercial society based on individual labour could foster free, equal, and fraternal relations among citizens (Bruni and Sugden 2008). Civil economy, as will be shown in more depth in the next sections, is the science of pubblica felicità (Bianchini 1982; Bruni 2017), since individual and public happiness are deeply intertwined and linked to the material wealth of society. In such circumstances, work, commerce, and horizontal relations are positively

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connected with virtue and happiness; rents based on privilege, exploitation, and vertical relationships are not. This moral and cultural critique grew to include economic factors. Genovesi argued that ‘bad’ rents (rendite), whether private or public, consisted of income from the ownership of a rural property or from a publicly issued bond. In both cases, ‘bad’ rents damage good ones: We now consider the class of owners, namely the ones who live thanks to perpetual or life-long rents. This class of men, which one can call wealthy, lives at the expense of the Arts and of the people who work. (Genovesi 2013, 127–128) According to Genovesi, the main problem with ‘bad’ rent lies in its parasitic nature (Rao 2000), as it exists by syphoning off important resources from the economic system. This issue was particularly evident in agriculture, in which lands were unequally distributed among a few landlords, each with extensive landholdings. ‘The main cause of this unequal division’, Genovesi stated, ‘is that some mortmain (mani morte) occupied the half of the lands, which became inalienable’ (Genovesi 2013, 244). This is the depiction of the feudal system: not only did landlords take rent from their servants’ work, but many lands were also left abandoned and uncultivated. Here, a more nuanced definition is needed. Genovesi was not against agriculture—he opposed the agricultural weltanschauung that emerged from the Counter-Reformation and that was also based on the interpretation of Aquinas’s ideas. As Benedetto Croce, a profound connoisseur of Genovesi, rightly showed, the Neapolitan philosopher praised agriculture so much that he wanted the priests to renounce some hour of their teaching of theology in favour of agricultural matters (Croce 1992, 254–255). He even defined politics as a form of agriculture: The art of government is political agriculture, and the political body is a vineyard. The shrewd farmer visits often. He shaves the foreign plants, replaces the missing vines, subdues the old and withered ones, grafts the wild ones, prunes the luxuriant ones and, to defend it, surrounds it with a hedge, a pit, or walls. (Genovesi 2013, 45) The necessity for the redistribution of lands based on justice and economic efficiency inevitably emerged. Such redistribution was in line with the fight against privilege, exploitation, and, more generally, against an illiberal/unequal society. Small landowners would cultivate the uncultivated land and, receiving the entire profit of those lands, would improve the quality of the cultivations. As stated by the jurist Dragonetti, Genovesi’s pupil, who put the issue of rent seeking at the heart of his work, ‘the industry of the husbandman

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multiplies the ground without adding the surface […] if there were fewer labourers, and more owners’ (Dragonetti 2018, 75). Genovesi and Dragonetti called for a radical change. They believed that through public power and a good ruler, the nation might have achieved a more ideal situation. In this respect, laws and legislation were fundamental for retaking the historical privileges from the exploiters, including the rights of inheritance and a favourable taxation system. This was the final claim in another of Dragonetti’s work, Origine de’ feudi ne’regni di Napoli e Sicilia (1788). As explained by Dragonetti, feuds should be ‘reversible to the revenue, in the event of the feudatory’s death in the absence of legitimate heirs […] so that the lord, lacking of progeny and legitimate successors, cannot dispossess the feud among others even with legal acts’ (Dragonetti 1842, 374). In the event of death in the absence of legitimate heirs, Dragonetti proposed that the feud should revert to the property of the State and the King, who will employ it for communal assets. The expected result would have been a society built on small landowners, the optimal solution envisioned by those authors. Following a similar pattern, Filangieri developed the same position in one of his most famous and unfinished works,3 La Scienza della Legislazione (The Science of Legislation. Filangieri [1780] 1822). In the book, titled Delle Leggi Politiche ed economiche (On Political and Economic Laws. Filangieri 1804), he analysed the conditions of the people in Europe as an indicator of the prosperity of an economy: ‘All that tends to make difficult subsistence, tends to decrease the population’ (Filangieri 1804, 52). For this reason, the main aim of his study was to remove legal obstacles to the growth and prosperity of populations. According to Filangieri, one of the most serious economic issues in Europe was the concentration of land ownership in the hands of a few and the consequent overwhelming majority of landless persons. These people had to work as farmers and accept a daily wage lower than the subsistence limit due to intense competition. Filangieri considered another problem: Even within the landed class, there was a disproportion between large and small landholders. The use of land by the former was ineffective because parts of their terrain were not destined to cultivation. In turn, this mismanagement reduced the overall productivity of the nation: ‘It is not in the hands of the large landowners that agriculture improves […] they do not contribute to the wealth of a nation’ (Filangieri 1804, 169–170). Filangieri proposed, then, to modify the inheritance system with the abolition of primogeniture and allow the auctioning of feudal lands to promote redistribution. Initially, these reforms failed. For instance, the land register (catasto onciario), intended to be a basis for determining the amount of tax due, was instituted in the Kingdom of Naples in the first half of the eighteenth century, yet it did not produce the desired outcomes. According to Genovesi, it gave ‘less value to the lands of the arrogant and wealthy, and more value to the land of the poor’ (Genovesi 2013, 321). Similarly, the Italian economist Carlo Antonio Broggia noted that the taxes ‘lay on the capital and not on the

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rent’ (Racioppi 1871, 25). These were fundamental reforms; however, the expected results did not follow. The seeds of these failures were in the ambivalent attitude of Catholic culture towards rents and rentiers. On the one hand, Counter-Reformation theologians strongly condemned usury, that is, the production of money from money (without work). On the other hand, the Church was among the largest owners of lands and buildings (Venturi 1969). The public authority of the Kingdom of Naples attempted to tax ecclesiastical goods (estates, churches, monasteries), which were exempted from taxation in that period (Racioppi 1871). The Church was, in fact, probably the most important landowner within feudal society. Filangieri understood the urgency of the legislative reform of Church estates (Ferrone 2012). In this respect, he stated: ‘They were exempted from all the public offices, relieved from all the taxes, enriched by donations and gifts so that they become the only owners of the entire Europe’ (Filangieri 1804, 83). Genovesi also harshly criticized this status quo, stating that ecclesial rents should benefit the people who actually produce by ‘saving and hoeing the ground’ (Genovesi 2013, 308). Closer to the Neapolitan economists was the position of Gianmaria Ortes, who was ambivalent about ecclesial rent. Whereas ‘one of his minor works, Errori popolari intorno all’economia nazionale (1772), aimed to refute the criticism voiced by those Enlightenment writers who strongly opposed the extended landed properties of the Church’ (Faucci 2014, 56), Ortes still maintained that the Church should enter into the marketplace by giving up its feudal privileges.4 All these things considered, Neapolitan civil economy seemed to address Aquinas’s ideas from the interpretations dominant in the period of the Counter-Reformation. In contrast to the feudal society, civil economists advocated legal reforms alongside the advent of commercial society. But this is only half the story. The other half regards the direct inf luence Aquinas had on Genovesi and, through him, on the civil economy tradition.

Aquinas’s inf luence on Genovesi: the problem of theodicy Genovesi encountered Aquinas’s theology and philosophy when he moved from Castiglione, where he was born in 1713, to Salerno to start his ecclesiastical career—in 1736 he became a priest of the Catholic Church. In his youth, he read Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae for six years, as confirmed by his autobiography, ‘The first books were the canonical laws and the Summa of Saint Thomas’ (Genovesi, in Zambelli 1972, 806), and in his eulogy by Galanti (1781).5 Paola Zambelli, who produced the largest work on Genovesi’s philosophical formation, stated that ‘Genovesi often recalls Thomas, and thus sometimes he was defined a Thomist’ (Zambelli 1972, 219). Despite having an aversion to most of the Scholastic tradition, Genovesi had in fact a great appreciation for Aquinas: ‘St. Thomas was a great Theologian, but above all, an

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invaluable Metaphysician; he read the Fathers, he read the History […] surely, he was the best philosopher of his time’ (Genovesi 1818, 92). In Genovesi’s manual of Logic for young people (Logica per I giovinetti), Aquinas is described as ‘always capable of teaching and always brilliant’ (Genovesi 1818, 238). The presence should not be forgotten of the important Dominican Studium Generale of San Pietro Martire, in eighteenth-century Naples, close to the university, where Dominicans spread Aquinas’s ideas (Rossi 1962). How should these judgements be evaluated? It is known that Genovesi had many troubles with ecclesiastical authority. The Neapolitan philosopher was removed from Chair of Metaphysics obtained in 1741, in 1744, and he wrote his first book on Metaphysics without the imprimatur of the archbishop of Naples. He began teaching Ethics and was later appointed chair of Commerce and Mechanics. But he was never allowed to teach theology, and he was criticized by many theologians of his time, such as Abbot Molinari, or Maria T. Mamachio. Why? Because he was a Catholic theologian too eclectic, interested in Lockean empiricism, in Galileo, Newton, and Grotius (Galanti 1781). Moreover, as evidenced by his reaction to the Counter–Reformation view of society, Genovesi was very critical of those Catholic theologians who spent too much time on abstract matters rather than focusing on the education of the people. Here, it could be interesting to stress a meaningful point of convergence with Aquinas. When he taught in Naples, Aquinas used the vulgar language during mass to be understood by the people (Ventimiglia 2014). Many centuries later, Genovesi, setting aside his first work on Metaphysics, stopped writing in Latin and began writing in vulgar Italian: ‘I will therefore write as I think, and I will speak as we speak, because I love to be understood, not admired’ (Genovesi 1973, 27). This is just a suggestion, but it reveals an important point of convergence with authors of the Mediterranean spirit of capitalism: Every form of knowledge, with its rules and methods, should be at the service of the common good of the city, which means it has to be useful for people living in the social space of civitas. Nonetheless, the ambivalence of an eclectic Genovesi, highly critical of the Scholastic elucubrations of Catholic theologians but a sincere admirer of Aquinas, raised some doubts about the authenticity of his intentions when he praised the Angelic Doctor. These doubts cannot be dissipated once and for all, but they can be significantly diminished in two ways. On the one hand, Aquinas was an important reference for Genovesi to clarify his position on the problem of theodicy, which prompted accusations from his friends of seminary and ecclesiastical authority. On the other hand, the loci of Genovesi’s thought on which Aquinas’s ideas had a considerable impact should be stressed to prove that the reference to Aquinas’s was more than a mere homage to the authority. The rest of this section deals with theodicy and the next one will be devoted to the philological and conceptual analysis. Genovesi’s first book on Metaphysics, Elementa Metaphysicae, begun in 1743 and concluded in 1752 (Arata 1978), was the object of a great deal of criticism.

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The first ‘round’ of critiques, involving the abovementioned priest and abbot (Mamachio, Molinari), but also cardinals and bishops, ended when Genovesi was prevented from teaching Metaphysics or Theology in Naples. But another ‘round’ emerged when he was already teaching civil economy in the chair given to him by Bartolomeo Interi in 1754. The Neapolitan philosopher was accused of having endorsed dangerous positions on the matter of theodicy that would have opened the way to heresies (Addante 1972, 1982). The charge was extremely grave, as it came from some of his friends, such as the abbot Pasquale Magli and Father Francesco Antonio Piro. The former published a volume on the f laws in Genovesi’s Theodicy (1759), while the latter criticized Genovesi in his volume dated 1764, Antimanicheismo (Antimanicheism. Piro 1777). To set the terms of the controversy, it is important to understand why the problem of theodicy was important for Neapolitan culture, but also for the emergence of economic science in general. These days, it is no longer controversial to enquire into the theological roots of political economy because many good studies have already approached this complicated issue. However, if one wants to pick a symbolic moment that opened a season of renewed pluralism in economics, it would be a lecture given by a Canadian economist, Jacob Viner, at the Jayne Lectures for the American Philosophical Society in 1996, titled ‘The Role of Providence in the Social Order’, later published in book form in 1972. Viner presented many interesting insights into the theology hidden in the thoughts of political economists, such as Adam Smith. For the purpose of the present book, the focus is on a topic that inf luenced the early days of political economy, that is, theodicy. Max Weber, in his essay ‘Politics as Vocation’ (1919), asked: ‘How could a power that is said to be both omnipotent and good create such an irrational world of unmerited suffering, unpunished justice and incorrigible stupidity?’ (Weber 2004, 86). In these few words, Weber summarizes the question of theodicy, namely theos dike [God’s justice]: the relationship between God’s justice and worldly evils. The term theodicy was coined by Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz in response to Pierre Bayle’s challenge to the Christian belief in divine providence. Weber’s question resembles Hume’s question, attributed to Epicurus: ‘Epicurus’ old questions are yet unanswered. Is he willing to prevent evil, but not able? then is he impotent. Is he able, but not willing? then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?’ (Hume 2007, 74). It is clear that the debate regarding theodicy has ancient roots, but it is also widely recognized to have shaped intellectual modernity in Europe (Viner 1972; Hirschman 1997; Hengstmengel 2019). In this respect, Viner affirmed, ‘Almost every learned Englishman and still more every learned Scotsman, it would seem, at some stage of his career felt impelled to publish his views on “The Origin of Evil”’ (Viner 1972, 58). This is related to not only natural evils (e.g., earthquakes, disease, and human inclinations) but also moral evils—those related to man’s behaviour resulting from free will (Waterman 2017), including the market.

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Eighteenth-century economists focused on theodicy; consider the work of Pierre de Boisguilbert in France who was inf luenced by Jansenist authors, or Thomas Robert Malthus, an English Anglican priest, who was also very concerned about the problem of worldly evils.6 The same applies to Genovesi. Genovesi inherited the concern about the problem of theodicy from Giambattista Vico,7 whose lessons the young Genovesi seems to have followed in Naples. Vico, in fact, directly challenged the heretical theodicy of Bayle, whose justification of God was close to atheism. Bayle’s work provoked strong reactions from the Catholic world of Southern Italy. In his work Various Thoughts on the Occasion of a Comet, Bayle expressed the possibility that a society made of atheists could be equally as virtuous as one in which the belief in God is widespread (Bayle 2000a, 200). Not by chance, the first edition of The New Science by Vico started with the consideration that ‘the natural law of nations was certainly born with the common customs of nations; nor was there ever a nation of atheists in the world, because all nations began with some religion’ (Vico, in Robertson 2005, 226). The reference in the third edition is even more explicit: ‘Bayle affirms in his treatise on comets that peoples can live in justice without the light of God’ (Vico 1948, 86). The explicit nexus between market and theodicy was stressed by one of the Italian philosophers inf luenced by Vico, Appiano Buonafede. He defined the society of the atheist as a form of ‘market’ (Garin 1959, 218), leaving little room to doubt the connection between theological and economic issues. The reference to Bayle proves that Vico’s ‘rational civil theology of divine providence’ was directed precisely to the problem of theodicy. A further proof which, as far as we know, has remained unexplored is the explicit reference to the triad ‘ambition, avarice, and cruelty’ set forth in the article Ovid of Bayle’s Dictionary.8 Vico’s argument of heterogeneity of ends, which involved the market sphere, was in fact directed towards addressing this kind of issue. Among economists, Vico’s perspective of the heterogeneity of ends contained in The New Science (3rd edition, 1744) is well known, owing to the work of Hirschman (1997), who first put Vico among the founders of the invisible-hand theory: Legislation considers man as he is in order to turn him to good uses in human society. Out of ferocity, avarice and ambition, the three vices which run throughout the human race, it creates the military, merchant and governing classes, and thus the strength, riches and wisdom of commonwealths. Out of these three vices […] it makes civil happiness. This axiom proves that there is divine providence. (Vico 1948, 56) Following this passage, the other side of the coin of Vico’s Theodicy is expressed, namely ‘that man has free choice, however weak, to make virtues

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of his passions’ (Vico 1948, 56). Genovesi stressed this second part of Vico’s social theodicy. While recognizing a role for the invisible-hand mechanism (Bruni 2006), Genovesi focused on human beings’ inclination to virtue as the remedy for moral evils. Like many Italian theologians and philosophers in the first half of the eighteenth century, Genovesi was involved in the debate on theodicy. Bayle’s theses were so radical and absolute that we can say, paraphrasing Viner, every learned Italian man of the eighteenth century was impelled to publish dissertations addressing the topic of the origin of evil. Italian Catholic theologians felt the necessity to propose a coherent and strong refutation of Bayle’s heresy (Addante 1972, 1982). They did so by invoking patristic tradition, Aquinas’s theology, and Counter-Reformation authors. Genovesi was accused of embracing Bayle’s arguments on theodicy, driving this theological problem towards Manichean or atheistic solutions. Piro refused three theses from Genovesi’s Elementa Metaphysicae: (1) Virtue is not rewarded, whereas vice remains unpunished (Genovesi 1763, 463); (2) virtue does not need evil to f lourish (Genovesi 1763, 441–442); and (3) vices are more numerous than virtue: ‘At nunc, aiunt, vitia multo plura et maiora, sineque ulla comparatione, esse virtutibus’ (Genovesi 1763, 452). Genovesi refuted these charges, and he accused the accusers of having misunderstood his ideas. To prove that, Genovesi is shown to have embraced a ‘cautious’ positive view of human beings, rooted in Aquinas’s philosophy. It is plausible that Genovesi heard of Aquinas’s position on theodicy from the Dominican teachers of the Studium Generale, such as Father Michele Villani, who taught in the first half of the eighteenth century on a tesario titled Propositiones philosophicae, or from Salvatore Rosselli, who taught in Rome and collected his teachings in the Summa Philosophica published in 1777 (Rossi 1962). It is not surprising, then, to find Aquinas as the most quoted author in Genovesi’s reply to Magli (1759). Genovesi envisaged a Christian tradition from Augustine to Aquinas, and later, to Leibniz. All argued that the ordo of the universe required the possibility for man to fail, but also that man had been furnished with enough strength to overcome moral evils and become virtuous. Genovesi particularly emphasised Aquinas’s connection between man’s freedom and moral evils in a passage that should leave little room for doubt, even for Magli: Our freedom belongs to the order of this world. Ut sit ordo in rebus ad complementum Universi. S. Th. p. 2., quest. 9, art. 8, in corpore. Moral evils are in the order of the universe. S. Th. 1. 49, a. 2 Ordo autem universi requirit, ut supra dictum est, quod quaedam sint quae deficere possint, et interdum deficiant. […] Here my sources of my miserable theory regarding the origin of evils. Have you seen? You should see once more: it could be you will see more clearly. (Genovesi 1759, LXXXIII)

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As shown in Chapter 2, to Aquinas, the Fall produced a significant reduction of man’s virtuous inclination, a reduction which can go on indefinitely. However, virtue ‘cannot be destroyed entirely, because the root of this inclination always remains’ (Summa Theologiae, Ia–IIae, q. 85, a. 2, corp.). Aquinas did not conceive humanity as a massa damnata, nor did he see evil and damnation outside divine grace. Even in an imperfect form, man is capable of virtue, and he is directed to the good of human life, what he called imperfect happiness (beatitudo imperfecta). This view preserves man’s attitude towards virtue and sees moral evils as a means to let virtue f lourish. Within such a structure, for Genovesi, the problem of Evil finds a proper solution: God forbids evil, God commands good: we ought to believe that He always bestows us with enough strength to escape one and follow the other. Is there anyone who does not feel any strength to maintain his passions, even the most ardent? (Genovesi 1833, 178) In this line of thinking, Genovesi went beyond Vico’s vision of ambition, avarice, and cruelty—man can overcome these three vices with his own effort: Virtue is a habit. To obtain it, one requires strict, long and constant discipline: one wants to challenge the vices of nature: one has to bargain daily and win gluttony, incontinence, avarice, self-love, vainglory, ambition, disdain, ferocity […] and the stronger and better armed those enemies are, as in the case of erudite people/scholars, the more these fights are courageous. (Genovesi 1772, 26–27; emphasis added) It goes without saying that in Genovesi’s view, as in Aquinas’s, affirming that the human being is inclined to virtue does not exclude that virtue may require significant efforts to be obtained; rather, virtue needs ‘strict, long and constant discipline’. Genovesi’s theodicy arose from the works of Aquinas, his theological tradition (Hick 2010), and scholasticism. After the Fall, mankind’s inclination towards virtue was diminished but not eliminated. The problem of evil is solved thanks to man’s natural and virtuous ability to overcome moral evils. Adopting Thomistic theodicy, Genovesi placed himself within the tradition that includes Origen, Irenaeus, Aquinas, Bellarmino and the theologians from the Council of Trent, Leibniz, Magli, and Piro—to mention just a few. He demonstrated to his former critics (Magli, Piro) that he was part of this tradition, rather than its adversary. Does this imply that Genovesi’s philosophy had been inf luenced by Aquinas?

Aquinas’s inf luence on Genovesi: homo homini natura amicus Genovesi studied directly from Aquinas’s texts, but he also received insights into the interpretations of his contemporaries and immediate predecessors.

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In a nutshell, Genovesi’s reading of Aquinas’s view was inf luenced by more geometrico. It was not Spinoza but rather Malebranche and Leibniz whose views, for Genovesi, represented modern interpretations of Aquinas’s view. In his reply to Magli, he wrote, ‘It could be clearly shown that the Leibniz system is entirely taken by St. Augustine and St. Thomas and the other school doctors’ (Genovesi 1759, LXVI). Here, the element of interest is not so much the philosophers mentioned but rather the emphasis on reason, calculation, and geometry to describe Aquinas’s theology and philosophy. According to Genovesi, this was the method adopted by Aquinas in his ref lections: St. Thomas, if one considers carefully, wrote his Summa Teologica with an almost Euclidean method, for his surprising strength of genius, and the reading of the works of Aristotle and the Arabs who had written everything as geometers. (Genovesi 1835, 235) In the dispute between voluntarists and intellectualists, which was analysed in the previous chapter, Genovesi sided with the intellectualists and elected Aquinas as his representative. The wisdom and knowledge of God precedes His will in His ruling of the world, so that, based on the authority of Aquinas, Genovesi even argued that ‘the Reason is the radix of Will’ (Genovesi 1759, LXXXVI). As for God, the prominence of reason over the will is the guarantee of human freedom: I have said, and I say it again, that there is no freedom without reason; that the root of freedom is the intellect; that freedom necessarily follows the judgment of practical reason; that freer is he whose reason is greatest and least prone to error; that there can be no sin in the will, without error in the intellect, that therefore God is perfectly free, because he is infinitely wise, and perfect, and not subject to error or disturbance of any intellect. This is the doctrine of St. Thomas and the whole Thomistic school. (Genovesi 1759, IV) This extremely rationalistic interpretation of Aquinas is also applied by Genovesi to the relationship between nature and grace. Genovesi interpreted Aquinas’s phrase gratia non tollit naturam, sed perficit—grace does not destroy nature, but perfects it—as an implicit statement that nature is not completely wasted by Original Sin, but it contains the seeds of the inclination of human beings towards the good. To describe this relation between nature and grace, cardinal and theological virtues, Genovesi employed the Italian verb corrobora, meaning to corroborate, to specify that somehow grace reinforces and invigorates what was already present in human nature. While it could be rightly stated that Genovesi ‘rationalized’ and ‘modernized’ Aquinas’s thought, there are two important corollaries tied to his interpretation. On the one hand, Genovesi refused the voluntaristic dichotomy of

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the two powers of God, which, in turn, implied the impossibility of knowing the very essence of the world and human beings (see Chapter 4). On the other hand and far more importantly, Genovesi imbued in Aquinas’s notion of reason the notion of calculating reason typical of the advent of the materialist mechanism of his contemporary La Mettrie (Di Liso 2016). The former is the reason that drives man in his virtuous path towards happiness—the teleological view of human beings that Genovesi inherited from the Aristotelian and Thomistic tradition—whereas the latter is the one that, more geometrico, guides the calculus of the means. In the next paragraph, it will be shown that, for Genovesi, economy is the science of public happiness, that is, the calculations made by economic actors in the market can be part of the common good of society; this Thomistic framework will be the silent background of Genovesi’s speculations. Five centuries after Aquinas’s s naturaliter homo homini amicus est, Genovesi expressed the core element of his anthropology in the formula homo homini natura amicus est. Adopting Newtonian terms, Genovesi showed that the human being is mainly moved by two primitive forces: self-love ( forza concentrativa) and love for others ( forza diffusiva). He suggested that some passions are manifestations of self-love, while others bring man to care about the good of others. In private as well as social spheres, virtue consists of the capability of reason to find an equilibrium between these two basic forces. Genovesi’s theory of action is constructed upon the idea that human nature and society can be explained as an equilibrium between these two primitive and opposite forces. From this viewpoint, he condemned Hobbes’s egoistic anthropologies: ‘Hobbes founds all on forza concentrativa, and the forza diffusiva springs only from a higher degree of the concentrativa, that is fear’ (Genovesi 1818, 231). Here Genovesi sided implicitly with Aquinas, whose idea of donum captured the equilibrium of these two forces. According to Aquinas, concern for one’s own good is present even in the purest form of friendship, one based on virtue, wherein concern for the good of others is particularly strong. This is much more evident in civic friendship, which is based on mutual assistance. There, as shown in the last section, donum and the quest for one’s own good coexist. Genovesi and Aquinas both rejected egoism and altruism, linking their anthropologies with the fundamental category of reciprocity. In Genovesi’s words, ‘friendship and reciprocal trust between citizens foster mutual assistance in life’s troubles’ (Genovesi 2013, 342). Genovesi referred to Aquinas in two important passages of his work on moral philosophy, written and published in the very same years as the Lezioni. Aquinas is first recalled to answer a general anthropological question, that is, ‘if man is by nature good, bad, or neither one nor the other’ (Genovesi 1973, 41). Notwithstanding his enlightenment rationalism and optimism, as a Catholic theologian, Genovesi had been trained in recognizing the effects of Original Sin. Moreover, as an attentive reader of Machiavelli and Vico, both focused on the necessity of studying l’uomo qual è (man as he is) rather than man as he should be, that is, focus on the realist dimension before the

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normative one, Genovesi had his eyes fixed on the egoisms which, in his view, prevented the Kingdom of Naples from f lourishing. This was also valid for the economic sphere where Genovesi recognized the excesses of selfinterest/self-love ( forza concentrativa). But Aquinas is recalled to prove that, […] just as in man there is much that inclines to evil, in the same way there is no animal with more physical and intellectual virtue, as stated elsewhere; and the natural law of justice and mercy, the dictating conscience not wanting to do to others what you would suffer if it were done to you, is, says the Theologian himself, a force inclining to good for all humanity. (Genovesi 1973, 41–42) In the footnote, the name of the Theologian—San Thomas in his Summa Theologiae Ia–IIae, quaestio 94 on Natural Law—is revealed to the reader. Scholars (Costabile 2012; Pabst 2018) wisely argued that Genovesi received Aquinas’s view of Natural Law directly and mediated by many modern sources (Grotius, Pufendorf ). But what Genovesi really received from Aquinas was an anthropological teaching, since, as known, the precepts of Natural Law follow the fundamental inclinations of human beings (Summa Theologiae Ia–IIae, q. 94, a. 2, corp.). Among these basic inclinations, as emerged in Chapter 2, there is the social nature of human beings, that is, their propensity to live in society: and in this respect, whatever pertains to this inclination belongs to the natural law; for instance, to shun ignorance, to avoid offending those among whom one has to live, and other such things regarding the above inclination. (Summa Theologiae Ia–IIae, q. 94, a. 2, corp.) Therefore, Genovesi did receive a version of the Golden Rule which not only implies respecting others (justice) but also a positive duty of mercy, whose corresponding right he named the right to mutual assistance: Man is a naturally sociable animal, goes the common saying. But not every man will believe there is no other sociable animal on earth…. How is man more sociable than other animals?… [it is] in his reciprocal right to be assisted and consequently in his reciprocal obligation to help us in our needs. (Genovesi 2013, 26) Genovesi fervently stressed the importance of affection towards others ( forza diffusiva), as he recognized its dignity and fundamental importance, equal to the one attributed to the affection driving one to ensure his own good. The Neapolitan philosopher transported his anthropological model to a moral and juridical level, proposing an original definition for natural law: ‘Nurture

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everyone’s rights, assisting them to the utmost of your knowledge and capability’ (Genovesi 1973, 44). In this passage, Albini (1859) encounters a weakness in Genovesi’s philosophy of right, guilty of not having sufficiently distinguished between juridical and moral matters. But this judgement might be misplaced, losing the peculiarity of Genovesi’s position. Genovesi’s stance is in accordance with the main proposition of Natural Law, namely, the human capacity for adhering to Law not only from fear of external coercion but also for internal adherence. Hence, the idea that perfect law, non-violation of others’ rights, may be accompanied by an imperfect law, mutual assistance. Natural Law, in fact, metaphorically defined by Genovesi as a great rope tying mankind together—the parallel with trust ( fides), defined as a rope that unites humanity in a sociable life (Genovesi 2013, 341) is noteworthy— enforces mutual respect for human law. Imperfection must be sought in the possibilities of application of the laws, rather than in their binding force: The only difference between perfect laws and assistance laws is that the former entail what one cannot do, the others regulate what one can do; being mankind able to always avoid doing what harms the other but not always doing what benefits the other, the obligation to safeguard the first ones is infinite, but it cannot be the same for the second ones. (Genovesi 1973, 56) Here, Aquinas’s teaching on mutual assistance as the foundation of civil life echoes. Genovesi’s social right cannot be exhaustively assimilated into State– individual relations, meaning into the logic of distributive justice. Hence, how can a natural social right, declinable in inter-individual relations, be ascribable into the legislative body (human law)? One can observe the absence in Genovesi’s thought of the idea of an ethical State compelling its citizens to mutual assistance. He shared an important precept of natural law with Aquinas: ‘Human law cannot prohibit what is adverse to virtue, forbidding instead what endangers human consortium. It then legitimates other injustices not because it does not approve them, but rather because it does not condemn them’ (Summa Theologiae, Ia–IIae q. 77, a. 1, ad. 1). What legislation is allowed to do, instead, is reserve a space for mutual assistance in civil life, also allowing the f lourishing of intermediate bodies. It is not surprising, then, that Fanfani chose to list Genovesi among the voluntarist authors (Fanfani 1942): in the Neapolitan philosopher’s system, in fact, one could find both the idea that man can overcome individual negative inclinations—see the Thomistic theodicy above—but also the role of institutions in shaping social life. Human actions in the social sphere cannot be evaluated, regardless of their impact on the common good of society: As prudently stated by St. Thomas, no actions are indifferent in hypothesis or in an individual, whether they may be in such a way as far as thesis or mankind are considered. Thus, in political bodies, some actions

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or “non-actions”, generally contemplated as indifferent in this fashion, disclose a necessary relation to Good or Evil and are hence not to be intended as indifferent. (Genovesi 1973, 308) From Aquinas, Genovesi inherited a view of social life in which virtue and mutual assistance are the cornerstones, and civic friendship is the common good to be reached. As reported by Bruni (2008), Genovesi admitted to using the terms reciprocity, mutual assistance, virtue, and friendship interchangeably. We can rightly place Aquinas in the tradition that Bruni retraced, going back from Aristotle to Genovesi, that puts emphasis on the intrinsic value of relationality: For Aristotle, and in the whole Western civil tradition, there is an intrinsic value in relational and civil life, without which human life does not fully f lourish. Though human life, as seen, must be able to f lourish autonomously, in the sense that it cannot be totally jeopardized by bad fortune, it is also true that in the Aristotelian line of thought, some of the essential components of the good life are tied to interpersonal relationships. (Bruni 2010, 394) Is this social framework also valid for his commercial theory? Is Aquinas also a steady reference point for Genovesi’s economic theory?

Civil as civitas De Roover, a leading twentieth-century scholar of medieval economic thought, wrote in an entry for the International Encyclopaedia of Social Sciences: ‘Even then, scholastic economics did not die. It left its imprint, although unacknowledged and even disavowed, on the works of Abbe Ferdinando Galiani (1728–1787) and Abbe Antonio Genovesi (1712–1769), both Neapolitan forerunners of the classical school’ (De Roover, in Sills 1968, 431). In Chapter 2, De Roover’s interpretation of Aquinas’s theory of just price was highlighted, that is, the equation of just price and competitive market price. From this standpoint, Aquinas and the whole Scholastic would be forerunners of classical and neo-classical economy. While it was extensively shown in Chapter 2 that things do not stand in this way, as far as Aquinas’s theory is concerned, it is also problematic to equate Galiani’s and Genovesi’s theories. The former employed Newtonian terminology to express his anthropological idea that man is basically self-interested and to recognize a role for the invisible hand (which he called ‘Supreme Hand’); Genovesi maintained that man is driven by two basic forces, and, as will be shown later, the invisible hand finds a smaller space in his economic theory. De Roover then added that Genovesi, unlike Smith, produced neither an autonomous nor an innovative economic theory (De Roover, in Sills 1968, 431).

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This judgement recalls that expressed by Francesco Ferrara in the nineteenth century (Ferrara 1852, XXXVI). Before addressing Aquinas’s inf luence on Genovesi’s economic theory, it would be useful to understand the relationship between civil economy and political economy. Civil economy is an alternative—but not opposite—vision to classical political economy. The conceptual key lies in Genovesi’s understanding of the market and market transactions, which is different from that found in widespread modern economic theories. Unlike Smith or political economists, who argue that parties operate in a state of mutual unconcern prior to and during market transactions (and the invisible-hand mechanism creates the public good as an unintended result), Genovesi held a different view. In fact, Genovesi’s approach seems to differ by requiring that the parties to a market transaction have a more internalized sense of its mutually beneficial nature. Somehow, each party’s understanding of his own part in the transaction must include the idea of the transaction as mutually beneficial. (Bruni and Sugden 2008, 49) Civil economists were suspicious of the building blocks of political economy, that is, that the common good does not need actions intentionally aimed at it, because the only good and effective way to achieve the common good is to create incentives for each individual to seek their own private interest. As far as the butcher, the baker, and the brewer are concerned, ‘we address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages’ (Smith 1981, 27). In the market, the person driven by self-interest is blind with respect to the good of other people, incapable of caring about the good of our fellows. Conversely, for Genovesi, things do not stand in this way. The good of the others can be pursued intentionally during the market transaction alongside one’s individual good. This idea of market is in harmony with Genovesi’s anthropological vision, whose Thomistic roots have been described above. Genovesi calls mutual assistance (mutua assistenza) the mutual concern of both parties during the market transaction. In a commercial society, the equilibrium can be found and maintained, as the two forces converge towards a common end: mutual benefit. The market is a place in which, through the medium of price mechanisms, men are mutually useful and thus assist one another with their respective needs. In this framework, the common good is not an unintentional consequence (like the invisible hand), nor is it the byproduct of self-interest. Using Smith’s example, but reversing his main thesis, in Genovesi’s view, the butcher, the baker, and the brewer can intentionally promote the interests of the buyers and of society without renouncing their gains from trade. As Milbank and Pabst rightly interpreted (2016), in this case ‘contract can be a reciprocal agreement about a shared goal and value, not just the joint meeting of two entirely separate individual interests’ (143);

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for example, ‘you might lower that price to help your neighbour because you did not want to destroy her and it would never even make economic sense to do so’ (143). The competitive and cooperative nature of market enterprise is not a naïve interpretation of the market. It is how Genovesi, theoretically and empirically, saw commercial society as a large-scale effort of cooperation for mutual benefit, whereas other-regarded motivations are equally as basic as self-interested ones. In Genovesi’s theory, the mechanism of the invisible hand had a role, but only as a secondary and subsidiary mechanism. As the following passage demonstrates, the operations of the invisible hand do not constitute the essence of the market. Rather, they are the accidental restoration of a virtuous equilibrium: Each force of the universe is supposed to perpetually follow the end to which it was ordered. However, the individual actions of the forces often def lect off the wire leading to the highest Good. Sometimes, in order not to roam without order, they ought to aim towards a certain end, not the one established by the First Cause with antecedent and absolute will, but rather an end which necessarily originates from that aberration, and by which such actions abide without contradicting the First Cause. (Genovesi 1763, CLXXXI) The fundamental economic principle is ‘mutual assistance’ in which each intentionally wants the interest of the other in addition to his own interest. Mutual good is part of everyone’s intentions. In this view, there is no common good without intentionally seeking it. From here, one can understand why Genovesi, even before indicating economics as the science of the ‘wealth of nations’, preferred to define it as the science of public happiness. The economy is ‘civil’ when it considers the good of the civitas as a determining element of the actions and choices of economic actors, and it is ‘uncivilized’ when it promotes economic activities that damage the civitas in all its expressions, from people to buildings, from quality of life to the environment. Pace D’Onofrio (2015), Aquinas is also behind Genovesi’s idea of civil economy as the science of public happiness: ‘This is because he—Genovesi is talking about himself—considers natural and civil happiness which […] not differently from philosophical virtue is natural, and acquiritur per naturalia, as stated by St. Thomas’ (Genovesi 1791, 260). Some elements emerge from this passage: (1) natural and civil happiness are connected, quasi-identified with one another, and (2) happiness and virtue ‘naturally acquired’ are strictly intertwined. This is not surprising if one recalls the rationalist and modern interpretations Genovesi adopted regarding Aquinas’s teachings (see the previous section). Reading the Lezioni, one encounters the name of Aquinas only in a footnote. Genovesi talked about the money that Aquinas took when he taught in Naples, a considerable sum according to the Neapolitan philosopher.

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He probably read the news on a plaque which is even today affixed outside the room of the Studium of San Domenico Maggiore in Naples. But the presence of Aquinas silently informs Genovesi’s economic teachings: ‘The purpose of civil economy, as it is said more than once, is: 1. The increase of population; 2. its nutrition; 3. its natural and civil happiness’ (Genovesi 2013, 170; emphasis added).9 That Genovesi’s civil economy deals with happiness has been recognized even by Schumpeter, who significantly put brackets around ‘happiness’ when he related one of the economic concepts developed by Genovesi—the idea of just population (giusta popolazione): Genovesi went further than this, however, in effecting a synthesis between the two opposites. He saw that, from the standpoint of a population living under given conditions, numbers are capable of being either too small or too great in the sense that increase or decrease would produce greater ‘happiness.’ This led Genovesi to reassert the old idea of optimum population (popolazione giusta, Lezioni, Part I, Ch. 5). (Schumpeter 2006, 247) In Genovesi’s Lezioni, the right to mutual assistance becomes a ‘mutual obligation to assist one another with one’s needs’ (Genovesi 2013, 22). This notion is based (1) on human social nature (homo homini natura amicus), (2) on agreements and contracts, and (3) on the gains one derives from it (Genovesi 2013, 22–23). The market is one of those parts of civil life in which genuine relationships can be lived and authentic virtues cultivated. The common good does have a material aspect, and this seems to link it more immediately to the economic sphere, but it also has a formal aspect linked to the f lowering of the person in the social world. Do Genovesi’s economic view and its Thomistic roots also characterize his view of international trade? In relation to Genovesi’s Lezioni, Schumpeter expressed his opinion on the matter in an important footnote in his monumental History of Economic Analysis: These lectures do indeed display the inf luence of contemporaneous and earlier writers and, what is worse, the argument frequently lacks rigor. But nobody had, when they appeared, published as comprehensive a presentation of the utilitarian welfare economics that the epoch was evolving. The ‘mercantilist’ elements in Genovesi’s teaching only prove the realism of his vision. (Schumpeter 2006, 172–173) Schumpeter’s judgement distanced Genovesi from the doux-commerce thesis, namely ‘the complex of ideas and expectations which accompanied the expansion of commerce and the development of the market from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries’ (Hirschman 1982, 1464). The most famous proponent of this idea was Montesquieu, who argued that ‘commerce… polishes

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and softens (adoucit) barbaric ways as we see every day’ (Montesquieu, in Hirschman 1982, 1464). In other words, international trade promotes not only the increase in wealth but also the civilization of societies and friendship with foreign peoples, being associated with moral progress, politeness of manners, and peace.11 Scholars seem to confirm Schumpeter’s readings (Gobbi 1884; Fanfani 1942; Fusco 1988 Spiller and Zamberlan 2009). Many passages from the Lezioni also confirm this thesis: The introduction of merchandise, preventing the consumption of internal ones, or harming the progress of internal manufactures, or the one of agriculture, causes notable damage to the State. Said damage is due to the present dispositions in Europe, where every nation evaluates to what extent it can value its active trade […]. Such introduction is the reason for the state of poverty and depopulation’. (Genovesi 2013, 213) Bruni’s (2013, 527–528) reconstruction of the evolution of Genovesi’s attitude towards international commerce confirms the first argument. Genovesi adopted an increasingly negative attitude towards international commerce, which, he argued, is linked to war and conquest rather than to mutual assistance and friendship. In his Lezioni, the true spirit of commerce is identified with the ‘occhio di conquista’ (‘eye of conquest’. Genovesi 2013, 281). The last uncompleted work by Genovesi was a translation and comment on Montesquieu’s Spirit of Laws. Genovesi stated clearly therein that ‘commerce is the great source of wars’ (Genovesi, in Bruni 2013, 527), in his remarks related to the passages on peace and ‘doux commerce’. However, according to Genovesi, this was just one option for international trade coinciding with the state of affairs in Europe. The other option, expressed in the same remarks on Montesquieu’s statement, concerns the pattern of mutual assistance between nations: ‘If two nations trade together for reciprocal needs, these needs are in opposition to war, not the spirit of commerce’ (Genovesi, in Bruni 2013, 528; emphasis added). Genovesi evidently preferred this vision of trade, but he was fully aware that reforms were needed to bring the states, as the individuals, into conditions of equality and ‘mutual recognition of equality’ (Bruni and Sugden 2008, 55). In other words, mutual assistance is possible even between states, on the condition that they can trade in similar circumstances to those in which individuals operate. This thesis emerges clearly from the last note that Genovesi wrote to Montesquieu’s work: […] Mr. Montesquieu would have bestowed us with an instruction that would have placed us in a state of profit from such laws, if he had strained to reveal us which principles, which maxims, which laws, which customs, what dispositions, what institutions, and finally what means lead

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the different nations to the degree of trade in which they have been. […] Unfortunately, we would not be trained on the subject, after reading Book XXI of the Spirit of Laws, compared to the event had we never read it. (Genovesi, in Montesquieu 1832, 387) As recognized in the literature, Genovesi revised mercantilism embracing this spirit: ‘As Fusco very rightly points out (1988, 615–616), Genovesi’s scheme goes back to “new mercantilism”, since the vision is mainly projected on the Neapolitan situation’ (Spiller and Zamberlan 2009, 38). A similar judgement is traceable in Gobbi’s work arguing that the ‘legitimate freedom of trade is not Genovesi’s original idea, yet he had the merit of applying it, for example, with greater consistency than the Melon’ (Gobbi 1884, 138). Finally, Bruni argued as well that ‘according to Genovesi, the sentence has to be intended in a normative sense (it has to be) and not in a descriptive one (it is as such)’ (Bruni 2015, 144). The link between international trade, friendship, and mutual assistance also emerges vividly in the works of Filangieri: Brothers of a large family scattered across the globe urged to give each other assistance, we will realize that the great Agent of vegetation has largely provided us with what is necessary to support the needs of life. Trade, had it been free, would substitute what is superf luous in one nation with what is needed in another, according to the plans of nature. (Filangieri 1822, 93) Based on the previous argumentations, it is not surprising that Filangieri was among the first to consider commerce a positive-sum game (Bruni 2006, 53). Interestingly enough, he dedicated many pages to demonstrating to what extent an opposite proposition had undermined the European States: A principle no less unjust than false, equally opposed to morality and politics, has menacingly seduced those who manage the interests of the nations. It is commonly believed that a State cannot gain without the others losing […] Who can describe the evils that this fatal rivalry brings to trades in general and, especially to those of the nations? (Filangieri 1822, 163–164) Hence, the possibility of the existence of mutual gains from trade is the cornerstone of classical and civil economy.12 It is known that both branches focused on the economic conditions that facilitate fruitful exchanges—the true spirit of commerce—between States. The point of departure is the frame on which market relations have to be conceived. Civil economists took seriously the notion of mutual help in need as the real foundation of commerce, side by side with the pursuit of gains from trade. Mutual assistance is the result of the

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interaction between these two elements of commerce. Herein emerges the similarity with Aquinas’s view on the role of foreign merchants and international trade that was developed in Chapter 3. Different from classical economists, civil economists thought that commerce based only on self-interest cannot produce anything other than war and competition among people and nations. In light of this awareness, they stressed the necessity of cultural reform, which has to be grounded mostly on the education system but also on national and international institutions. Aquinas compared human inclinations towards civitas (city or state) with those towards virtue, both related to friendship: There is in all men a certain natural impulse toward the city, as also toward the virtues. But nevertheless, just as the virtues are acquired through human exercise, as is stated in Book II of the Ethics, in the same way cities are founded by human industry. Now the man who first founded a city was the cause of the greatest goods for men. (Aquinas 2007, I, 40) The Thomistic virtue-ethic tradition is grounded on education and the public exercise of virtue. Transcending Aquinas’s text, yet remaining in a Thomistic framework, it could be argued that economic education is fundamental to fostering relations of mutual assistance. The social ties necessary to reach this aim can be developed only through public education and practices. Aware of this sensibility towards commerce inside their civitas, merchants can trade abroad without corrupting virtues and traditions in other civitates. In other words, Aquinas would have stated that people should be assisted in considering mutual assistance as a possibility of national and international trade. Hence, the necessity for an educational system that depicts the virtues and the vices of international commerce and its possible contribution to the common good of societies is clear. The aim is not a sort of social engineering. However, it should be possible for people to understand which pattern of behaviour fits better with their basic moral understandings. In Aquinas’s view, they would freely choose when to do it according to the basic inclinations of their rational nature. Not surprisingly, a similar argument was advanced by civil economists profoundly inf luenced by the Thomistic tradition. Filangieri described in detail six levels of public education and then distinguished the seventh according to every profession. Interestingly enough, he devotes very little space to the ‘college of traders’ (Collegio de’ Negozianti) since there are ‘few and small differences […] between the scientific education of such a precious class for the State, and that of the class mentioned in the XXV chapter’ (Filangieri 1822, 277). The XXV chapter was indeed devoted to the sixth and higher level of education, focused on scientific cognition. Filangieri was aware that every good citizen ought to acquire knowledge on economy and commerce, as both are related to individual and public happiness.

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In Genovesi’s thought, the centrality of education was even more evident.13 On the one hand, Genovesi complained about the limited interest granted by public authorities to economic matters. Public education is connected to laws and a constitution, but this is a binary relationship: they grow together but they can be neglected together. He declared himself ‘astonished’ at the little attention paid to the economic portion of laws, even though this may be considered the very foundation of all others: ‘Among the endless commentators of our laws there are very few who have cared to illustrate the laws on their economic part’ (Genovesi 2013, 259). On the other hand, it is highly significant that Genovesi decided to title his treatise ‘Lezioni’ and not ‘Investigation’, ‘Essay’, or ‘Principles’. The relationship with the students of his Naples, the intellectual exchange and reciprocity even in teaching, were fundamental for the Neapolitan priest (Smith was also much loved as a professor of moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow). The ‘civil’ character of his work also emerges here—economic science is not a private matter but is at the service of the development and f lowering of peoples: One can assess the truth of our original assumptions, namely that it [the economy] is one of the noblest and most useful sciences, worthy of the study of every citizen. Apart from Ethics, science of the interior embodiment and of our duties, nothing is as important as knowing how we can live wisely in a civil society, with our own utility and with that of the others. (Genovesi 2013, 433) Genovesi implicitly agreed with Aquinas. He argues that public trust ( fede pubblica), which is fundamental for commerce, is grounded on ethical trust ( fede etica), which roughly corresponds to virtue. Bringing his argument to the international level, states in which public trust is widespread and robust will trade more easily under the spirit of mutual assistance. People conceive of markets as places of mutual help and friendship also. Finally, aware of Machiavelli’s and Vico’s accounts of the truly bad behaviour of human beings (l’uomo qual è), Genovesi specified that not all patterns of behaviour are good, since they can lead through bad patterns. In the economic case, mutual advantage can be reached even without mutual assistance and virtue. This is particularly valid in the ‘spirit’ of the international. Once more, Genovesi emphasized the need for education to develop people’s good habits in his remarks on Montesquieu’s Spirit of Laws: Let a sentiment, which is not the result of earlier ref lections and which is not a series of cognitions, be an act able to lead towards the end by unfair ways and by those which would be right. In order for this sentiment to lead to the goodness of customs, it is natural that it ought to be sustained

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by the firm conviction that the good of the country is intimately linked to the goodness of customs; only being it as such, can it guide you. But in this case, it would more or less require a series of cognitions, which would make the love of the country more or less stable. (Genovesi, in Montesquieu 1832, 105; emphasis added)

Epilogue To sum up the findings of this chapter, it could be stated that civil economy emerges as a reaction to a certain Thomism (anti-commerce) but also as a development of the seeds of the Mediterranean Spirit of Capitalism as expressed in Aquinas’s social and economic teachings. Naturally, there are many points of departure that have been marginally touched in this chapter. Aquinas and Genovesi lived in different times and, consequently, held two different accounts of the ideal society. Aquinas’s framework was rooted in the concept of social need and founded on a divine-based hierarchy. This cannot be denied; even Chapter 3 showed that some dynamic elements are present in this static view of society. Conversely, Genovesi was an enlightened reformer. He defined the economy as civil since, similar to Smith, he believed that the equality and freedom that characterize market transactions could contribute decisively to the process of civilization, lifting human societies out of their hierarchical, fixed, feudal structure. Further, Aquinas did not consider the role of supra-personal dynamics in converting vices into virtues. Natural law, a set of norms that prescribe virtuous or, at least, licit behaviour, could not be considered an example in this sense. On the contrary, in studying Machiavelli and Hobbes, Genovesi was fully aware that moral issues needed to be sustained by considerations about the true behaviour of man (l’uomo qual è). Studying Vico, he noted that the supra-personal dynamics of civil life can contribute to the common good of society, orienting intentional behaviours towards unintentional consequences. More precisely, for Genovesi, civil institutions could transform human passions and impulses, such as the desire for luxury, profit, and comfort, into behaviour that unintentionally contributes to the common good. However, Genovesi admitted that this was just an accident of the market, the essence of mutual assistance as an intentional search for the common good. By contrast, Aquinas only considered the intentional side of civil dynamics, leaving no room for proto forms of invisible-hand mechanisms. These differences are profound and should be taken seriously. Nonetheless, the thread woven around the view of the market as a place of virtue, friendship, and mutual assistance intrinsically ties these two authors, despite the distance in time. The Mediterranean Spirit of Capitalism finds two pillars in Aquinas and Genovesi. This chapter concludes with beautiful verses in the original Italian language from Agostino Paradisi (Paradisi 1827, 9–80), who

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was appointed to the first Chair of Economia Civile in Modena, dedicated to a student during the days of Saint Thomas Aquinas: Te pur dal cielo illumina, fra i sentier cupi e bassi, amico astro seguace, che risplende ai tuoi passi del vero con la face, Tommaso è l’astro. Sacrasi a lui il festivo giorno. Tommaso i voti ardenti, Suonan Tommaso intorno, I solennir cocenti Densa d’error caligine Premea l’umano ingegno. Lui ragionar le scole udiro, e Dio fe’ segno di plauso alle sue parole. Dischiuso in parte il mistico di Fede arcano velo, fidando a tanto Duce varcò ragion del Cielo nell’inattesa luce. Tacque, e tornò nell’Erebo alla stanza natia con gemito e vergogna la proterva Eresia maestra di menzogna. Garzon a cui pochi imitano Colpa de’ tempi nostri, tu notte e dì dispensi de’ venerati inchiostri sopra i sublimi sensi.

Notes 1 The role of Verri and Beccaria in inf luencing Bentham’s philosophy is known. 2 Translations of the works of the Italian economists quoted in this chapter were done by the author of this book. 3 Although only four of seven books were printed while the author was alive, this work enjoyed great national and international success. It was translated in several languages and even praised by Benjamin Franklin. 4 To understand how deeply the phenomenon of ecclesial rent was imbedded in Italian society, one can consider the condemnation of the thesis of the theologian Antonio Rosmini Serbati. In his work Of the Five Wounds of the Catholic Church (1884), he still listed the feudal administration of ecclesial estates among these

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5

6 7 8

9

10

11

12

injustices, as they enriched clergymen, fostered vices, and produced servility towards the political power. Di Liso (2016, 20) argued that Genovesi read Aquinas in 1730, because Genovesi appeared to have stated that he read the Summa for six years. However, it is more likely that Genovesi started to read Aquinas when he was the disciple of Giuseppe Abbamonte, priest of Buccino, where Genovesi was sent to continue his studies and not be distracted by his feelings of love for a girl in Castiglione. The author of this book is proving in two working papers that Adam Smith’s economic thought can also be considered a form of theodicy. Genovesi adopted Vico’s diagnosis of the problem of theodicy, but not integrally the prognosis. Vico, in fact, cannot be defined as a Thomist (Vasoli 1974), nor was his theodicy tied to Thomistic ideas. ‘In some countries men follow the same course, and everywhere they are great exterminators. I do not speak of the slaughter arising from ambition, avarice, or cruelty, or from the other passions that give rise to war. I speak only of the consequences of the efforts we make to nourish our bodies. Upon this score man is a principle so injurious and so destructive that if all other animals did as much in proportion, the earth would not be able to furnish them with sufficient sustenance. When we see in the streets and in the market places of the great cities that prodigious bulk of vegetables, fruits, and the infinite number of other things destined for the feeding of its inhabitants, is one not apt to exclaim: here is enough for the week?’ (Bayle 2000b, 224; emphasis added). Genovesi’s insistence on the role of Kings and Sovereigns in civil happiness brought some scholars (D’Onofrio 2015; Pabst 2018) to argue that this is the real point of interest of Genovesi’s and civil economists’ theories. While these comments are well-posed, the author of this book agrees with Bruni (2017) and Bruni and Zamagni (2016) in retracing, in the seeds of a microeconomic perspective, the most fruitful teachings developed by Italian civil economists. This argument seemed to corroborate what Viner defined as the universal economy doctrine. Under this label, Viner includes all pre-Modern and Modern authors who conceived of overseas trade and its benefits as a sign of God’s Providence to promote friendship among people and Nations. Universal Economy is ‘a trend of thought, important in classical pagan and in early Christian thought which substitutes eulogy for condemnation with respect at least to overseas trade’ (Viner 1991, 41). More precisely, it is a combination of two axioms: ‘(1) providence favors trade between people as a means of promoting the universal brotherhood of man; (2) to give economic incentives to peoples to trade with each other, providence has assigned to their respective territories different products’ (Viner 1972, 32). This argument seems to lead to the claim that universal economy’s commerce encourages friendship (note IX). Such thesis was very common, to the extent that in Diderot’s and D’Alambert’s Encyclopaedia, commerce has the providential function ‘de porter les peuples à conserver la paix ent’eux & à s’aimer’ (Encyclopédie 1753, 690). However, as significantly stressed by Hengstmengel (2015, 94, footnote 106**), this lemma was written by the neo-mercantilist François Véron Duverger de Forbonnais. The crucial concept of mercantilism and neo-mercantilism was the idea of international commerce as a zero-sum game, which means that a state’s gains or losses are proportionally inverse to those of other states. The result is the exact opposite of what one can infer from the tradition of ‘universal economy’ that adopted rather a vision of trades as a positive-sum game. A similar pattern is present in two other Italian economists familiar with the Neapolitan school, namely Giuseppe Palmieri (1721–1793) and Filippo Briganti (1724–1804). In Thomistic spirit, Palmieri connects trades and society: ‘There is no society without commerce; even more, we can say that society has been born

138 The Thomistic soul of civil economy for the need of the commerce’ (Palmieri, in Bruni 2006, 53). Briganti describes the basic function of international trade in exchanges between the necessary and the superf luous: This useful and compelling operation seems to have been suggested by the benevolent and social nature itself, that varying the products of this globe tends to bring together the bonds of the human family with the sweet knot of reciprocal necessity. (Briganti 1828, 168; my translation) 13 This point has been well-proven by Bruni (2006, 63–64), on his consideration of Genovesi’s ‘little catechism of natural law’.

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Gift and contract intertwined With this book I tried to continue the path opened by Bruni and Zamagni (2016). Through an interdisciplinary inquiry into the history of theological, philosophical, and theoretical ideas, I have tried to accomplish two things. First, I described the intellectual features of the Mediterranean spirit of capitalism that could be connected to the peculiarity of economic institutions as emerged, for example, in Italy in the last century. Small-family firms, rural banks, cooperatives, distretti, and mutualism, are all expressions of a way of living in the market sphere, which are all different from the one emerged, for example, in the United States as a result of the Protestant strain of the spirit of capitalism. As I have already stated in the Introduction, the differences should not be stretched too far, but they should not be ignored either. Today we need approaches that are able to draw similarities, as well as differences, between the social and economic models developed in different parts of the world. My attempt to prove the presence and development of the Mediterranean spirit of capitalism has succeeded in recognizing similarities between Aquinas’s and Genovesi’s thoughts, and in sketching the paths that could have connected those authors’ differences in time. My main finding is that both shared the idea that the market is a place of virtue and mutual assistance, intrinsically connected to the spread of civic friendship as the common good of society. In this sense, the Mediterranean spirit of capitalism could be captured in the formula ‘gift and contract intertwined’. Without entering the millennial debate on gifts, which I have brief ly sketched in Chapter 2 talking about the idea of Donum in Aquinas’s thought, the idea is that all the dimensions that we naturally associate with gifts—gratuitousness, authenticity, trust, genuine sociality, intrinsic motivation—permeates the economic realm of contract based on self-interest. This also includes the problems annexed when gifts are treated as a contract: amoral familism, moral hazard, exploitation, and illegality (Mafia). Once more, my attempt is not to prove that one spirit of capitalism and its economic realizations are better than others. Conversely, I would like to provide historical and interdisciplinary lenses through which to identify contemporary market societies.

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However, much more work must be done to describe the development of the Mediterranean spirit. Especially in Chapter 4, I have only sketched some lines of inquiry and periods that would be crucial to address to understand the development of Aquinas’s ideas. For instance, if one has a better understanding of the reception and elaboration of Aquinas’s social and economic ideas in the Protestant world, perhaps something about the difference of Civil Economy and Social Market Economy could be addressed (Martino 2020). Aquinas’s and Genovesi’s theories proposed an economic anthropology different from the one dominant today in Economics. Civil Economy brings into economic debate the social nature of human beings, together with words long forgotten or left behind, such as mutual assistance, virtue, civic friendship, and common good. Heterogeneity in today’s economic and social theory could be useful to address the contemporary debates from new angles. What will happen if we substitute homo oeconomicus from homo homini natura amicus? To conclude this book, respecting Genovesi’s wish to propose a speculative inquiry and not forgetting the practical and civil implications, I will suggest two paths, which I am following with Luigino Bruni (Bruni and Santori 2018; Bruni and Santori 2021).

Incentives and prizes Since the early days of Modern Political Economy, theories of actions and their motivations have played a central role. At the dawn of political economy, esteem and virtue were considered two crucial elements in the understanding of human (economic) behaviour. Just think about Scottish enlightenment authors’ (Hume, Smith) emphasis on empathy or sympathy (Fontaine 1997; Sugden 2002) or the Italian civil economists’ (Genovesi, Filangieri) account of Economics as the science of pubblica felicità (Bruni and Zamagni 2016). The more Classical Economy nears Utilitarian philosophy, the more these elements were put aside, leaving space for individual utility functions and, with the Neo-classical approach, to preferences. However, the situation has been transforming in recent decades. Economists have re-started to approach esteem and virtue (Brennan and Petit 2004; Bruni and Sugden 2013), thanks to the fruitful encounter with other disciplines (Psychology and Sociology, among others). Social psychologists developed the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic motivations to categorize the main reasons why people make choices and act on their basis (Deci and Ryan 1985; Ryan and Deci 2000). From the Neo-classical turn, Economics mostly relied on extrinsic motivated behaviours, “those that were executed because they were instrumental to some separable consequence” (Ryan and Deci 2000), whereas it tended to ignore intrinsic motivated behaviours that ‘[we]re performed out of interest and satisfy the innate psychological needs for competence and autonomy’ (65). That is to say, economists considered only monetary incentives as appropriate tools to interact with human actions grounded on extrinsic motivations.

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Taking seriously the results from Social Psychology, some economists considered the impact of intrinsic motivations on economic performance, i.e., the interaction between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. The ‘Economics of Awards’ rose from this research (Frey 1997; Frey and Neckermann 2008; Frey and Gallus 2017). This small, yet growing, theoretical and experimental literature on prizes or awards claims that incentives tend to control or even manipulate individual actions, undermining (crowding-out) human autonomy and intrinsic motivation (i.e., the internalized reasons for action). Conversely, awards are conceived as supporting intrinsic motivation, enhancing (crowding-in) human capability of self-determination. Awards are symbolic, non-material tools, well-suited to address people’s demand for esteem and their intrinsic motivations. They can complement (Frey 1997), or even substitute (Frey and Gallus 2017), monetary incentives. The word incentive has, in fact, become an umbrella term that has absorbed the concept of award/prize. However, by stretching the descriptive scope of this concept too far, the economics profession is responsible for oversimplifying otherwise very diverse phenomena, actions and motivations. This view has left the economic domain stricto sensu and increasingly embraces diverse areas of civil society (education, health, non-profit organizations, and institutions, among others), so becoming a sort of new key for explaining almost all human actions. This reductionism does not help us in understanding what happens in many real choices. The Economics of Awards aims at fulfilling this gap. The focus on intrinsic motivation finds economic, more than moral, explanation. In certain circumstances, in fact, intrinsic motivations are crowded-out by extrinsic ones, the so-called crowding-out effect (Frey 1997). Suffering for the loss of intrinsic motivation, the agent reduces the effort in the action that the incentive aimed at increasing. Hence, economists are trying to find new ways to relate to intrinsic motivations and, thus, control individual performance. The Economics of Awards is developing almost on the experimental side, but it relies on a theoretical background which is, in turn, continually evolving. This promising field of research on awards, while trying to bring complexity back into Economics, relies on a refined model of homo oeconomicus. What are the lessons that emerge from approaching the issue of Incentives-Awards from the economic anthropology of homo homini natura amicus typical of the Mediterranean Spirit of Capitalism? When the nexus awards-intrinsic motivation is applied from Social Psychology to Economics, it inevitably incurred the ‘Elster teleological Paradox’, namely ‘the general axiom […] that nothing is so unimpressive as behaviour designed to impress’ (Elster 1983, 66). As traduced by Brennan and Pettit (2004, 36), ‘if one makes the achievement of esteem one’s explicit goal, then that very fact will tend to undermine the provision of esteem by others’. It goes without saying that this kind of strategic behaviour toward esteem seems strongly connected with extrinsic, rather than intrinsic, motivations.

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To overcome this impasse, Frey argued that ‘awards are less powerful extrinsic incentives, the signal value of special behaviours is not reduced as much’ (Frey and Neckermann 2008, 201). After all, honour seemed to be a less strong motivator than money. If so, the crowding-out effect is avoided when one pursues directly symbolic awards. I want to problematize this very last assumption. I propose a parallel with a dilemma that was widespread in the history of ideas: does the intentional pursuit of honour transform a virtuous behaviour to a mercenary one? Brennan and Petit (2004, 22) recognized that this is a crucial question for ‘Economics of Esteem’ and, then, I add for ‘Economics of Awards’. Aquinas proposed a different answer. On the one hand, honour does not differ from other kinds of rewards in undermining virtue. It is not a less extrinsic reward than money. On the other hand, honour can be pursued directly without crowding out virtue if it rewards actions directed to the common good (Bruni and Santori 2018). According to Aquinas, the intentional pursuit of the symbolic prize can crowd-in or crowd-out virtue, based on the circumstances. In a contemporary analysis on awards, this standpoint suggests once more that the dichotomy between monetary incentive/extrinsic motivation, and symbolic awards/intrinsic motivation might be misplaced. Monetary incentives do not always go along with extrinsic motivation, just as symbolic awards do not always support intrinsically motivated actions. For Aquinas even honour can produce imbalance in human motivations. Even if the crowding-out effect on the side of honour has been studied experimentally (Gubler et al. 2016), this insight is currently less emphasized and overshadowed by the dichotomy of incentives vs. awards. Moreover, Genovesi’s economic account (Bruni and Santori 2018) implicitly challenges the dichotomy between extrinsic (instrumental and imposed) and intrinsic (authentic and internalized) motivations in contemporary economic literature. From Genovesi’s perspective, intrinsic motivations relate to the equilibrium between self-love and the love of others. This equilibrium is a typical Newtonian category, which gives rise to a single action, showing a continuum in the different spheres of social life, above all what we would call the marketplace and public spheres. The various equilibria must be determined according to concrete circumstances, as well as the different kinds of prizes. Thus, the corrupting effects of the market and incentives are secondary to the imbalance of these two basic forces. Similarly, when equilibrium is maintained, some instrumental or imposed choices in market relations may acquire a positive moral connotation. In Genovesi’s view, the crowding-out effect seems to be more related to the lack of equilibrium in human motivations, rather than to the symbolic/ material value of the rewards. This element is lacking in contemporary literature, although it is specified that awards are based on the ‘social nature’ of human beings (Frey and Gallus 2017, 105). I think it could be worthwhile to put more emphasis on the deep connection between honour and common good, a lesson that comes from the past and which has been quasi-totally dismissed today.

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Furthermore, in Aquinas’s works, the word incentive (incentivum) carries a negative connotation, in line with its usage of the late Middle Ages. The incentive was defined as an incorrect stimulus to passions, always associated with sin and vice, as shown by the recurrent formulas ‘incentive to lust’ (incentivum libidini) or ‘incentive to concupiscence’ (incentivum concupiscientiae). It would be interesting to understand if the passage from a negative to a positive understanding of the concept, could be related to the transition towards modernity, especially to the emergence of Political Economy (Sugden 2018).

Meritocracy and the common good The debate on merit and meritocracy is ongoing and alive today. While the logic of meritocracy finds some support in public opinion, as well as in academia (Bell 1972, 2012), there is also a rising current of criticism in the academic domain and beyond. Critics often take as a starting point the dystopia depicted by Michael Young (1958), which convincingly characterizes merit as the battering ram of the bourgeoisie that broke down the walls of the aristocratic-feudal hierarchical world before transforming into a veil that concealed the aristocratic temperament of the bourgeois élite. Young (1958) famously proposed the notion that meritocracy is a system in which the ‘inequality of opportunity fostered the myth of human equality’ (85) or, as it has been described, the ‘equality of opportunity to be unequal’ (Vlastos 1975; Bloodworth 2016, part I). Outside of academia, Appiah (2018) and Scaggs (2018) have written newspaper articles demonstrating how Young’s The Rise of Meritocracy has become a reality. Bloodworth (2016) employed Young’s paradigm to analyze U.K. politics in relation to job markets, showing how, despite the rhetoric suggesting that merit is behind social mobility, the middle class always has superior access to job opportunities. The book The Meritocratic Myth (McNamee and Miller 2004) also shows that systems based on merit have become a myth that intertwines merit with non-meritocratic factors, such as luck and birth status, ignoring the latter in favour of the former. This has produced an élite composed of people who can afford higher-quality education and have access to networks and platforms that provide opportunity (Hayes 2013). Something very similar is argued in the recent book by Markovits, significantly entitled The Meritocracy Traps (2020). Another core aspect of the debate around meritocracy relates to social psychology; people who are affected by the socioeconomic inequalities produced by meritocracies see these inequalities as necessary and legitimate ( Jost et  al. 2003). Littler (2017) referred to this as the ‘meritocratic deficit’ of neoliberal meritocratic societies; ‘it is often people who face significant disempowerment in terms of their resources and available choices who are more intensely incited to construct a neoliberal meritocratic self ’ (172). The process is so evident that a group of psychologists tried to study its psychological causes (Piff et al. 2018); similarly, Bénabou and Tirole (2006) tried to find

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an explanation for the appeal of the meritocratic ideology in relation to the ‘American dream’ among the lower-middle-classes: ‘When confronted with data that contradicts this view they try hard to ignore, reinterpret, distort, or forget it—for instance by finding imaginary merits to the recipients of fortuitous rewards, or assigning blame to innocent victims’ (700, emphasis added). Meritocracy is also extensively studied in the field of economics and, even more, in management. The manual edited by Arrow et al. (2000), titled Meritocracy and Economic Inequality, sets the stage for a critical investigation of the socioeconomic consequences of meritocratic discourse. Frank (2016) analyzed the consequences in terms of public policy, first by examining how public investment and a person’s own efforts enable them to attain high social positions, leading, in turn, to the élite overestimating their merit and underestimating the role of luck. Élite members of society then oppose public investment, which they consider a waste, in social mobility, reducing the chances that others will succeed—in particular, those in lower social classes—thus, generating economic inequalities. Frank’s analysis explains how this process of removal (i.e., starting conditions) and deception (i.e., merit intertwined with luck) can produce a popular acceptance of brute luck and a subsequent aversion to redistribution and welfarism (Alesina and Angeletos 2005; Charité et al. 2015; Heiserman and Simpson 2017; Piketty 2020). Alesina et al. (2018) also showed that beliefs about intergenerational mobility, which are an index of the meritocratic nature of social structures, can significantly affect people’s political preferences for redistribution; farright voters prefer not to redistribute because they do not trust government intervention, while far-left voters follow an opposite pattern. Using different methods and objects of analysis, business historians (Chapman 1986; Laird 2017) have also studied the evolution of meritocracy and its inf luence on shaping social structure. Above all, meritocracy is connected to economics because it is a notion that fits well into performance-incentive schemes (Grant 2014; Bruni and Santori 2018; Bruni et al. 2019), with merit today mostly corresponding to material or monetary rewards. As I showed in the previous section, mainstream economic approaches to research on behaviour in markets and organizations has fixated on a slender set of rewards for actions that made social interactions simpler, more predictable, and controllable. The schema performanceincentive resembles the economic retributive logic of merit, as demonstrated by the Latin etymology of merit. Meritus also meant wage and the verb mereri to earn, deserve, acquire, gain. As Amartya Sen argued (2000), ‘the idea of meritocracy has many merits, but clarity is not among them. The lack of clarity may relate […] that the concept of merit is deeply contingent on our views of a good society’ (5). It is not surprising, then, reading the titles of the last publications on the matter: The Mirage of Merit by Thornton (2013); The Merit of Meritocracy by Son Hing et al. (2011); The Merit Myth by Carnevale, Schmidt, and Strohl (2020); and The Tiranny of Merit by Sandel (2020).

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What could inquiry into the Mediterranean spirit of Capitalism add to this debate? Once more, starting from the perspective of homo homini natura amicus, rather than homo oeconomicus, turns the tables. According to Aquinas, mutual assistance implies mutual recognition of being in need, what MacIntyre (1999), after his Thomistic turn, named ‘acknowledged dependence’. There may have been many reasons why the dimension of mutual assistance was removed from economic science. As Smith explained, ‘nobody but a beggar chooses to depend chief ly upon the benevolence of his fellow-citizens’ (Smith 1977, 31). This was the expression of the Illuminist concern for a transition from a hierarchical society, where ‘assistance’ came from a feudal landlord, to a commercial society between free and equal people, but this removal meant to throw the baby in the dirty water. As Aquinas, and then Genovesi proved, freedom and dignity can coexist with mutual assistance. Market and civil society are based on this kind of relationship. A similar notion was envisaged when ‘fraternity’ accompanied freedom and equality in the famous French Motto (Bruni and Sugden 2008). The cultural dominance of the discourse on meritocracy inexorably tends to undermine the perception of acknowledged dependence. This is because meritocracy encourages individuals to over-emphasize the importance of their efforts in the achievements reached and hide the role of others, as well as the role of luck. Market transactions are inexorably affected by this misperception. In turn, the emergence of relational goods suffers from individualistic meritocratic discourse since people are discouraged to recognize cooperation for mutual advantage (Sugden 2018), which lies behind the achievement of an economic result. If we agree on the nexus between happiness, friendship, virtue, and mutual assistance, and if we agree that the economic domain is where genuine relations could be cultivated, then the next step is to understand the context in which these elements emerge. Hence, it is necessary to revisit authors, such as Aquinas, who bring forgotten yet fundamental questions to contemporary topics. In the history of theological ideas, merit has always been associated with the doctrine of grace. Two further paths of interdisciplinary research are open. On the one hand, it would be interesting to further explore the equation of merit: meritocracy = grace: X. What in contemporary society took the place of grace? Is X today represented by philanthropy, welfare state, family ties, social businesses? On the other hand, there is the inquiry into the theological roots of the spirits of capitalism. Why in the Protestant world, where grace and faith are predominant over merit on the path of salvation, has meritocratic market societies been realized? And why in the Catholic world, where human merits found a larger place, is it difficult to find meritocracy? Are we in front of another example of unintended consequences related to the story of the spirit of capitalism? (Gregory 2012; Bruni 2018). From Aquinas’s perspective, with its doctrine of merit and grace (Wawrykow 2016), this could be of the utmost interest. Furthermore, civil economists were interested in merit and meritocracy. There is a path opened from

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Dragonetti’s Delle Virtù e dei Premi (2018) to Melchiorre Gioja Del Merito e delle Ricompense (1830) that waits to be intellectually walked. Different authors, different traditions, different spirits of capitalism, and a story that has only begun to be reconstructed.

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Index

Note: Page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes. acknowledged dependence 16, 148 Adorno, Theodor W. 24 Aeterni Patris (Leo) 26n2, 100 Agamben, G. 43 agriculture 114–116 Alighieri, Dante 36; Divine Comedy 36 ambition, avarice, and cruelty vision 120, 122 Anglo-Saxon capitalism 3, 26n1 anthropology: Aquinas’s anthropology 23, 41;Aristotle’s eudaemonic anthropology 86n4; economic anthropology 52, 56, 68, 143; gift virtue 83; relational virtue 16–17, 83; social nature of human beings 15; wounded nature of human beings 15–16 anti-commerce Thomism 98, 101, 108, 113, 114, 135 anti-merchant forms 93 Appiah, A.K. 146 apprenticeship 72, 86n3 Aquinas and the Market (Hirschfeld) 22 Aquinas: Moral, Political, and Legal Theory (Finnis) 22 Aquinas,Thomas 5, 13, 14, 20, 26n2; anthropological and social views 68; On Being and Essence 58; civic friendship 18; commercial exchange view 58; De Regimine Principuum 46, 75, 100; economic ideas 93, 94; economic teachings 49; egoism and altruism 17; natural law, account of 45; necessity and extreme 41; Nicomachean Ethics 52; paradigm 19, 39; social and economic ideas 92; social and economic teachings 98, 114; social and economic view 36; social thought 43;

Summa Theologiae 31, 48, 68, 81, 117; theology and philosophy 91; theory 127; trinitarian ontology 40; virtue, relational idea of 38 Arangio-Ruiz,V. 47 Aristotle:Aquinas civic friendship 18; Aquinas’s commentary 105; Bruni’s translation 105; common good and virtues theory 44; commutative justice 53; eudaemonic anthropology 86n4; magnanimous, definition of 76; model 67; natural wealth vs. artificial wealth 48–49; Nicomachean Ethics 40; objective value 53; political friendship 18; Politics 104; thing, value of 53; tradition 22, 52; virtue ethics 37–38; zoon politikon 15 arithmetical equality 47, 53 Arrow, K. 147; Meritocracy and Economic Inequality 147 artificial wealth (money) 48–49 Augustine of Hippo:Augustinianism 92; biblical narration of the Fall 38; Christian tradition from 121; with controversy 51; fallen humanity, vision of 15; Original Sin 15; theological battle 51; tradition 16; virtue, concept of 38 Avicennism 90 Baldo degli Ubaldi 74 Baldwin, J.W. 58 Barbieri, G. 13, 101 Baron, Hans 102 Bayle, Pierre 119; Various Thoughts on the Occasion of a Comet 120 Beccaria, Cesare 112, 136n1; On Crimes and Punishments 112 Bénabou, R. 146

154

Index

Benjamin,W. 12, 18 Saint Bernard of Clairvaux 32 Beza, Theodore 93 Bible 82, 91 biblical narration of Fall 38 Biel, Gabriel 92, 96 Black, Antony 75; Political Thought in Europe, 1250–1450 75 Bloodworth, J. 146 Blumenberg, H. 12 Blythe, J.M. 75; De Regimine Principum 75 Bobbio, N. 67 de Boisguilbert, Pierre 120 Boltanski, Luc 32; New Spirit of Capitalism 27n4 Bousset, Jacques 32 Bracciolini, Poggio 102 Brennan, G. 144, 145 Briganti, Filippo 137n12 Broggia, Carlo Antonio 116 Brown, Peter 50; Through the Eye of a Needle 50 Bruni, L. 3, 4, 13, 20, 23, 25, 33, 90, 113, 127, 131, 137, 142; Civil Economy 102 Bruni, Leonardo 102 Bucer, Martin 93 Buonafede, Appiano 120 buying and selling (negotium) 47, 48, 52 Caille, A.C. 33; The World of Gift 33 Cajetan,Thomas De Vio Cardinal 99, 100, 101 Calvinism 3 Calvin, John 1, 92, 93 Cambridge Economic History of Europe 57 capitalism 1, 2, 5; development of 13; peculiarity of 6;Weber’s definition of 5 Capitalistic economic action 5 Capreolus, John 91, 92 caritas, notion of 39 Carnevale, A.P. 147 Casadei, E. 76 Catholic culture 117 Catholic ethic 4, 12, 25 The Catholic Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Novak) 12 Catholicism 2, 3, 13 Catholic religion 2 Catholic tradition economy 6 Cattaneo, Carlo 112 Chair of Metaphysics 118 charity 49, 78 Chiapello, Eve 27n4

Christian belief 119 Christian Catholic world 2 Christian community 78 Christianism 13 Christian thought 32, 137n10 Christian tradition 39, 49, 121 Cicero 83, 84; On Duties (De Officiis) 83 Cima L.R. 59n5 Cipolla, C.M. 57 civic friendship 18–19, 45, 46, 51, 56, 57, 127, 142 civil: as civitas 127; happiness 129; as incivilmento 113 civil economy 6, 12, 66, 112; agriculture 114–116; ‘bad’ rents (rendite) 115; Genovesi’s idea of 129; land ownership 116; land register (catasto onciario) 116; lands, redistribution of 115; large and small landholders 116; and political economy 114, 128; tradition of 14, 66 Civil Economy (Bruni) 102 civilization, idea of 114 civil life 17–19, 44, 85, 135 civil market economy 6 Coda, P. 41 ‘college of traders’ (Collegio de’ Negozianti) 133 commenda 57 commerce 48, 98, 132; importance of 84; and institutions 83–86; in Middle Ages 69–72; and wealth 47–51 commercial exchange view 58 commercial network 72 common good 56, 77, 79, 83 common utility (commune utilitate) 51, 52, 54 communication 72, 77 compatibility sense 8, 65 ‘conceptual Natural Law theory’ 67 Controriforma 12–14 Corpus Iuris Civilis 47 Council of Trent (1545–1563) 100 Counter-Reformation theory 2, 90, 98, 101, 113, 115, 117, 121 Croce, Benedetto 115 crowding-out effect 144, 145 Das Neves, J.L.C. 48 Decretum Gratiani 17 Dei Delitti e Delle Pene see On Crimes and Punishments (Beccaria) Delle Leggi Politiche ed economiche see On Political and Economic Laws (Filangieri)

Index Delle Virtù e dei Premi see On Virtues and Prizes (Dragonetti) Del Merito e delle Ricompense (Gioja) 149 De Natura Accidentis 58 Der Bourgeois (Sombart) 13 De Regimine Principum (Blythe) 75 De Roover, R. 58, 127 Derrida, J. 32 Di Liso, S. 137n5 Divine Comedy (Alighieri) 36 divine merchant (mercator coelestis) 73 docility, virtue of 42–43 Domenico Peri, Giovan 101; Il Negoziante 101 Dominicans 104, 105 Donnelly, J.P. 93 D’Onofrio, F. 129 Donum, idea of 142 double-fold Catholic, Mediterranean 12–14 Douglas, Mary 33 doux-commerce thesis 130 Dragonetti, Giacinto 112, 115; Origine de’ feudi ne’regni di Napoli e Sicilia 116; public power and good ruler 116; On Virtues and Prizes 112 Duns Scotus, J. 92, 95, 97, 105 economy: anthropology 52, 56, 68; capitalists vs. salariats 6; education 133; exchange 52; institutions, role of 21–22; moderate profit 19–21; mutual assistance 19–21; sphere 68, 85; theory 127; thought 65; voluntarism 93 educational system 133 Elementa Metaphysicae (Genovesi) 118 emporium, coastal urban centre 69 Epicurus 119 Erasmus of Rotterdam 3 ethical life (bios etikos) 37 ethical trust ( fede etica) 134 exchange ‘in itself ’ 54, 57–58 experience 9, 58, 95; concept of 10; good and bad 35; mediators, role of 99; rules of 10 extreme necessity 41–42, 44 extrinsic motivations 143 fallen humanity, vision of 16 Fanfani,A. 2, 13, 94; capitalism development 13; spirit of capitalism 13 favourable taxation system 116 Fenelon, Francois 32

155

Ferrara, Francesco 113, 128 Ferrer, Juan 105 Filangieri, G. 116, 132; On Political and Economic Laws 116; public education 133; The Science of Legislation 116 Filmer, Robert 67; Patriarcha, or The Natural Power of Kings 67–68 finance commercial activities 71 Finnis, John 24, 77; Aquinas: Moral, Political, and Legal Theory 22 da Firenze,Antonino 105 Fischer, K. 5 Fontamara (Silone) 6 ‘Foreign Competition and the Historic Italian Economists’ (Gobbi) 66 foreign merchants 72 foreign trade judgement 66 Franciscan economic teachings 93 Franciscan movement 93 Franciscans 104 Franklin, Benjamin 11, 136n3 Frank, R.H. 147 Franks, C.A. 65 Franks, Christopher A.: He Became Poor 22 French Revolution 113 Frey, B. 145 friendship 36–41, 39, 40, 45 Galanti, G.M. 117 Galiani,Abbe Ferdinando 127 Garin, E. 102 Genovesi,Antonio 5, 12, 14, 15, 17, 26n3, 114; agricultural weltanschauung 115; anthropological vision 128;Aquinas’s influence on 117;‘bad’ rents (rendite) 115; civil economy 18, 23, 130; commercial society 114; economic teachings 130; economic theory 113, 128; Elementa Metaphysicae 118, 121; Lessons of Civil Economy 112; Lezioni 130; Montesquieu’s work 131; mutual assistance 20, 128; public power and good ruler 116;Thomistic roots 130 Gerhard, John 93 German social market economy 93 gift (donum) 39, 97; dimension of 51–52; important role for 84; logic of 50; and mutual assistance 52; and relational virtue 83 Gilson, E. 19, 45 Gioja, Melchiorre 112, 149; Del Merito e delle Ricompense 149

156 Index Gobbi, Ulisse 66;‘Foreign Competition and the Historic Italian Economists’ 66 Godbout, J.T. 33; The World of Gift 33 goods-money-goods cycle 48 gratuitousness 17, 31, 34, 36, 39, 40 Gregory, Brad: The Unintended Reformation 1 Gregory IX 106 Grosseteste, Robert 53 Guardini, R. 103

Italian civil economists 114; agricultural issues 114 Italian Enlightenment 112, 114

habit (habitus) 37 happiness (beatitudo) 34 Harvie, T. 60n10 He Became Poor (Franks) 22 heterogeneous tradition 18 Hing, Son: The Merit of Meritocracy 147 Hirschfeld, M.L. 19, 24, 49; Aquinas and the Market 22 Hirschman, A.O. 120 historical reality, conception of 8 historical-social sciences 7, 10, 11 History of Economic Analysis (Schumpeter) 130 Hobbes, Thomas 67 homo oeconomicus model 92, 143, 144, 148 horizontalization 80 human action 8–10, 16, 21, 34, 126, 143 human behaviour 94; analysis of 8, 9; interpretation of 8 human beings: social nature of 15; wounded nature of 15–16 human experience 9, 35 humanism 103, 104

von Karlstadt,Andreas Bodenstein 92 Kaye, J. 56 Knies, Karl 6–8

ideal types 14 Il Negoziante (Domenico Peri) 101 incentives 143–146 incivilmento, definition of 113 individualism 103 Institutiones 47 institutions, role of 21–22 intellectualism 95; vs. voluntarism 97 intellectualistic framework 96 International Encyclopaedia of Social Sciences 127 international trade 131–133 intrinsic motivation 144, 145 intrinsic value (gradum naturae), good 53 invisible-hand mechanism 121 invisible-hand theory 120 irrationality 8 Italian civic humanism 102

James of Viterbo 57 The Jews and the Modern Capitalism (Sombart) 13 John XXII (Pope) 91 just price:Aquinas’s idea of 97; and mutual assistance 51–59

labour (fatiga) 114 labour-value theory 53, 54 land ownership 116 land register (catasto onciario) 116 lands, redistribution of 115 Langholm, Odd 22, 107; L’economia in Tommaso D’Aquino 22 Lapidus, A. 54 large and small landholders 116 La Scienza della Legislazione see The Science of Legislation (Filangieri) Latin capitalism 3 ‘laws of thought’ 10 L’economia in Tommaso D’Aquino (Langholm) 22 von Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 119 Leo XIII: Aeterni Patris 26n2; Rerum Novarum 12 Lessons of Civil Economy (Genovesi) 112, 130, 131 Littler, J. 146 loans 84, 85 Locke, John 67, 68 Lombard, Peter 91 love: broader concept of 31; of complacency 33, 34; consequence of 35; eros and agape 39; of friendship 35, 36, 78; Greek and Christian notions of 31; human experience of 35; motion of 34; mutual exchange of 36 Löwith, K. 12 Lutheranism 2, 3 Luther, Martin 1, 85, 92, 93, 98 Lüthy, H. 2 McGrath,A.E. 95, 96 Machiavelli 15, 16, 105, 124, 134, 135 MacIntyre,A.C. 16, 148

Index Magli, Pasquale 119, 121 magnanimous, definition of 76 Malthus,Thomas Robert 120 man–God relation 40 Marion, J.L. 33 Maritain, J. 81 market: exchanges 56; and theodicy 120; transactions 128, 135, 148 Marxian theory 53 massa damnata 122 M.A.U.S.S. (Anti Utilitarian Movement in Social Sciences) 33 Mauss, Marcel 33;“No Free Gifts” 33 Medieval Christianity 99 Mediterranean spirit of capitalism 4, 5, 13, 14, 18, 118, 142;Aquinas’s and Genovesi’s thoughts 142; economic activity 19;Thomistic philosophy 93 Melanchthon, Philip 93 de Mercado,Tomas 100 mercantilism 132 merchants 52, 57, 69, 72–78 merit and meritocracy 51, 146 The Merit Myth (Carnevale, Schmidt, and Strohl) 147 Meritocracy and Economic Inequality (Arrow) 147 The Meritocracy Traps (Markovits) 146 The Meritocratic Myth (McNamee and Miller) 146 The Merit of Meritocracy (Hing) 147 microeconomic category 20 Milanese enlightenment 112 Milanese Provincial Council 101 Milbank, J. 3, 101, 128 The Mirage of Merit (Thornton) 147 modernity 12, 67, 68, 99 modern political economy 143 Mohr, Walter 75 money, sterility of 93 Monsalve, F. 54 Montesquieu, C.L. 130; Spirit of Laws 134 moral and legal theory 91 moral hazard 79 motivations 56 Münsterberg, Hugo 9, 10 mutual assistance 18–21, 45, 129, 130, 132; dimension of 55 mutual benefit 129 Natural Law theory 67, 135 natural price, Smith’s concept 92 natural religion 94

157

natural wealth (material goods) 48 Neapolitan culture 119 Neapolitan enlightenment 113 Neapolitan philosopher 119 neo-classical economy 90, 127 neo-classical theory of value 53 The New Science (Vico) 21, 120 New Spirit of Capitalism (Boltanski) 27n4 Nicomachean Ethics (Aquinas) 40, 52 “No Free Gifts” (Mauss) 33 North America capitalism 12 Novak, M. 2, 81; The Catholic Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism 12; spirit of capitalism 13 Nusbbaum, Martha 86n4 Nygren,A. 31, 39 objectifying’, definition of 9 Of the Five Wounds of the Catholic Church (Rosmini Serbati) 136n3 Olivi, Pietro di Giovanni 105 On Being and Essence (Aquinas) 58 On Benefits (Seneca) 31–32 On Crimes and Punishments (Beccaria) 112 On Duties (De Officiis, Cicero) 83 On Political and Economic Laws (Filangieri) 116 On Virtues and Prizes (Dragonetti) 112 operation (operatio) 34 order of love (ordo amoris) 35, 38 Order of Preachers (Ordo Praedicatorum) 75 Original Sin 15–16, 38, 84 Origine de’ feudi ne’regni di Napoli e Sicilia (Dragonetti) 116, 149 “The Origin of Evil”’ 119 Ortes, Gianmaria 117 Pabst, A. 128 Pace (D’Onofrio) 129 Palmieri, Giuseppe 137n12 Paradisi, Agostino 112 Patriarcha, or The Natural Power of Kings (Filmer) 67–68 Pecorella C. 70 Pelagianism 92 Pelagian motto 51 performance-incentive schemes 147 Pettit, P. 144, 145 Philosophische Terminologie (Adorno) 24 phronesis (practical wisdom) 37, 38 Pierre-Torrell, Jean 39 pilgrims 73, 74

158 Index Pinsent, A. 59n4 Pio III (Pope) 105 Piro, Francesco Antonio 119 Pocock, J.G.A. 102 political economy 6, 66, 92, 112, 119; and civil economy 114 Political Thought in Europe, 1250–1450 (Black) 75 politics: economy (see political economy); friendship 18, 44; motive 50; power 46, 67, 68; thought 79 Politics (Aristotle) 104 ‘Politics as Vocation’ (Weber) 119 Preachers (Dominicans) 90, 98 price and value, equivalence of 56 price mechanisms 128 prizes 143–146 Prodi, P. 71 Propositiones philosophicae 121 Protestant ethic 3, 11, 13, 99 Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Weber) 1 Protestantism 1, 93 Protestant Reformation 1 Ptolemy of Lucca 77 pubblica felicità (public happiness) 113, 114 public education 134 public happiness 129 public trust ( fede pubblica) 134 Puritanism 3 pursuit of gain 5, 57, 83 quantitative modern society 11 Rachfahl, F. 5 reciprocity 17, 32, 33, 36, 39, 52, 78, 127, 134 Reformation 2, 13, 93 relationality 40, 80, 127 relational virtue 16–17, 83 Rerum Novarum (Leo) 12 Ricardo, David 83, 112 Richey, F.A. 82 The Rise of Meritocracy (Young) 146 ‘The Role of Providence in the Social Order’ (Viner) 119 Romagnosi, Giandomenico 112 Roman Jurisprudence 17 Roscher and Knies and the Logical Problem of Historical Economics (Weber) 6 Roscher, Wilhelm H. 6–7, 26n4 Rosmini Serbati, Antonio 136n3; Of the Five Wounds of the Catholic Church 136n3

Rosselli, Salvatore 121 Rothbard, M. 92 ‘rules of experience’ 10 rural economic systems 6 Salutati, Coluccio 102 Sandel, M.: The Tiranny of Merit 147 Sansedoni, Ambrogio 98 Scaggs, A. 146 Schmidt, P. 147 Schmitt, C. 17, 18, 43 Schmoller, Gustav 7 scholasticism 103, 104 Scholastic theology 93 Schubeck, T.L. 59n5 Schumpeter, J.A. 12, 58, 91, 130; History of Economic Analysis 130 The Science of Legislation (Filangieri) 116 Scottish Enlightenment 112, 114, 143 secularization notion 12 self-interest 15, 19, 58, 82–84, 83, 114, 125, 128 self-sufficiency 76, 86n4 semi-pelagian doctrine 1 Sen, Amartya 147 Seneca, L.A. 31–33; On Benefits 31–32 da Siena, Caterina 98 da Siena, Franciscan Bernardino 97, 105 Silber, Eucharius 105 Silone, Ignazio: Fontamara (Silone) 6 Smith, Adam 20, 68, 83, 94, 112, 114, 119, 148; theory 21; Theory of Moral Sentiments 94; The Wealth of Nations 94 social mobility 146, 147 social need theory 54 social psychology 144, 146 societas, function of 70 society, ‘Aristotelian model’ of 67 Sombart, W. 13; Der Bourgeois 13; The Jews and the Modern Capitalism 13 Sorrentino Provincial Council 101 Spanish Scholastic developments 92 spirit of capitalism 3–6, 65; economic features of 19; historical individuality 11; meaning of 6; religious ethics 11 Spirit of Laws (Montesquieu) 134 spontaneous order theory 94 state of exception 17–18 ‘State of Innocence’ 67 status: definition of 81; misunderstanding of 78 status necessitatis see Decretum Gratiani Strohl, J. 147

Index Studia Generalia 91 ‘subjectivating’ method 9 subjective need theory 54 Sugden, R. 20, 87n6 Summa Philosophica (Rossi) 121 Summa Theologiae (Aquinas) 31, 48, 68, 81, 117 da Susa, Enrico 74 Tempier, Etienne 90, 91 Theocarakis, N.J. 57 theodicy 119, 120, 122, 137n7 theological sphere 31, 94 theological voluntarism 93 Theory of Moral Sentiments (Smith) 94 Thomism 26n2, 90, 91, 93, 98; as weltanschauung 90 Thomistic economic ideas 91, 93 Thomistic ethic 14 Thomistic framework 22, 133 Thomistic ideas 90 Thomistic theodicy 122, 126 Thomistic tradition 16, 23, 133 Thomistic virtue-ethic tradition 133 Thornton, M. 147; The Mirage of Merit 147 Through the Eye of a Needle (Brown) 50 The Tiranny of Merit (Sandel) 147 Tirole, J. 146 Toniolo, Giuseppe 103, 104 translation 94 transportation 72 Trebilcock, M. 66 Trevor-Roper, H.R. 2–3 trust (fides) 16, 126 The Unintended Reformation (Gregory) 1 union of affection (unio affectuum) 35 United States, capitalism 3, 4 universal economy 75–76 Università Cattolica of Fanfani 13 utility (utilitas) 18, 44, 45 value neo-classical theory 53 value relationships 11 value, subjective theory of 92

159

Various Thoughts on the Occasion of a Comet (Bayle) 120 Vermigli, Peter Martyr 93 Verri, Pietro 112, 136n1 Vico, Giambattista 15, 16, 21, 120, 134; ambition, avarice, and cruelty vision 120, 122; civil life, supra-personal dynamics of 135; The New Science 21, 120;‘rational civil theology of divine providence’ 120; social theodicy 121; theodicy 119, 120, 137n7 Vigueur, Maire 70 Villani, Michele 121 Viner, Jacob 37, 75, 76, 77, 119;‘The Role of Providence in the Social Order’ 119 virtue 37–41 voluntarism 94, 95 Von Gottl, Friederich 10 wealth: and commerce 47–51; negative vision of 50 The Wealth of Nations (Smith) 94 Weber, Max 119; analysis 3; capitalism, definition of 5; capitalists vs. salariats 6; evidence vs. validity 10; historicalsocial sciences 10; ideal types 14; noncontradiction 8;‘Politics as Vocation’ 119; Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Weber) 1; secularization notion 12; spirit of capitalism 14 William of Moerbeke 53, 77, 104; Nicomachean Ethics 77 William of Ockham 96 women, nature of 81 The World of Gift (Caille and Godbout) 33 Wundt, Wilhelm 7 Young, Michael 146; The Rise of Meritocracy 146 Zamagni, S. 4, 6, 13, 23, 25, 90, 113, 137n9, 142 Zambelli, Paola 117 Zanchi, Jerome 93 zoon politikon (Aristotle) 15