ABSTRACT OF PAPER
Title: The Just Price: Economic theorizing and the modern division of normative labour
Author: STURN Richard
“Although careless historians of the history of economic thought have labeled the patristic and scholastic concept of just price as a quaint notion which presumed that every commodity which entered into exchange had an objective value – inherent, intrinsic, and immutable – closer in-spection of Christian literature and more consideration of contemporaneous institutional devel-opment indicate beyond peradventure that the just price doctrine of the Universal church was essentially functional in nature.” (E.A.J. Johnson 1938, S. 166) Joel Kaye (1998, S. 88) writes: “[...] it was generally assumed that all aspects of medieval economic thought were similarly characterized by the determination to maintain ideal definitions, whether in opposition to or in ignorance of, actual economic practice. […] Seen in this way, just price theory was … another manifestation of the medieval desire to control economic activity in the name of religious ideals and social equilibrium.” E.A.J. Johnson, Kaye, de Roover (1958), Friedman (1987), amongst others, convincingly stress that the important scholastic theorists of the just price were seriously interested in understanding the logic of markets and the surrounding institutions and not just in super-imposing a normative framework irrespective of market forces. Nonetheless, justice as a normative concept plays a role in these theories which is different from its role in modern economics. Put loosely, it seems to be more deeply integrated within economic theorizing. In this paper I try to give a systematic account of the role of justice in different currents of scholastic economic thought. Moreover, I relate and compare pertinent developments to modern tendencies of the “normative division of labor” in general and the modern development of justice as a criterion for the evaluation of what Rawls calls “the basic structure of society” in particular. Literature: De Roover, Raymond (1958): The Concept of Just Price: Theory and Economic Policy. Journal of Economic History 18 (2), S. 418-34. Friedman, David (1987): Just Price. In: John Eatwell et al., Hg., Palgrave Dictionary of Economics E-J. London: Macmillan, S. 1043-1044. Johnson, E.A.J. (1938): Just Price in an Unjust World. Ethics 48 (2), S. 165-181. Kaye, Joel (1998): Economy and Nature in the Fourteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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