No hay un límite preciso entre la economía y las ciencias sociales

Economía de pre mercado en Grecia antigua

Cálculo hedonístico del bienestar
Dos conceptos del individuo: Macro (Gobernante autoritario que tomada decisiones por
todos) y micro (Familias patriarcales)
Jenofonte, uno de los primeros economistas: Un buen administrador se esfuerza por
aumentar el excedente de la unidad que administra mediante la división del trabajo.
La especialización y la división del trabajo están limitadas por el tamaño del mercado
Platón: Optimo economía/gobierno mediante la justicia
La especialización crea la interdependencia mutua y esta el intercambio reciproco.
Platón toleraba el dinero y el comercio como males necesarios
La idea de Platón acerca del mercado se basa más en el racionalismo y mantenimiento del
statu quo antes que en cualquier proceso social participativo.
Protágoras: Relativismo
Aristóteles: La medida iguala el trabajo en diferentes áreas. Moneda como depósito de
valor. No aprobaba el comercio como medio de enriquecimiento.
Los griegos creían que el mercado no regulado llevaría al desorden social que amenazaba el
statu quo.
Contribuciones romanas y del primitivo cristianismo
Inicialmente los cristianos creían que el regreso del reino de Dios era algo muy próximo,
pero el paso del tiempo hizo que cambiara la percepción hacía la idea de que las riquezas
eran una “bendición de Dios”.
Aquino: La necesidad determina el precio
El planteamiento de Odonis rechazaba específicamente una simple teoría del valor basada
en la cantidad de trabajo y se centraba en la escasez y en la calidad de las habilidades
productivas humanas. Esto le llevó a una teoría de las diferencias de salarios que reconocía
las eficiencias relativas de las diferentes habilidades y el coste relativo de adquirir aquellas
habilidades.
Aunque el período que va desde la antigüedad griega hasta el final de la Edad Media
representa aproximadamente dos mil años, la estructura económica fundamental de la
civilización occidental cambió poco durante ese tiempo. Tanto la antigüedad griega como
el feudalismo europeo se caracterizaron por economías pequeñas, aisladas y
autosuficientes, con escaso capital y niveles de producción bajos.
A lo largo de estos dos milenios, el intercambio aislado predominó sobre lo que ahora
llamamos intercambio de mercado. En consecuencia, los tratados eruditos de la época se
centran principalmente en la cuestión de la justicia, no en el origen de los precios. Este
hecho proporcionó una cierta continuidad desde Aristóteles hasta los escolásticos. Cuando
Juan Crell escribió en el siglo XVII, coronaba una tradición en el análisis del valor que
había comenzado con los primeros escolásticos cuatrocientos años antes. Pero, por así
decirlo, era una tradición dentro de una tradición

Wood 6:
‘A price is given according to the estimate of a thing, but a wage according to the estimate
of the use of a thing.’
Aquinas appreciated: a reward is something repaid to someone in return for work, as a sort
of price paid for it. Thus just as the payment of the just price for goods received from
someone is an act of justice, so too the payment of a reward for work is an act of justice.
Three methods of arriving at a figure for the price of goods or services: the first was to
accept the current market price, later known as the ‘natural price’; the second was for it to
be fixed by a public authority; the third was for it to be freely negotiated. This method
covered salaries as well as wages, and the social status of the individuals might well be a
factor. These three were separate models, but it was quite likely that they would overlap, so
that when the official or ‘legal’ price was fixed, reference would be made to the ‘natural’
one; when parties were haggling, they might well use either the ‘legal’ or the ‘natural’ price
as a bench mark.
Each of the three could be upset in different ways by fraud or deceit, especially by
‘monopoly’.
Aristotle’s real concern was to apply justice to exchange. In its widest sense he saw justice
as a state of mind which disposed someone to act rightly. It was righteousness itself, and as
such it was the epitome of all virtue.
Aristotle discussed justice in exchange, however, his concern was with ‘particular’ rather
than universal justice – justice as applied to relationships between people. This was divided
into two types. The first was distributive justice, which allotted things to people in
proportion to either their status or their contribution to the community.
The other type of justice, corrective, or rectificatory, was based on the arithmetical mean,
which entailed strict equality
exchange was what cemented society together: ‘for neither would there have been
association if there were not exchange, nor exchange if there were not equality, nor equality
if there were not commensurability’. But while need was the predominant factor, the
philosopher did not omit the ‘wage’ element, because he recognized that inherent in the
price or value of the goods being exchanged was the ‘labor’ of the craftsmen involved:
‘The builder, then, must get from the shoemaker the latter’s work, and must himself give
him in return his own.’
From the late thirteenth century, the concept of equality found in the works of the
scholastics gradually changed from the arithmetical to the geometrical.
Everyone recognized that there was a current price, the question was if it was just.
A celebrated Roman law text in the Digest affirmed that the value of a thing was the price
for which it could be sold, in other words, the current market price.

Aquinas accepted that labor and expenses might be a factor in determining value, although
he placed more weight on demand. Using examples from Augustine’s City of God he cited
the scale of natural perfection in which living things were placed above inanimate ones.
Reasoning on the just wage was similar. St Bernardino of Siena, relying on Olivi, declared
that the price of goods would be estimated by the community of citizens working together.
Similarly, when fixing people’s wages their status, office, and dignity would be considered

In terms of exchange, monopoly meant the creation of artificial scarcities of necessities (as
opposed to luxuries) in order to make a cash profit. It violated justice in the form of the just
price, because it forced an unjust price on the market and injured the whole of society.
Aristotle had vilified it under the heading of ‘retail trade’.

Roman law dealt sternly with monopoly. In practice, the most common monopolistic
offences were the closely related ones of engrossing, forestalling, and regrating. The
Scottish-born Oxford philosopher, John Duns Scotus (d. 1308) described those who bought
and sold goods merely in order to profit, without adding any service in the form of
improvement or transport, as ‘regraters’. Such people stood in the way of free exchange and
caused prices to rise for buyers and fall for sellers, and so harmed everyone. In his opinion
they ought to be banished.

By restricting trade the gilds merchant affected the current market price. The craft gilds,
however, affected both the current market price and the current market wage, if only
because they covered every aspect of trade and commerce – both those who sold or
manufactured goods for a price and those who provided a service for a wage, such as the
masons or the carpenters.
The theorists do not seem to have suggested that wages should be fixed by the State,
although this happened in England even before the Black Death, when Edward I tried to fix
wages for all the construction trades, and many times after it; after the Black Death there is
abundant evidence. The wiping out of between a third and a half of the population led to
scarcity of labor and a dramatic rise in wages.
In Aragon the situation was much the same, and Peter IV estimated that the high wages
demanded were ‘against equality and right reason’ – in other words, against the concept of
the just wage. Yet however hard they tried, in the final analysis no amount of regulation
and legislation was able to withstand the natural laws of the market.
Free bargaining
The ‘natural’ and the ‘legal’ prices of goods and services were fixed by intangible market
forces or by public officials. The two prices could be closely related, because there was
nothing to stop the ‘natural’ price being adopted as the ‘legal’ price. The ‘just’ price or
wage which emerged from free bargaining, however, was the result of negotiation between
two parties, sometimes individuals, and sometimes groups, such as journeymen and
masters. In practice, of course, the price arrived at might use the market price, whether
legal or natural, as a point of reference.
The ‘natural’ and the ‘legal’ prices had originated at a later stage of civilization than free
bargaining, which originally had been an extension of the primitive exchange described by
Aristotle.

It was essential for the lawyers that the price of a thing or a service was in money, for if this
were not so, the transaction was not sale, but barter, and there could then be no distinction
between buyer and seller. This would have made the law of sale unworkable.

When the theologians discussed free bargaining they synthesized Roman legal ideas with
Aristotelian ones. Free bargaining was based on the subjective judgement of individuals,
rather than the objective valuation of positive law or the impersonal workings of the
market. This subjective element made it difficult to define the just price precisely. As Joel
Kaye has demonstrated, it was in this area of market negotiation that the notion of equality
gradually changed, starting in the mid-thirteenth century, from the strictly arithmetical one
demanded by corrective justice, to one based on geometrical proportion, the commutative
justice described by Aristotle in Ethics.

Aquinas, too, admitted that ‘we cannot always fix the just price precisely; we sometimes
have to make the best estimate we can’, and that ‘giving or taking a little here or there does
not upset the balance of justice’. Henry of Hesse referred directly to Aristotle, Ethics (v),
and explained that in buying and leasing the just price was not always accepted, but
‘something near to the equality of things in proportion to the measure of their market or
usual or customary value’. This approximate measure was ‘the quantity of human
need’.100 Justice, then, was no more than an approximation.
Two points are axiomatic in free bargaining. The first is that what matters is not so much
the objective and mathematically just value of things exchanged, but the more personal
value of their usefulness to each party. The second point is that if someone does not feel
that he will benefit from a transaction, then he will not bother to exchange.
One of Aquinas’s justifications of the merchant had been the man ‘who uses moderate
business profits to provide for his household’, implying that he would be maintaining his
economic status quo rather than improving it.
Peter John Olivi argued that something requiring more expert knowledge and skill should
be better paid than unskilled labour. The architect would earn more than the stone-cutter.
High office was better rewarded because the skill, expertise, and diligence it required was
gained ‘through lengthy and lasting study, experience, and labour, and at great risk and
expense’, and also because those fit for it were few and therefore valued more highly. The
Franciscan Minister-General Gerald Odonis (d. 1348) agreed that professional people
would earn more because they were ‘rarer and more necessary in great matters’.

The Dominican Aquinas was concerned about the status of the client. In discussing the fees
of lawyers, physicians, and masters he stipulated: The only proviso is that they charge
moderate fees having regard to their clients’ position, profession and work, and also the
customs of the country. It follows that anybody who is dishonest enough to charge
excessive fees commits a sin against justice.
There was no such thing as a just wage for teachers, because knowledge was a gift of God,
and could therefore not be sold. In practice, masters in the late medieval universities did
accept fees.
The just wage and the just price were supposed to achieve equality between either seller
and buyer or employer and employee.
The change in the notion of justice from an exact mathematical balance to something based
on geometrical proportion, which allowed considerably more latitude. Ultimately in
negotiating prices there could be no such thing as precise equality, because equality would
deprive both parties of profit and lead to deadlock. Like Buridan’s ass faced with two equal
heaps of hay, the result would have been economic inactivity and disaster.
Schumpeter:
Aristotle laid the foundations for a theory of value and price. He recognized the
significance of a distinction between value in use and value in exchange and thus clearly
grasped the problem inherent in this distinction. The doctrine of the exchange value became
to him the pivot of a theory of market economics (chrematistics). As he based this theory
on the fact of human wants, he arrived at a purely subjective theory of economic value and
though he maintained the supremacy of ethical laws, he developed a theory of price as well,
without however offering a real explanation for the phenomenon of price.
Aristotle's theory of interest which is of such historical importance cannot be counted
amongst these gross errors. It is true that his conception of production is primitive and
encompasses merely the element of material productivity. In consequence, profits produced
by trade seemed to him explicable merely as a result of fraud.
This Deism corresponds exactly to the eternal but 'natural' law, that is to say, it is a faith arrived at
with the help of Reason' but with a definitely determined content and it is not a doctrine of the
general nature and the social function of religious faith as such. All thinkers of the period have
touched on these problems.

The doctrine of Natural Law which in the sixteenth century. grew into an independent
discipline is of still greater importance to us. It is very difficult to give an adequate idea of
the extent of scientific progress made within its framework. In the circles of Italian and
French lawyers who at first were still working with the tools of the Postglossatores, that is,
were using the method of casuistry and exegesis, a critical spirit developed early under the
favorable influence of the circumstances outlined above, so that they questioned the content
of the legal systems with which they dealt.
This critical spirit was ultimately derived from the natural sciences of Greece which had
been made known through Arab intermediaries.
We must further draw attention to three points. First, one trend within the school of Natural
Law gradually led to the theory of Utilitarianism with which later the name of Bentham
became associated. At first this simply meant that the element of social utility was
emphasized in a certain direction. The result of this, however, was that the key to social
action was sought in the will of the individual, in his desire to seek pleasure and to avoid
pain. This was to be of the greatest importance, especially in economics, to which this
conception was suited best, while it was rather ineffective outside its province. It was an
efficient instrument of economic analysis and resulted, partly directly, partly through the
stimulus which it gave to criticism, in a considerable extension of knowledge in the field of
social science. Secondly, we may stress the fact that the idea of the social contract was
simultaneously developed and overcome by representatives of the school of Natural Law.
We must not condemn this idea because it was historically valuless since many social
relations are based, if not on a conscious contract, at least on the fact of mutual services, so
that it deserves as a heuristic principle a better treatment than it received from the historians
of political thought. This evidently applies particularly to the economic relations of which
an economic system is composed, and this idea contributed, consciously or unconsciously,
much to a clearer insight in economics, free from metaphysical elements. Thirdly, we like
to recall that, as v. Philoppovich {Die Entwicklung der deutschen Volkswirtschaftslehre,
Festgabe für G. v. Schmoller) has shown, the idea of society and various theories connected
with it penetrated into the German economic theory only with the help of the teachers of the
Law of Nature during the nineteenth century.