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cally, he was intrigued to find that British thinkers were so
inclined toward the labor theory while French and Italian
thinkers came down so consistently on the side of subjective
value.
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164 How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization
In A History of Marginal Utility Theory (1965), Kauder sug-
gested that the answer to this puzzle could be found in the
importance that Protestant luminary John Calvin ascribed to
work. For Calvin, work of essentially any kind enjoyed divine
sanction, and was a crucial arena within which man could glorify
God. This emphasis on work led thinkers in Protestant countries
to emphasize labor as the central determinant of value. Any
social philosopher or economist exposed to Calvinism, Kauder
explained, will be tempted to give labor an exalted position in
his social or economic treatise, and no better way of extolling
labor can be found than by combining work with value theory,
traditionally the very basis of an economic system. Thus value
19
becomes labor value.
According to Kauder, this was true even in the cases of such
thinkers as John Locke and Adam Smith, both of whom placed
great emphasis on labor in their writing and whose own views
20
were largely deistic rather than Protestant. Such men
absorbed the Calvinist ideas that dominated their cultural
milieu. Smith, for example, was always sympathetic to Presby-
terianism (organized Calvinism, in effect) in spite of his own
departures from orthodoxy, and this sympathy for Calvinism
may well account for Smith s emphasis on labor as a determi-
21
nant of value.
Catholic countries, on the other hand, more deeply influenced
by an Aristotelian and Thomist line of thought, felt no such
attraction to a labor theory of value. Aristotle and Saint Thomas
envisioned the purpose of economic activity to be the derivation
of pleasure and happiness. Thus the goals of economics were pro-
foundly subjective, insofar as pleasure and happiness were non-
quantifiable states of being whose intensity could not be
articulated with precision or in a manner that could be compared
from one person to another. Subjective value theory follows from
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THE CHURCH AND ECONOMICS 165
this premise as night follows day. If pleasure in a moderate form
is the purpose of economics, wrote Kauder, then following the
Aristotelian concept of the final cause, all principles of economics
including valuation must be derived from this goal. In this pat-
tern of Aristotelian and Thomistic thinking, valuation has the
function of showing how much pleasure can be derived from eco-
22
nomic goods.
In other words, then, the Calvinist emphasis on the impor-
tance of labor led thinkers in Protestant countries to make it the
determining factor in their theory of what made goods valu-
able how much labor had been expended on them? The Aris-
totelian and Thomist view that dominated Catholic countries,
on the other hand, which held happiness to be the purpose of
economic activity, was naturally far more inclined to look for
the source of value in individuals subjective valuations of
goods, as they assess the amount of pleasure that the good in
question will afford them.
It is impossible to prove such a theory, of course, though
Kauder assembles suggestive evidence that Protestant and
Catholic thinkers at the time possessed an inchoate sense of the
theological source of their disagreement over economic value.
The fact remains, however, that Catholic thinkers, informed by
their own distinct intellectual tradition, reached the correct con-
clusion with regard to the nature of value while Protestant ones
by and large did not.
It would be interesting enough if Catholic thinkers had hap-
pened fortuitously upon these important economic principles,
only to have them languish in obscurity without influencing any
subsequent thinker. In fact, however, the economic ideas of the
late Scholastics were profoundly influential, and the existing evi-
dence permits us the happy luxury of tracing that influence
through the centuries.
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166 How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization
Into the seventeenth century, the Dutch Protestant Hugo
Grotius, known for his contributions to international law theory,
expressly cited the late Scholastics in his own work, and adopted
much of their economic outlook. Scholastic influence in the sev-
enteenth century also persists in the work of such influential
23
Jesuits as Father Leonardus Lessius and Father Juan de Lugo. In
eighteenth-century Italy, there is strong evidence of Scholastic
influence on Abbé Ferdinando Galiani, who is sometimes cited as
the originator of the ideas of utility and scarcity as determinants
24
of price. (Likewise for Antonio Genovesi, a contemporary of
Galiani who was also indebted to Scholastic thought.) From
Galiani, writes Rothbard, the central role of utility, scarcity,
and the common estimation of the market spread to France, to
the late eighteenth-century French abbé Étienne Bonnot de
Condillac (1714 80), as well as to that other great abbé Robert
Jacques Turgot (1727 81). . . . François Quesnay (1694 1774)
and the eighteenth-century French physiocrats often consid-
ered to be the founders of economic science were also heavily
25
influenced by the Scholastics.
Alejandro Chafuen, in his important book Faith and Liberty:
The Economic Thought of the Late Scholastics (2003), shows
that on one issue after another these sixteenth- and seventeenth-
century thinkers not only understood and developed crucial
economic principles, but also defended the principles of eco-
nomic liberty and a free-market economy. From prices and wages
to money and value theory, the late Scholastics anticipated the
very best economic thought of later centuries. Specialists in the
history of economic thought have become more and more aware
of the late Scholastics contribution to economics, but this is yet
another example of a Catholic innovation well known to special-
ized scholars that has, for the most part, not made its way to the
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