An outlook about the influential role of the School of Salamanca to the Modern Economic and Legal Thought
In the 16th and 17th centuries, many members of the Salamanca School (Spanish Scholasticism) engaged in a sustained and sophisticated discussion of many issues, from a philosophical, moral and natural law tradition points of view. They addressed all sorts of issues which today we would qualify as belonging to the social sciences. One of the main topic was the ordering and regulation of economic activity, regarding the best way to achieve a just order within a political community already glimpsed as universal. Their members addressed practical questions and dilemmas about the relation between value and price (fair price theory), money and credit (nature of interest and usury), enrichment (profit theory), fiscal and monetary stability (fair taxes and healthy money), and also the presence of the gift in the forms of liberality and alms. They thought that the search for the just (commutative, distributive and political) should inform both human law and the action of those governing and those governed. The doctrinal elaborations and controversies that mark the scholastic thought are answers to the challenges of that time that the authors of Salamanca School considered necessary to attend. Their thought influenced powerfully in the philosophy and the political action that ended giving shape to the Modernity and entrance to the Enlightenment. In this sense, this paper uses their contributions as a point of departure for a consideration of justice in the global market economy which is very relevant to current-day circumstances. The goal is to bring to light the attractiveness of those views to guide current policy-making and legal scholarship and methodology by contrasting them with alternative views, showing their connection with intuitively attractive basic standards, and linking them to commonly shared intuitions and analysis. For this reason, the purpose of this paper is to delve into the projection of the Spanish scholastic thought in some developments of modern econo
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Keywords: School of Salamanca, Spanish Scholasticism, market economy, justice, Law and Economics, policy-making
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