Between Religion and Economics: Towards a Shift of Paradigm in Early Modern Economic Literature

Eleonora Belligni

doi:10.22158/jrph.v2n1p79

Abstract

At the beginning of the early modern age, philosophers, religious and political thinkers writing on economics had to deal with categories that were still based on the religious certainties of the medieval West, and with a paradigm built on Aristotelian dialectic between oikos (the family economy) and chrèmata (wealth). From this frame, articulated and innovative investigations on the contemporary economic world were born in the late Middle Ages of Europe: but up until the late seventeenth century, at least, the Aristotelian paradigm remained a rigid cage for most of the writers. Yet, both the impact of some theoretical work on the relationship between religion and economy, and some significant changing in European scenario started to break this cage. Evidence of a shifting of paradigm could be detected even in Counter-Reformation authors like the Italian Giovanni Botero.

Highlights

At the beginning of the early modern age, philosophers, religious and political thinkers writing on economics had to deal with categories that were still based on the religious certainties of the medieval West, and with a paradigm built on Aristotelian dialectic between oikos and chrèmata
Along with the separation between religion and politics, the scission between religion and economy represented a focal point in the early modern Europe process of secularization (Note 1)
In the scenario marked by the great geographical discoveries, which irreversibly modified the parameters of the world economy, by the Protestant Reformation, that altered the foundations of Christian universality, and by the rising of the great European monarchies and early modern State, economic matters found www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/jrph Journal of Research in Philosophy and History

Summary

Introduction

Along with the separation between religion and politics, the scission between religion and economy represented a focal point in the early modern Europe process of secularization (Note 1). Another factor of innovation can be taken as an example of how new perspectives were being outlined in this century in the relationship between the economy and religion: small realities, failed experiments, often violently repressed or kept at least in the margins of civic society, even in Eastern Europe These were mostly utopias which were created in contexts limited in time and in space: from the dream of Thomas Münzer, which arose from the Peasants’ War, and from the attempt by Matthysen, Rothmann, and Knipperdolling to create a “New Zion” in Münster (1536); to the community of the Anabaptists, who were persecuted by the Catholics and the Reformed, and who fled to the East. The Anabaptists, the Socinians, the Antitrinitarians, and all those who took part in the religious radicalism of the sixteenth century, even though it had been generated by the spores of Augustinism, revealed themselves to be more Aristotelian than Aquinas himself in their appreciation of the doctrine of the bonum commune, and their struggle against economic individualism, including the practice of usury

Oikos e Chrèmata

Towards a New Paradigm