Abstract
This paper considers the grounds for origin and development of the usurious nature of the capitalism phenomenon via social and economic analysis means. The place and role of the loan capital market in terms of replacement of the civilization paradigm and gradual ideological ‘cracking’ of traditional foundations of the Christian Europe, which happened under the market’s influence, and transition from the ‘religious man’ to the ‘economic man’ were defined. As a result, commercial relations between individual feudal territories expanded, along with municipal growth and trade and money relation development, as well as insulation and isolation of a feud was disrupted. There was a gradual shift from the conventional economic patterns, which looked like a closed self-sufficient household of a non-market structure and involving a number of spoken and unspoken rules, bringing different levels of its hierarchy together, towards a bourgeois (market), a system of highly specialized manufactures. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2015.v6n5s2p110
Highlights
One can come across rudiment economic theories in Western Europe mainly in works of Fathers of the Church, theologists and legal theorists - canonists of 14th-16th centuries
This paper aims at proving the loan interest to be the ideological intention of the capitalistic system of management as a basic element of the west-European and further global world-economy
Weber speaks of the spirit of capitalism as protestant ethic, Sombard about Judaism practices as a system that formed the capitalistic spirit for the most part, Marx as an added value and class exploitation, than Braudel shifts his focus from the mentality and class contradictions to profit maximization, while placing the capitalism inside a certain ‘set’, going outside its own borders and facilitating amplification of its own dynamics
Summary
One can come across rudiment economic theories in Western Europe mainly in works of Fathers of the Church, theologists and legal theorists - canonists of 14th-16th centuries. The trade was recognized in such works, provided the honesty, rightness and fairness were obeyed and usury (lending money on interest) was criticized. The medieval patristics did not regulate economic ideas as a separate scientific knowledge in a consistent way. Views and ideas, pertaining to the economic theory, were an integral part of the moral theology system. While analyzing the history of relations between the individual and society, Erich Fromm says “There is not any place for any economic activity that would not be connected with the moral in the medieval theory”. Further referring to Tawney “That economic interests are non-essential and should subject to the genuine goal of the human life, which is saving the sole” (Fromm, 1989)
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