Economic Treatises Research Articles

Uses of education: readings in Enlightenment in England

What is education for? The question framed in the second half of the eighteenth century in England is still urgent. Posed in textbooks, histories, conduct books, economic treatises, novels, and other kinds of writing, it was asked about punishment, the classical curriculum, the low status of teachers, education of the poor, public school or private tutor, and the education of girls. Uses of Education shows the fundamental question to be about the potential and limits of Enlightenment thought as it seeks to be embodied in institutions.

Enlightenment Science and Iconoclasm: The Brazilian Naturalist José Vieira Couto

AbstractIn the 1790s, Jose Vieira Couto, a Brazilian naturalist, was appointed by the Portuguese crown to study parts of the captaincy of Minas Gerais, located in southwestern Brazil. It was in this region that great deposits of gold and diamonds had been found earlier in the eighteenth century. Between 1788 and 1802, Vieira Couto used his expertise to serve the Portuguese state and advance his own career, writing several reports (memorias economicas, or economic treatises) regarding his expeditions in Minas Gerais. His knowledge of mining and geology was vital to the Portuguese authorities, who by that time were concerned about a decline in the captaincy’s mineralogical production. Studying the holdings of his personal library as well as his economic treatises provides a lens through which to view the influence of the Enlightenment in Brazil and to observe the spread of a new science and philosophy at the end of the eighteenth century. It also shows how technical expertise played an important role in the...

Protagoras and the Fourteenth‐Century Invention of Epistemological Relativism

When contemporary writers consider the history of relativism, more often than not, they simply gloss over the entire medieval period, suggesting that the absolute (and absolutely accepted) claims of the Catholic Church during this period blocked the development of any consideration of relativized notions of truth, morals, and ethics. This is an astounding oversight considering the attention that medieval writers themselves paid to the problem in everything from economic treatises to pastoral manuals. Indeed, a comparison between thirteenth‐ and fourteenth‐century commentaries on book IV of Aristotle's Metaphysics (where the Philosopher discusses the opinions of the pre‐Socratic thinker Protagoras) reveals the development of proto‐relativized epistemologies. The turn towards relativized conceptions of knowledge had everything to do with the possibility of visual error and the recognition that visual evidence is often susceptible to multiple incompatible explanations. This article charts the development of this discovery in the commentaries of Siger of Brabant (ca. 1240–1280s), Thomas Aquinas (ca. 1225–1274), and Nicholas of Autrecourt (ca. 1299–ca. 1369), as well as in the writings of Nicole Oresme (ca. 1323–1382).

John Ruskin and the Ethics of Consumption, by David M. Craig

Reviewed by: John Ruskin and the Ethics of Consumption Judith Stoddart (bio) John Ruskin and the Ethics of Consumption, by David M. Craig; pp. x + 422. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2006, $60.00, £36.95. In his 1899 reflection on contemporary consumerist theory entitled "The Moral Aspect of Consumption," Charles S. Devas, an admirer of John Ruskin, provided a cautionary note to Ruskin's maxim in Unto This Last (1860) that "THERE IS NO WEALTH BUT LIFE. Life including all its powers of love, of joy, and of admiration" (essay IV, par. 77). In Ruskin's economy, Devas noted, "beans and bacon . . . get mixed up with parental love; and although in many a humble household the former may be the visible expression of the latter . . . such a dissolving of the material into the immaterial is wholly unnecessary to the ethical treatment of economics, and may lead us to curious results" (International Journal of Ethics, 10.1 [1899]: 42). Devas's example gestures to the mixed heritage of Ruskin's notion of economics, derived from the Greek ideals of household economy, paternalist social models, Christian values, and an eighteenth-century vocabulary of sentimental virtues. But if Devas worried that Ruskin's conflation of moral, ethical, and economic practices was a distraction from the work of the marginalist school—which in the 1870s provided the groundwork for what Devas characterized as an ethical revolution in economic theory—David Craig suggests in John Ruskin and the Ethics of Consumption that Ruskin's mixed vocabulary is the source of his strength. It is precisely, Craig contends, where Ruskin links an account of value to a language of virtues that he offers important economic lessons. The value of beans and bacon, Craig might respond to Devas, is mixed up with parental love, if parental love is to be understood in a broad, communitarian sense. In a Ruskinian ethics of consumption, the purchase of a commodity involves a sympathetic act of projection through which we "cross over into other people's lives and endeavors" (315), imagining not only the conditions under which laborers and producers toiled, but their opportunities, sufferings, and choices. Craig traces the evolution of Ruskin's theory of virtue from his early aesthetic writings to his economic treatises. Key terms of that theory, such as "love" and "delight," which first appear in Modern Painters (1843–60), have been misread as references to subjective inner feelings; Craig resituates them within a Christian teleological ethics where they signify "outwardly directed 'affections'" that need to be "ordered properly" toward a good end (48). Over time Ruskin became less certain that he could define a coherent "metaphysics of the good" (289), but he never lost his belief that character development toward an end is the defining feature of a good life. With its focus on [End Page 106] impersonal market forces and individual choice, classical economics—represented in Craig's book by J. S. Mill—provided no mechanism for what Craig calls the "pedagogy of character" (115). Despite his often trenchant critiques of classical economy, Karl Marx, suspicious of the ideological underpinnings of any teleological system, also failed to outline a practical pedagogy. John Ruskin and the Ethics of Consumption usefully stages a dialogue between Ruskin and Mill as well as Marx to show where their emphases diverge. Craig shares both Mill's and Marx's recognition that capitalism can productively disrupt normative systems of value and hierarchy. And yet, he argues, communities do, in practice, adopt "binding" systems of value that structure the choices they make. Ruskin's increasing awareness of culture as a constructed system, a constantly changing set of interconnections, choices, and actions, makes him a more practical critic than Mill or Marx precisely because he intervenes at the level of what Jurgen Habermas would call the lifeworld. The Ruskin who emerges from Craig's book looks, in fact, something like a proto-Habermasian critic (although Craig never mentions Habermas), who "calls individual consumers to a searching vision of their own sense of good lives, the common good, shared goods, and the 'binding' practices requisite to them—a vision that if acted upon deliberately can find and persuade other people of...

Mammon's Music: Literature and Economics in the Age of Milton by Blair Hoxby (review)

MLR, 100.3, 2??5 783 available to readers an impressive amount of new material, much of it the result of Smith's tireless researches. It is far superior to all previous editions of Marvell in several respects: its annotation of linguistic detail, the puns and verbal ambiguities so abundant in Marvell; its notes identifying possible sources and analogues, classical and biblical; its citation of parallel passages from the poet's contemporaries; and its consistent attempts to situate Marvell's writings in their historical context. Marvell's critical reputation has undergone marked changes in the last few years, with a new emphasis on his involvement in politics and on locating his poems in specific historical moments. Much of the most interesting recent work on Marvell? Smith's own writings and those of David Norbrook, Annabel Patterson, Thomas Corns, Blair Worden, Derek Hirst, and others?has been historicist in its emphasis. Readers wanting guidance in reading the 'Horatian Ode', 'The First Anniversary', or such relatively obscure poems as 'The Character of Holland' or 'The Loyal Scot' have exactly the book here that will suit their needs. For some poems, including 'The First Anniversary' and Marvell's poem on the death of Cromwell, Smith's introduction and notes provide the best critical and historical introduction available. But forall its considerable merits, Smith's edition suffersfrom a certain imbalance. Anyone interested in Marvell as wit, lyric poet, ironist, the Marvell celebrated by T. S. Eliot for 'a tough reasonableness behind the slight lyric grace', may at times feel disappointed. Smith's introductions and notes are at their best when they treat the poems by Marvell which fithis own particular interests, and are less helpful in treating such poems as 'The Nymph Complaining forthe Death of her Fawn' or the four 'Mower' poems. Here as elsewhere, Smith's introductions and notes excel in pointing out parallel passages in classical and Renaissance authors. But 'The Nymph Complaining' is a difficult, enigmatic poem, and readers may need more help in coming to terms with its 'interpretative difficulties' (p. 64) than is afforded by a bare list giving bibliographical references to eighteen critical studies. The canon of Marvell's verse satires is uncertain, and Smith's edition treats the problematical elements with great assurance. He makes a strong case for Marvell's authorship of two satires of the 1660s, 'Second Advice' and 'Third Advice', as well as for the much earlier elegy on the death of Lord Francis Villiers. 'Blake's Victory', another poem whose authenticity has been doubted by Marvell scholars, is relegated to an appendix of doubtful poems. I would have preferred that A Dialogue between Thyrsis and Dorinda' had similarly been classed as doubtful, though Smith in his introduction states arguments forand against its authenticity. Ofthe poems 'of uncer? tain attribution' excluded from the edition but listed in a further appendix, I would have liked to see texts of 'The Kings Vowes' and 'Upon his Majesties being made free of the City' included among 'doubtful poems', since the case for their being wholly or partly by Marvell is at least as strong as with 'Blake's Victory' and 'Thyrsis and Dorinda'. For all these minor reservations, Nigel Smith's edition of Marvell is a triumphant achievement, invaluable for the student of Marvell and seventeenth-century poetry. In its full and informative introductions and notes, it is a great advance over the previous editions of Margoliouth, Legouis, Lord, Donno, and Walker. King's College London Warren Chernaik Mammon's Music: Literature and Economics in the Age of Milton. By Blair Hoxby. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. 2003. xii + 320 pp. ?30. ISBN 0-300-09378-0. Mammon's Music is a work ofconsiderable originality,which casts new light on Milton and some of his contemporaries by juxtaposing literary texts with economic treatises 784 Reviews and pamphlets of the seventeenth century. The title suggests a certain ambivalence. To the Puritan moralist Milton, the siren song ofmaterial gain represents a temptation to be resolutely resisted. And yet, as Blair Hoxby shows convincingly, images of trade and its circulation resonate throughout Milton's writings, associated both with ideas of empire and with freedom of thought. Mammon...

Klossowski, Deleuze, and Orthodoxy

Among the many strange and wonderful things to be found there, Pierre Klossowski's oeuvre is a preeminent illustration of what divides univocity and equivocity and therefore serves as one of the twentieth century's most instructive models for thinking the complexity of the dialectic. Univocity and equivocity are significant both in their roots in Scholastic philosophy, as the idea that Being is expressed in either one or several senses, and as belonging to a longstanding framework that helps demarcate the differences, nuanced yet significant, among members of the extraordinary generation of French intellectuals of which Klossowski was a part. Thus, these terms, apart from their theological and philosophical import, will serve as a heuristic for renarrating points of filiation and divergence among a series of prominent French thinkers, primarily Bataille, Klossowski, and Deleuze, but also extending backward to Sartre and forward to Badiou to frame the series. I will approach this in segmented fashion, first opposing Bataille's dialectic of transgression to Klossowski's more univocal method of disjunctive synthesis. When juxtaposed with Deleuze's Spinozist affirmation of univocity, however, Klossowski would seem to be more on the side of the equivocal. Whereas Deleuze criticizes the realm between the univocal and the equivocal as the lukewarm space of the analogical, my contention is that this middle realm allows for a space of movement and reversal that escapes the pitfalls Deleuze locates in the dialectic, and does so without a strict adherence to Spinozist univocity. Whereas Bataille and Deleuze remain closer to Klossowski in the tenor of their thought, I will nonetheless suggest in conclusion that Sartre and Badiou are actually closer to Klossowski on a formal level, in that each poses a similarly analogical challenge to the thought of the dialectic. For many reasons Bataille and Klossowski can be paired together. They were contemporaries, both born around the turn of the century, both writing in a variety of literary and philosophical genres, including pornographic or semi-pornographic fiction, and working outside the academy. Both wrote studies of Nietzsche, of Sade, and radical economic treatises. They were friends and fellow members in the late 1930s of the College of Sociology, which was modeled after a secret society, the members taking great interest in such topics as sacrifice and headlessness. Bataille and Klossowski wrote about each other. Both were at different points obsessed with Roman Catholicism, both at different points prepared to enter monastic orders, both in different fashions fell away. As might easily be imagined, their fiction is an outrageous mixture of the sacred and the profane, including sexual encounters and other desecrations staged at church alters and the like. Both work in that realm where pornography and theology come together. Yet while the more familiar Bataille uses pornography toward transgressive aims, the lesser-known Klossowski uses a more nuanced and interesting mechanism of boredom to elaborate an intrinsically disjunctive structure. Even boredom, for Bataille, partakes of the transgressive. In his novella The Story of the Eye, the narrator describes offhandedly how he and his companion Simone have just found their friend Marcelle's body. She has hung herself. The narrator and Simone

Reflection on the FOMC Meeting of October 6, 1979

the CBS Washington Bureau. He said he only had one crew working that day and it was covering the Pope. He asked if our press conference was going to make big news. Without hesitating, I said he would remember the press conference long after the Pope had left town. He sent the crew and never complained. I hope the Pope has forgiven me. The turnout at the press conference was large—more than 50 press attended, a few still in their Saturday-at-home working clothes. At one point, Irving R. Levine of NBC, apparently anxious to get the news on TV, tried to end the discussion by saying, “Thank you, Mr. Chairman.” But others stopped him. They wanted more. My next reflection is about consumer activists and, especially, Gail Cincotta. Mrs. Cincotta was from Chicago and an old-school activist for the consumer—make a lot of noise and you’ll get attention. Activist groups had scheduled a meeting in Baltimore and wanted Chairman Volcker to address them about high and rising interest rates. This is when I began to feel like the corporal in a John Wayne movie. You know, John Wayne is riding with his cavalry unit in the Old West when a group of hostile Indians appears on the horizon. Wayne says, “Corporal, take the point.” Needless to say, I wasn’t too enthralled about the Chairman addressing this meeting. I discussed the invitation letter from Mrs. Cincotta with him, and he, noting that the meeting was in Baltimore, suggested that we turn for help to then President Bob Black of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond. So, I telephoned President Black, and it turned out that he, too, had a corporal. He assigned one of his top officers to go to Baltimore and appear O n October 6, 1979, I was one of 33 persons who attended the most defining and important meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) during my more than 30 years at the Federal Reserve Board. It might well have been the most important monetary policy meeting in the entire history of the Federal Reserve System. Inflation was on a dangerous upward curve at the time and didn’t seem to be responding very well to policy actions. Chairman Volcker was especially concerned and called the special meeting that would change our lives throughout the entire System for several years to come. Since I am not an economist, my reflections about this meeting and its aftermath don’t fall under the heading of an economic treatise but involve day-to-day experiences that flowed from the meeting. They include the Pope, Gail Cincotta and consumer activists, purple hearts, two-byfours, keys, and a corporal in a John Wayne movie. The Pope was in town at the time of the meeting and probably diverted a great deal of public attention from what was happening elsewhere in Washington. Our meeting began at 10:10 a.m. and ended a few minutes before 4 p.m., as I recall. I immediately asked the Chairman if we could have a press conference. He said yes and asked what time; I said 6 p.m. Two of my staff and I began calling various members of the press. Keep in mind that in those days there were no cell phones or Internet. News services and newspapers were on a weekend status, and it was a quiet news day in Washington, generally, except for the Pope’s visit. Then my telephone rang. It was the chief of

Confronting Serfdom in the Age of Revolution: Projects for Serf Reform in the Time of Alexander I

During the Age of Revolution public-minded people both inside and outside governments across the European world took up the fundamental problem of human freedom. Of course, liberation meant different things in different countries. In the Russian Empire it meant peasant emancipation from serfdom. During the reign of Alexander I (1801-25) the emancipation question was addressed from a number of angles, often with the tsar's encouragement. Although the discussion only rarely appeared in open publication, peasants, policymakers, and political economists all advanced the debate about peasant emancipation. In fact, the record of this conversation that exists in projects for legal reform, in peasant complaints, and in economic treatises demonstrates that by the end of the first quarter of the nineteenth century most of the key elements of the eventual emancipation legislation had been vetted. That the political and social consensus necessary to untie the knot of serfdom did not arise during Alexander's reign can be considered partly, but not entirely, his fault. Alexander I surely vacillated, as the complex matter elicited every kind of conflicting opinion, and his vacillation compares unfavorably with the determination of his nephew, Alexander II. But the second Alexander inherited a political landscape conditioned by six decades of semipublic discussion of how emancipation could be achieved, as well as a state bureaucracy that had vetted a number of schemes for full emancipation and digested the lessons of various partial reforms. While it is traditional to tell the story of the Russian road to emancipation as commencing in the 1840s, doing so produces a fundamental misunderstanding of how the Russian state, landowners, and peasants arrived at 19 February 1861. In fact, the

UNNATURAL SELF- SACRIFICE

In this essay I explore Trollope's challenge to traditional Victorian valorizations of sacriÞce. A wide range of Victorian writings, from novels to sermons to economic and sociological treatises, suggests that sacriÞce is virtuous only when it comes without personal reward. In an era of unprecedented personal and national prosperity, Trollope rejected this purist standard for sacriÞce. The Þrst and last novels of his Barsetshire series do away with the attempt to retain a sphere of sacriÞce beyond a capitalistic circuit of exchange where theft and questionably gained surplus consistently threaten ethical life. Instead, the novels allow morally desirable acts to reap reward for their agents, to generate various forms of surplus that can then be fed back into a circuit of sympathetic human relations. In rejecting a sacriÞcial ideal, Trollope poses an everyday communal ethic of beneÞt in place of the idealized, highly individualistic model of self-denial that so many of his contemporaries endorsed.

Derrida's Debt to Milton Friedman

This article draws on Derrida's account of economic history in Given Time I: Counterfeit Money to show that he is indebted to an economist he does not mention at all, Milton Friedman. Derrida calls for an investigation of the literary consequences of the "dematerialization of money" and proceeds to give his own version of this history by examining a Baudelaire story from 1864 and an economic treatise from 1925. Those texts may mark moments in economic history, but the dematerialization of money which Derrida sees in them is almost entirely a middle twentieth-century development, finalized in the demise of the international gold standard at about the same time Derrida was writing his essay. The economist most responsible for the "dematerialization of money" is Milton Friedman, who in the 1950's proposed a rather Derridean theory of money as a non-referential sign system, describing money as a "fiction" which "veils" its own fictionality. Connecting economic developments to literary theory has implications for the history of literary forms: the shift from Keynesian to Monetarist economics mirrors the shift from modernism to postmodernism.

Intuitive elements in Adam Smith

This article is about the inclusion of the concept of intuition in the writings of Adam Smith. Intuition is a mental process that includes drawing inferences so quickly that reasoning seems to be absent, synthesizing disparate elements into a grand vision and sound judgment. More common everyday terms include gut feeling, educated hunch, a sixth sense, picking up vibes, and the Eureka or aha experience. The common element in all these descriptions is that intuition is a mental act but not a conscious analytical—logical, sequential, step-by-step, and reasoned—process of thinking. This article shows that Smith’s solution for achieving social harmony, a major interest that runs throughout his various works on ethics and economics, included using not only both self-interest and (what we now call) intuition, but also what Smith called “sympathy” and the “impartial spectator.” This article shows that these ideas are similar to the ones written about by Charles Darwin and Jean Piaget. Second, the article shows that Smith’s early work on grammar not only has relevance to his economics, but also that it used what we now know to be the brain’s division of labor function principle. Third, the article shows that Smith’s early writings on ethics and socio-economic person has direct relevance to his economic treatise, the Wealth of Nations.

Virtue and Necessity: The Bonds of Marriage and the Political Economy of J. S. Mill and F. W. Newman

For his first review of someone else’s economic treatise following the publication of his ownPrinciples of Political Economyin 1848, John Stuart Mill chose to examine Francis Newman’sLectures on Political Economy(1851). One might expect that Mill’s review would be sympathetic. Both Mill and Newman were zealous reformers, much berated for pursuing endless “crotchets.” They were both great advocates of the two campaigns that, for Mill, eventually emerged as pre-eminent: land reform and the emancipation of women. It would be reasonable to assume that the political economy of each helped determine the scope and focus of his respective involvement in social reform, and there would be much commonality. Newman, moreover, had only the year before outraged orthodox opinion by his highly critical analysis of the New Testament inPhases of Faith. While Mill downplayed his own secularism, he would likely have felt more than a spark of kinship with someone who had managed to scandalize even liberal Unitarians.

Virtue and Necessity: The Bonds of Marriage and the Political Economy of J. S. Mill and F. W. Newman

For his first review of someone else’s economic treatise following the publication of his ownPrinciples of Political Economyin 1848, John Stuart Mill chose to examine Francis Newman’sLectures on Political Economy(1851). One might expect that Mill’s review would be sympathetic. Both Mill and Newman were zealous reformers, much berated for pursuing endless “crotchets.” They were both great advocates of the two campaigns that, for Mill, eventually emerged as pre-eminent: land reform and the emancipation of women. It would be reasonable to assume that the political economy of each helped determine the scope and focus of his respective involvement in social reform, and there would be much commonality. Newman, moreover, had only the year before outraged orthodox opinion by his highly critical analysis of the New Testament inPhases of Faith. While Mill downplayed his own secularism, he would likely have felt more than a spark of kinship with someone who had managed to scandalize even liberal Unitarians.

Unchained voices: an anthology of black authors in the English-speaking world of the eighteenth century

In Unchained Voices, Vincent Carretta has assembled the most comprehensive anthology ever published of writings by eighteenth-century people of African descent, enabling many of these authors to be heard clearly for the first time in two centuries. Their writings reflect the surprisingly diverse experiences of blacks on both sides of the Atlantic-America, Britain, the West Indies, and Africa - between 1760 and 1798. Letters, poems, captivity narratives, petitions, criminal autobiographies, economic treatises, travel accounts, and antislavery arguments were produced during a time of various and changing political and religious loyalties. Although the theme of liberation from physical or spiritual captivity runs throughout the collection, freedom also clearly led to hardship and disappointment for a number of these authors. In his introduction, Carretta reconstructs the historical and cultural context of the works, emphasizing the constraints of the eighteenth-century genres under which these authors wrote. The texts and annotations are based on extensive research in both published and manuscript holdings of archives in the United States and the United Kingdom. Appropriate for undergraduates as well as for scholars, Unchained Voices gives a clear sense of the major literary and cultural issues at the heart of writings in English by people of African descent.

Framing Authority: Sayings, Self, and Society in Sixteenth-Century England

Writers in sixteenth-century England often kept commonplace books in which to jot down notable fragments encountered during reading or conversation, but few critics have fully appreciated the formative influence this activity had on humanism. Focusing on the discursive practices of textual fragments and or forming, arranging, and assimilating them, Mary Crane shows how keeping commonplace books made up the English humanists' central transaction with antiquity and provided an influential model for authorial practice and authoritative self-fashioning. She thereby revises our perceptions of English humanism, revealing its emphasis on sayings, collectivism, shared resources, anonymous inscription, and balance of power--in contrast to an aristocratic mode of thought, which championed individualism, imperialism, and strong assertion of authorial voice.Crane first explores the theory of gathering and framing as articulated in influential sixteenth-century logic and rhetoric texts and in the pedagogical theory with which they were linked in the humanist project. She then investigates the practice of humanist discourse through a series of texts that exemplify the notebook method of composition. These texts include school curricula, political and economic treatises (such as More's Utopia), contemporary biography, and collections of epigrams and poetic miscellanies.Originally published in 1993.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The protestant work ethic, the spirit of enterprise and the Siegerland mentality 1

We know that our intellectual heritage influences our approach to modern economic and social issues. Nevertheless, the history of economic thought and of political economy which forms the basis for research into the grassroots of socio-cultural development are currently outside the confines of mainstream economic analysis. Consequently, many of the results of research carried out nowadays are, unfortunate y, more likely to resemble a pamphlet on mathematical econophysics than an economic treatise. However, cultural evolution only enables us to conceive that "all the major schools of thought in economics have concomitant types of social organization. ... Substantively, what expresses growth and development in the dynamics of economic evolution is culture" (Brinkman, 1981 :xii).

The Aristotelian Analysis of Usury (review)

Odd Langholm. The Aristotelian Analysis of Usury. 1984. Pp.153. $~9.oo BOOK REVIEWS 139 Bergen: Universitetsforlaget AS, Some three decades ago John T. Noonan published The ScholasticAnalysis of Usury, the classic study of mediaeval economics. In many ways the present work should be considered as an update of it. The updating is made possible by new materials that have come to light--short mediaeval economic treatises by relatively obscure fourteenth-century theologians---Peter Olivi, Gerald Odonis, both Franciscans, and Gerard of Siena, an Augustinian. Langholm's careful study of the materials proceeds along five themes selected from scholastic moral theology----contract, teleology of money, law, human industria, and duress. The upshot is that we have a fresh account of the economic thought of the Middle Ages. We are now in a position to push back its creative period at least by half a century. The received opinion, established by the late Raymond De Roover, that Bernardino of Siena and Archbishop Antonino of Florence were "the two great economic thinkers of the Middle Ages" would now have to be revised in favor of the three mentioned above. Langholm demonstrates how indebted Bernardino and Antonino were to their more creative predecessors. Apart from its historical value, the book under review is also valuable for its contribution to the study of economic thought of the Middle Ages. Those intimidated by Noonan may find in Langholm, not a substitute, but a very reliable introduction. How did the mediaevals look upon economic activity? What kind of science did they think economics was? Economic activity--buying and selling, lending and borrowing money--were for them essentially 'human acts', and therefore not to be treated solely as acts justified by market behavior. Economic activity pertained to the sphere of 'action', not just 'behavior'. Accordingly, economics was essentially a moral science, and not an autonomous behavioral science. As Langholm points out, the scholastics did not have an instrumental conception of the economic variables. The focus of their attention was "man qua generalized individual," not "man en masse"(148). Hence, on the one hand, the supreme importance of the nature of money, and on the other, ofjustice and the notion of the just price in the loaning of it. As for the nature of money, mediaeval thought was fixated on two notions derived from Aristotle's Politics: the sterility of money and its essence as medium of exchange. As Langholm points out, scholastic thought did not have an abstract notion of money: money was a "concrete substance," coins, for use in exchange. It was not of the nature of money to breed money. They could not operationalize the possibility that in a loan what was transferred was not the thing itself, but only the ius, Accordingly, rules governing a money-loan were substantially not different from rules governing exchange of any other commodity. In each type of transaction the rules of '~just price" had to be observed. Money was a sterile entity which was consumed in its use: in a loan both the ownership and use were transferred. Therefore to charge interest on the use was to charge the same thing twice, which was against all principles ofjustice. Usury therefore was unjust. As for meeting the requirements of justice, there were also the questions of voluntariness and duress. Here Aristotle's Ethics was the source of enlightenment. For the mediaevals, a loan of money could only have been caused by some necessity: analyti- 140 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 26:1 JANUARY 1988 cally they could not have thought of a loan as a means of productive investment. Prohibitions against usury made good sense so long as the economy was static and did not produce any surplus wealth, and money itself was conceived of as a means of facilitating exchange of goods. The question of the nature and justification of interest, as Langholm reminds us, is by no means a settled issue even in the ideologically and religiously divided contemporary world. "It is only when we ourselves possess a consistent theory of interest," writes Langholm wisely, "that we can blame another age for the lack of it." (150). There is only one criticism that I would make...

Reproduction, production and the sexual division of labour

This basically economic treatise elaborates the thesis that the focal point of women's economic activities is provided by their special role in the reproduction of the labor force. Given that change in sex roles is necessary in order not to perpetuate a division of labor which places women in subordinate positions, this paper attempts to analyze the nature and functions of traditional sex roles and to study the structures that have supported them through generations in an effort to conceptualize the relevant issues and to set up a general framework from which change in social structure relating to women and their economic dependency can proceed. In addition, specific studies of concrete situations observed within and across countries and cultural barriers are used for illustration. The argument, simply stated, which the paper seeks to prove, is that male domination develops around the need to control reproduction in its different aspects; the concept of reproduction used here indicates a dynamic process of change linked with the perpetuation of social systems. It includes social as well as physical reproduction, and its meaning therefore goes beyond that of reproduction of human beings. This concept of reproduction is isolated in discussions of production and the sexual division of labor, including agrarian structures and modes of production; the commercialization and proletarization of agriculture; and the availability of labor resources and development of wage labor markets. The implications of this concept of reproduction in population policy, specifically population control, are not explicitly discussed but are tremendously important.

The Price Of Salvation: Moral Economics In Major Barbara

"IN ALL MY PLAYS," Bernard Shaw wrote to Archibald Henderson in 1904, "my economic studies have played as important a part as a knowledge of anatomy does in the works of Michael Angelo.” But the inclusion of economics in his plays, he always maintained, did not make them mere tracts. "My plays are no more economic treatises than Shakespear's," he declared in his Sixteen Self Sketches. "It is true that neither Widowers' Houses nor Major Barbara could have been written by an economic ignoramus, and that Mrs Warren's Profession is an economic exposure of the White Slave Traffic as well as a melodrama. There is an economic link between Cashel Byron, Sartorius, Mrs Warren, and Undershaft: all of them prospering in questionable activities. But would anyone but a buffleheheaded idiot of a university professor, half crazy with correcting examination papers, infer that all my plays were written as economic essays, and not as plays of life, character, and human destiny like those of Shakespear or Euripides?" Shaw's comments invite inquiry into how economics functions aesthetically in his dramas: how it affects not only thematic content, but characterization and dramatic structure as well. From this standpoint it may be useful to consider the influence economics exerts on "life, character, and human destiny" in one of the plays he mentions, Major Barbara.

Historia i moralność w filozofii Augusta Cieszkowskiego

August Ciszkowski (1814-1894) was a philosopher, an author of economic treatises, a man dedicated to social activities, and a politician. His first book in philosophy Prolegomena zur Historiosophie came out in Berlin 1838. The author intended it to be a venture to overstep the Hegelian philosophy. But at the same time it represents the author’s own system – “the philosophy of action”. The book won a wide response in Poland and ha a notable impact on philosophic debates in Germany and Russia. Not this book though, but Our Father (Ojcze Nasz) should be considered the work of Cieszkowski’s life.