Donum, exchange and common good in Aquinas: the dawn of civil economy

Abstract

This paper explores the role of gift (donum) and common good in Thomas Aquinas’ (c1225–1274) economic teachings. The result is a theory of economic agency, rooted in the concept of mutual assistance (reciprocity), under which Aquinas’ account of just price is considered. The paper also relates Aquinas’ thought to the work of the “civil economist” Antonio Genovesi (1713–1769). Genovesi’s account of the market as a place of virtue and mutual assistance is deeply connected to Thomistic anthropological and economic theses. This would classify Aquinas as a fundamental author for the tradition of civil economy.

Keywords:

• Mutual assistance
• common good
• just price
• Thomas Aquinas
• Antonio Genovesi

JEL CODES:

• B11
• B12

Acknowledgments

This paper has benefited from the supervision of Luigino Bruni and Adrian Pabst. Moreover, I would like to thank John Milbank, Robert Sugden and Piero Coda for their comments on the first two sections. I wish also to thank Roberta Sferrazzo, the participants at the conferences, “Vulnerability and Gift in Economic and Business. An Interdisciplinary Conference” (Florence, April 2016), “Common Good as a Common Project” (Notre Dame, March 2017), and “Festival for the New Economic Thinking” (Edinburgh, October 2017), for their useful observations and discussions on the topics of this research. I am also grateful to the editor and the three anonymous referee whose comments improved decisively the quality of my argumentation. Finally, I would like to thank my parents who showed me the relation between contract and gift long before reading it through Aquinas’ lenses.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 This pattern was analysed by Young and Gordon (1992).

2 In this paper, I consider a form of “voluntary exchanges”, namely market exchanges. These transactions are characterised by (1) the voluntary nature of the acts of the participants, (2) face-to-face relationships and (3) the possibility of freely choosing the partner in the exchange. Given this premise, “exchange”, “market exchange” and “voluntary exchange” will be employed as synonymous terms.

3 I believe that this can be done only in small steps. I have already started this intellectual reconstruction in a joint paper with Luigino Bruni (Bruni and Santori 2018). There, we analysed the similarity between Genovesi’s and Aquinas’s ideas on prizes and incentives, two key concepts for contemporary economic analysis.

4 See Miner (2014, 122–126). As far as Aquinas’ doctrine of love is concerned, especially for the internal development of Aquinas’ position, from the Commentary to Sentences to Summa Theologiae, see Sherwin 2005, 64–81.

5 It is known that Aquinas included both the corrective and reciprocal justice considered by Aristotle in commutative justice. This was probably due to problems with the translation of the texts of the Stagirite in Latin. However, the necessity of proportional equality was affirmed by Aquinas not only in the case of injuries and punishments (Sherwin 2005, 64–81) but also in other spheres of voluntary exchanges, as shown by the passage quoted.

6 The elements in support of this view are threefold: first, the fixed and hierarchical structure of Christian societies in the Middle Ages; second, the power of the princes to set and adjust prices in the markets under their sovereignty; third, the role of the human being in carrying out the divine plan, which corresponds to his contribution to the common good of society.

7 Aristotle was fully aware of this problem, as shown by the following passage from Eudemian Ethics: “Hence this is the kind of friendship in which recriminations most occur, the reason being that it is contrary to nature; for friendship based on utility and friendship based on goodness are different, but these people wish to have it both ways at once – they associate together for the sake of utility but make it out to be a moral friendship as between good men, and so represent it as not merely legal, pretending that it is a matter of trust” (Aristotle IV century b.c., cited in Theocarakis 2008, 35–36).

8 The English translations of the passages from Genovesi’s works are mine throughout, except for those extracted from Bruni (2006) or Bruni and Sugden (2008).

9 It could be clearly shown that the Leibniz system is entirely taken by St. Augustine and St. Thomas and the other school doctors. (Genovesi 1759, LXVI)

10 This capability of regulating and even overcoming individual impulses compelled Fanfani to place both Aquinas and Genovesi in the same economic tradition, i.e., “voluntarism” (Fanfani 1942).