- Economic thought as a tension between the primitive, communal society and what emerges which is this mercantilism that is established as people aim to grow their wealth through specialization.
A Golden Age
The Greeks, specifically Plato, introduce the thought of Utopia and a golden age of times gone past. Generally the thinking that extends into Roman times is p.25:
- A desire to return to more primitive conditions.
- A high regard for agriculture (or generally ‘productive’ work).
- Condemnation of money-making.
Commercial capitalism was prepared in the womb of the medieval world.
A class structure was generally taken for granted in the middle ages. THe lords an serfs structure, derived from the structure of the latifundia of latter-day Rome (?).
Due to a reduction in slaves landlords no longer tend to their property themselves, with slaves (Roman times). Instead, they ‘rent’ this land to tenants that take ownership of it. A new form of slavery. The estate became the new poltical unit and the tenant becoming tied to the land the new slavery.
Why so unequal
the organic community of the tribe had gone for good, and inequality and duress had taken the place of free association of equals, there was as yet no ‘atomic individualism’. The group loyalties were merely more numerous and more variegated and were exacted by means of often brutal coercion.
The Church became an important institution as a large landowner with a larger unity across landed boundaries. A combination of secular and spiritual power.
The Church initially tried to condemn trade, but realities of economies in the world made this untenable.Aquinas seems to introduce the idea that the institution of trade is good in the manner which it is used. The Church starts to double down on usury but the secular world usury increase. Doesn’t stop this expansion ~ p.40 kind of skimmed.
Emergence of Balance of trade (I skipped a lot of this section).
Mercantilism wants domestic profits. It wants more export, less imports and it views money as wealth in itself. This second half seems to define bullionism.
On p.58, exchange rates are argued as becoming more than just straight up exchanges, that dynamics beyond gold content are affecting the exchange rates (?).
Mercantilism did not want unregulated trade it seems. It was more a form of protectism that became replaced by more ‘free trade’ thinking (how?).
Roll says Machievelli starts this transition of thinking away from idealism of what man ‘should be’. That instead, we should focus on what ‘he was’. This is further extended by Hobbes and his leviathan as that higher power that creates this social contract. Social philosophy becomes based on a rational and positive foundation. Coercion and absolutism become essential to Hobbes, generally some earthly coercer to maintain the social contract. Locke then introduces the idea that ‘Freedom must only be restricted in the interests of preserving it’. Enforcement of property rights.
The state is acknowledged as the ‘creature of economic power no less than its master’.
Industrial capitalism and the rise of wage-labour
Workers became squeezed by cheaper and better modes of production.
p.81.
Labourers were essentially kicked off the land on which they worked (enclosure laws?) which created a kind of roaming class that would compete to perform labour with capital.
From all this, a change in thinking from ‘trade’ as what is a just price for exchange of things, to ‘production’.
Mercantilism said that what made a country rich was profit. So exporting more than importing. Foreign trade, then, is the way of increasing a nations ‘wealth’.
A new definition of wealth and value emerges.