CHANGING MODES OF RATIONALITY IN THE EARLY EVOLUTION OF MODERN ECONOMIC THOUGHT

Reversing the commonly accepted view, some historians of economic thought have dated the origins of modern economic thought in the breakdown of feudal society. But these writers have not produced fully convincing ways of relating changes in socio-economic reality to corresponding alternatives in medieval economic doctrine. The present study attempts to remedy this theoretical weakness with the thesis that during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries a substantive change began occurring in the mode of rationality by which the social world of medieval Europe was legitimated. This change involved a transformation in the manner of reasoning by which economic practice was explained and justified, encompassing developments in socio-economic conditions as well as in the evolution of doctrine. Before the change began to occur, the predominant mode of rationality, expressed in the social doctrine of Church Fathers as well as in civil law, was oriented by an interest in agreeing on morally appropriate conduct according to the principle of social ranking by status. Gradually, however, as new commercial practices began multiplying, the predominant model of reasoning became more similar to what we now call scientific rationality. Economic practices began to be oriented more by interest in finding the most efficient way of behaving. Thus the process of modernization commenced its long advance. The present study examines how scholastic writers extended the scope of modern rationality when they extended the Romanist and canonist modifications of traditional anti-commercialist doctrine to all cases of market exchange. Under thirteenth-century socio-economic conditions this development involved a reinterpretation of value in which the principles of market exchange were dissociated from those of distribution. Changing modes of rationality are evident both in the scholastic approach to the measurement of value and in the corresponding explanation of producer interests. Scholastic just-price doctrine disrupted the unified explanation of feudal society by extending technical rationality in the domain of exchange while retaining practical rationality in the realm of distribution. This study complements the work of those who go beyond conventional and neoclassical attempts to explain this inconsistency in scholastic economic thought.