Murray N. Rothbard, Christians for Freedom: Late-Scholastic Economics (1988)

Murray N. Rothbard’s journal book review of Alejandro Antonio Chafuen’s Christians for Freedom: Late-Scholastic Economics (1986) presents the book as a major contribution to the recovery of scholastic economic thought. Its argument proceeds from a revision of conventional intellectual history, through an appraisal of Chafuen’s research and selected examples, to a pointed disagreement about the scholastics’ influence on later economists. Rothbard’s central claim is that the Spanish scholastics developed sophisticated analyses of markets, value, property, and entrepreneurship that anticipate Austrian economics. His praise of Chafuen culminates, however, in a challenge to any genealogy that makes Adam Smith the faithful inheritor of this achievement.

The review begins by reconstructing the older Anglo-American account. Scholastic economics supposedly began and effectively ended with Aquinas, treated value as a function of labor or production costs, and understood a just price as one sufficient to maintain a merchant’s social station. This account reduced scholastic thought to the moral regulation of a feudal society before moving through mercantilism to Smith’s supposed creation of economics and laissez-faire. Rothbard credits Emil Kauder, Joseph A. Schumpeter, Marjorie Grice-Hutchinson, and Raymond de Roover with overturning that narrative after the Second World War. Scholasticism continued through the later Middle Ages and attained its most advanced economic formulation in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain.

The decisive conceptual reversal concerns justice in exchange:

To the broad mainstream of centuries of scholastics, the "just price" was the free market price, the freely arrived at, common estimate determined on the market.

For Rothbard, this interpretation replaces an externally prescribed price based on costs or status with valuation emerging through exchange. He connects it to subjective utility and scarcity, market wages, private property, international trade, and recognition of the uncertainty surrounding entrepreneurial profit and loss. The cost-of-production interpretation belonged, he argues, to a small minority whom earlier historians had mistaken for the mainstream. His example of Pierre de Jean Olivi, an extreme ascetic who nevertheless developed subjective utility theory, also separates personal religious austerity from hostility toward market analysis.

Rothbard offers two possible explanations for the long neglect of this tradition. One is linguistic: economists increasingly lacked the Latin needed to read its principal texts, whereas the leading revisionists possessed relevant linguistic training. The other is cultural and confessional: hostility toward Catholicism and Spain distorted Anglo-American assessments. These are presented as plausible explanations rather than established findings. Together they make the recovery of scholastic economics a question both of access to sources and of the assumptions governing their interpretation.

Chafuen’s achievement lies in bringing the revised scholarship into a comprehensive treatment of the Spanish scholastics. Rothbard distinguishes this contribution from Schumpeter’s early synthesis, de Roover’s and Kauder’s articles, and Grice-Hutchinson’s concentration on value theory. Chafuen’s command of Latin and use of primary and secondary literature extend the discussion into public finance, entrepreneurship, wages, and property rights:

He has thoroughly combed the primary, as well as the secondary, literature, and has added findings and new material in public finance, entrepreneurship, wages, and property rights, in addition to the relatively well-trod areas of utility, value and price, and monetary theory.

The review’s examples emphasize how scholastic reasoning could produce conclusions more radical than its conventional reputation suggests. Domingo de Soto defended gambling; Felipe de la Cruz recognized time preference and attacked usury laws, an area Rothbard otherwise identifies as a serious scholastic weakness. Martin de Azpilcueta Navarrus distinguished the immorality of prostitution from a prostitute’s entitlement to retain her market earnings. Pedro Fernandez Navarrete denounced heavy taxation and bureaucracy and proposed voluntary donations to the king. These cases support Rothbard’s distinction between moral condemnation of an activity and the economic or proprietary rights associated with it.

His approval extends to the force of the scholastics’ expression:

The Spanish scholastics were not afraid to be consistently radical in concept, as well as clear, pointed, and hard-hitting in language, and Chafuen admirably captures that tone in well-selected quotations.

The closing section shifts from recovery to intellectual transmission. Rothbard rejects Chafuen’s classification of Turgot as a Physiocrat, describing him instead as an independent thinker allied with the Physiocrats politically over laissez-faire. He accepts the influence of Spanish scholasticism on Grotius and the influence of Grotius and Pufendorf on the Scottish Enlightenment. But these connections, he insists, do not establish that Smith’s mature economics preserved the scholastic inheritance.

For it was not the scholastics but Adam Smith who injected into economics the labor and cost of production theories of value, and the concentration on long-run equilibrium, that scuttled the scholastic legacy of subjective utility and study of real world uncertainty and entrepreneurship.

Rothbard thus turns the familiar history upside down: Smith becomes a source of regression rather than the founder who overcame scholastic confusion. He attributes this departure to Smith’s Calvinism, contrasting a duty-centered valuation of labor with the Catholic and scholastic orientation toward consumption as production’s goal. This confessional explanation is Rothbard’s own polemical interpretation. The review ends by endorsing Chafuen’s rejection of Tawney’s identification of Marx as the last Schoolman, while relocating Marx within the inheritance of Smith, the Mills, and Ricardo. Its relevance lies in this contested genealogy: recovering scholastic economics changes not only the assessment of premodern thought but also the account of what modern economics gained—and lost—through its canonical founders.