Alchemists’ Schemes and Merchants’ Dreams: Aquinas and the Limits of Economic Knowledge

Liana Farber’s An Anatomy of Trade in Medieval Writing presents Thomas Aquinas as a rival to the Augustinian separation of natural and economic value.  Though her analysis is far from unfair, Aquinas becomes an unrealistic thinker who, when confronted with the fluctuations in price, desires to tame prices through linking economic values to the hierarchy of natural values, which has been well established.  Important to her argument is Aquinas’s discussion of the problems with counterfeit gold, which she utilizes to link economic and natural values in Aquinas’s argument.

In my paper, I explore a more coherent view through locating Aquinas’s economic teachings within his taxonomy of the sciences.  His economic teachings form a subset of the discipline of ethics, a practical science admitting of a theoretical part. Situating Aquinas’s discussion within the Aristotelian contours of the theoretical and practical sciences suggests that price falls within practical knowledge, and so does not admit of certainty.  Rather, use value-as determined by the nature of a given thing and as differentiated from exchange value, or price-is located within the theoretical sciences and can be known.  Using this framework, I provide an alternate reading of Aquinas’ passage on counterfeit gold.   Aquinas is not concerned with determining price, but rather with elucidating a proper understanding of value which will guide market-goers as they utilize prudentia in pursuing just economic exchange.  Alchemists’ schemes fail, and merchants’ dreams with them, insofar as exchange value must submit to use value, even when one of the goods is gold.