Medieval Scholasticism and Modern Times

Medieval Scholasticism encompassed some seven centuries, from 800 A.D. to 1500 A.D. In theological and philosophical studies, the activity of the period from 1350 to 1500 is known as Late Scholasticism. In social sciences, Late Scholasticism reaches until the end of the 17th century.

In addition, they treated wages, profits, and rents as a reflection of commutative justice (on which contracts were based), rather than of distributive justice, which only dealt with justice in the provision and distribution of goods held in common by a family or political body. Finally, their careful distinction between legal and moral obligations and punishments proved an essential aspect of what later became classical liberal theory.

Lord Acton wrote that, “the greater part of the political ideas of Milton, Locke, and Rousseau, may be found in the ponderous Latin of Jesuits who were subjects of the Spanish Crown, of Lessius, Molina, Mariana, and Suârez.” The Jesuits mentioned by Lord Acton owed many of their views to the Late Scholastics of other religious orders who helped build the foundations of a political order based on libertarian principles. Late Scholastic contributions were not circumscribed to any one religious group or to a particular school or nation.

Scholastic authors from the 14th to the 16th centuries, including St. Bernardino of Siena (a Franciscan); St. Antonino of Florence, Francisco de Vitoria, and Domingo de Soto (all Dominicans); and Luis de Molina, Juan de Mariana, and Francisco Suarez (all Jesuits) all presented arguments that were later to serve as the foundation of a market order based on freedom and property. Bede Jarrett, a Dominican priest and a historian of thought, wrote that, for these authors,

the right to property was an absolute right which no circumstances could ever invalidate. Even in case of necessity, when individual property might be lawfully seized ...