histofthought1

102 Economic thought before Adam Smithof Spain. Spain, the leader in the explorations and conquests in the NewWorld; Spain, the nation that brought the treasures of gold and silver acrossthe Atlantic to Europe; Spain, along with Italy and Portugal, the nation inEurope that remained resoundingly Catholic and proved immune to the spreadof Protestantism.The acknowledged founder of the School of Salamanca was the great legaltheorist and pioneer in the discipline of international law, Francisco de Vitoria(c. 1485-1546). A Basque raised in Burgos in northern Spain and born into aprosperous family, Vitoria became a Dominican and went to study and thenteach in Paris. There, in one of the ironies of the history of thought, hebecame a disciple of a Fleming who had been a pupil of one of the last of theOckhamites, John Major. This man, Pierre Crockaert (c.1450-1514), hadbecome a student and then teacher of theology late in life. Turning away fromhis teacher Major, Crockaert abandoned nominalism and moved to Thomism,entering the Dominican Order and coming to teach at the Dominican Collegeof Saint-Jacques in Paris. After spending over 17 years imbibing and thenteaching Thomism in Paris, Vitoria returned to Spain to lecture in theology atValladolid, finally coming to Salamanca - then the queen of Spanish universities- as prime professor of theology in 1526.A brilliant and highly influential teacher and lecturer, Vitoria set the frameworkfor the Salamanca School for the rest of the century. Even though hedid not publish any writings, his lectures have come down to us as transcribedby his students - much as in the case of Aristotle. Much of the gloryof the University of Salamanca was the result of reforms instituted by Vitoriahimself. Consequently, the university soon had no less than 70 professorialchairs filled by the best scholars of the day, providing instruction not only inthe traditional medieval curriculum, but also in such new-fangled disciplinesas navigational science and the Chaldean language.Vitoria's lectures were largely commentaries on Aquinas's moral theory. Inthe course of the lectures, Vitoria founded the great Spanish scholastic traditionof denouncing the conquest and particularly the enslavement by theSpanish of the Indians in the New World. In an age when thinkers in Franceand Italy were preaching secular absolutism and the power of the state,Vitoria and his followers revived the idea that natural law is morally superiorto the mere might of the state.Vitoria did not expound much on economic topics, but he was interested incommercial morality, and his views followed the mainstream scholastic tradition:the just price was the common market price, even though if there were alegally fixed price it would also be considered just. In short, legal price edictsare to be obeyed. However, for those goods without a common market - saywith only one or two sellers - Vitoria advanced beyond his forbears. Insteadof having cost of production determinate, Vitoria, while stating that cost