histofthought1

Bibliographical essay 513also C. Cipolla (ed.), The Fontana Economic History ofEurope, Vol. II, TheSixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (London: CollinslFontana 1974).Luther and CalvinAn excellent and brief analysis is contained in Gary North, 'The EconomicThought of Luther and Calvin', The Journal of Christian Reconstruction, II(Summer 1975), pp. 76-108. Skinner's Foundations Vol. II, is excellent onLuther and Calvin's, especially the former's, social and political philosophy,and that of their followers, on which also see the older work by John N.Figgis, Political Thoughtfrom Gerson to Grotius (1916, New York: Harper &Bros, 1960), especially Ch. III on 'Luther and Machiavelli'. The Weber thesisis argued back and forth in Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit ofCapitalism (New York: Charles Scribner's, 1930); the Weberian ErnstTroeltsch, The Social Teaching of the Christian Church, Vol. II (New York:Macmillan, 1931); Richard H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism(1937, New York: New American Library, 1954); and the Robertson andBrodrick books mentioned above. See also the critical study of KurtSamuelsson, Religion and Economic Action (New York: Basic Books, 1961).A fruitful application of the Weber thesis to China and Japan is in NormanJacobs, The Origin of Modern Capitalism and Eastern Asia (Hong Kong:Hong Kong University Press, 1958). De Roover's discovery of the thirteenthcentury Florentine motto, 'In the name of God and of profit', is in his 'TheScholastic Attitude Toward Trade and Entrepreneurship', in Business, Banking,and Economic Thought, p. 345. For Calvin and his followers on usury,see Noonan's great work discussed above.The brilliant Kauder thesis holds that Calvinism led to the labour theory ofvalue in Britain while Aristotelian Thomism kept France and Italy to asubjective, consumer-oriented theory of value. This thesis may be found inEmil Kauder, A History ofMarginal Utility Theory (Princeton, NJ: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1965), and in Kauder, 'The Retarded Acceptance of theMarginal Utility Theory', Quarterly Journal of Economics (Nov. 1953),pp.564-9. On such tough-minded Calvinists as the English Marian exilesand on the puritan devotion to work, see Michael Walzer, The Revolution ofthe Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics (Cambridge: HarvardUniversity Press, 1965).Perhaps the greatest work ever written in the history of economic thoughtwas Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk's Capital and Interest: Vol. I, History andCritique of Interest Theories (1921, South Holland, Ill.: Libertarian Press,1959). Bohm-Bawerk, the first great systematizer of the Austrian School ofeconomics in the 1880s, wrote his survey and critique of preceding theoriesof interest before proceeding to develop his own theory in later volumes ofhis masterwork, Capital and Interest. While Bohm-Bawerk's treatment of