The Sourcebook is a thematically unified collection of seminal texts in the history of economics on the topic of money and exchange relations (cambium)_its nature, purpose, value, and relationship to justice and morality in financial transactions_within the tradition of late-scholastic commercial ethics.

Monetary law is essential to the functioning of private transactions and international dealings by the state: nearly every legal transaction has a monetary aspect. Money in the Western Legal Tradition presents the first comprehensive analysis of Western monetary law, covering the civil law and Anglo-American common law legal systems from the High Middle Ages up to the middle of the 20th century. Weaving a detailed tapestry of the changing concepts of money and private transactions throughout the ages, the contributors investigate the special contribution made by legal scholars and practitioners to our understanding of money and the laws that govern it. Divided in five parts, the book begins with the coin currency of the Middle Ages, moving through the invention of nominalism in the early modern period to cashless payment and the rise of the banking system and paper money, then charting the progression to fiat money in the modern era. Each part commences with an overview of the monetary environment for the historical period written by an economic historian or numismatist. These are followed by chapters describing the legal doctrines of each period in civil and common law. Each section contains examples of contemporary litigation or statute law which engages with the distinctive issues affecting the monetary law of the period. This interdisciplinary approach reveals the distinctive conception of money prevalent in each period, which either facilitated or hampered the implementation of economic policy and the operation of private transactions.

Major Conservative and Libertarian Thinkers provides comprehensive accounts of the works of seminal conservative thinkers from a variety of periods, disciplines and traditions - the first series of its kind. Even the selection of thinkers adds another aspect to conservative thinking, including not only theorists but also thinkers in literary forms and those who are also practitioners. The series comprises twenty volumes, each including an intellectual biography, historical context, critical exposition of the thinker's work, reception and influence, contemporary relevance, bibliography including references to electronic resources and an index.

The Great Christian Jurists series comprises a library of national volumes of detailed biographies of leading jurists, judges and practitioners, assessing the impact of their Christian faith on the professional output of the individuals studied. Spanish legal culture, developed during the Spanish Golden Age, has had a significant influence on the legal norms and institutions that emerged in Europe and in Latin America. This volume examines the lives of twenty key personalities in Spanish legal history, in particular how their Christian faith was a factor in molding the evolution of law. Each chapter discusses a jurist within his or her intellectual and political context. All chapters have been written by distinguished legal scholars from Spain and around the world. This diversity of international and methodological perspectives gives the volume its unique character; it will appeal to scholars, lawyers, and students interested in the interplay between religion and law.

A reevaluation of what money is—and what it might be Questions about the nature of money have gained a new urgency in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. Even as many people have less of it, there are more forms and systems of money, from local currencies and social lending to mobile money and Bitcoin. Yet our understanding of what money is—and what it might be—hasn't kept pace. In The Social Life of Money, Nigel Dodd, one of today’s leading sociologists of money, reformulates the theory of the subject for a postcrisis world in which new kinds of money are proliferating. What counts as legitimate action by central banks that issue currency and set policy? What underpins the right of nongovernmental actors to create new currencies? And how might new forms of money surpass or subvert government-sanctioned currencies? To answer such questions, The Social Life of Money takes a fresh and wide-ranging look at modern theories of money. One of the book’s central concerns is how money can be wrested from the domination and mismanagement of banks and governments and restored to its fundamental position as the "claim upon society" described by Georg Simmel. But rather than advancing yet another critique of the state-based monetary system, The Social Life of Money draws out the utopian aspects of money and the ways in which its transformation could in turn transform society, politics, and economics. The book also identifies the contributions of thinkers who have not previously been thought of as monetary theorists—including Nietzsche, Benjamin, Bataille, Deleuze and Guattari, Baudrillard, Derrida, and Hardt and Negri. The result provides new ways of thinking about money that seek not only to understand it but to change it.

Justice in the Marketplace in Early Modern Spain examines two late scholastic economic treatises, the Provechoso tratado de cambios of Cristóbal de Villalón (1542) and the Instrución de mercaderes of Saravia de la Calle (1544). It does this in the context of the two principal questions that economic historians pose concerning the economic literature of the Spanish late scholastics in general. Is there a clear link between this literature and modern economic science, and does it manifest a free market orientation? Michael D’Emic draws two conclusions. First, there is a palpable relationship between the work of these two authors and modern economic analysis, particularly that of financial economics. Second, the authors fundamentally disagreed on most questions, mostly concerning the justice of the free market. Villalón condemns the workings of the market and refuses to allow any possibility that the profit motive may be morally neutral. With considerable clarity, he articulates a cost of production theory of value and advocates a system of prices based upon labor and cost and administered by civil authority. Saravia counters with an elegant expression of the utility theory of value and argues with logical force that prices established by the workings of the market are fundamentally just. He allows considerable moral latitude to the pursuit of profit, which he regards as spiritually dangerous but not necessarily evil. Through the lens of their opposing views on economic value, the market price, and what does or does not constitute the sin of ‘usury,’ the authors, with astonishing technical acumen, observe, analyze, and pass moral judgment on a remarkably wide range of complex transactions, most of which have counterparts in twenty-first century financial markets. In the process, they tackle problems that still bedevil economists and accountants in our own day, such as the difference between a sale and a borrowing, the ‘just’ value of future income flows, and the presence of asymmetrical information in pricing. The result is a vivid record of the color and texture of early modern economic life that reveals a surprising degree of financial sophistication that the present book makes accessible to the modern reader.

Jordan J. Ballor takes as his point of departure the doctrine of the covenant as it appears in the theology of the prominent second-generation reformer, Wolfgang Musculus (1497–1563), who is perhaps the earliest Reformed theologian to give the topic of the covenant a separate and distinct treatment in a collection of theological commonplaces. Musculus' teaching on the covenant is characterized by the important distinction he makes between general and special covenants, and it is rooted in his exegetical work on the book of Genesis. Where Musculus' Loci communes demonstrate his antispeculative, soteriologically focused and pastorally driven approach, his exegesis provides fulsome guidance in the study of Scripture. This examination of Musculus' views on covenant and related doctrines is followed by explorations concerning causality and metaphysics. It concludes with considerations on law and social order. This book is the first full-scale study to place Musculus' theology within its broader intellectual context and to focus on Musculus' theology as found both in his Loci communes and in his extensive and voluminous exegetical work. Musculus' positions on doctrines related to covenant, causality and law reveal the eclecticism of Reformed reception of medieval traditions. The final section of this study places Musculus within the later development of Reformed orthodoxy in the 16th and 17th centuries, concluding that Wolfgang Musculus is a significant and often-overlooked figure worthy of further consideration.

This book shows how threads of field research, economic reflection, natural law tradition, casuistry and the quest for justice weave together in Luis de Molina’s De Iustitia et Iure, thus forming a major work of Catholic moral theology.

Luis de Molina (1535-1600) was the first scholastic doctor to legitimize the practice of money lending as a career. His De Iustitia et Iure offers a thorough description of trade practices of the vibrant economies of Portugal and Spain in the Sixteenth Century. This detailed analysis allows him to provide a moral assessment of these practices. His treatise is a capital example of how a deep commitment to received tradition and to contemporary economic issues can advance economic science and perfect moral theology through a better understanding of reality. This book shows how threads of field research, economic reflection, natural law tradition, casuistry and the quest for justice may weave together to form a major work of Catholic moral theology.

The discovery of the New World was initially a cause for celebration. But the vast amounts of gold that Columbus and other explorers claimed from these lands altered Spanish society. The influx of such wealth contributed to the expansion of the Spanish empire, but also it raised doubts and insecurities about the meaning and function of money, the ideals of court and civility, and the structure of commerce and credit. New World Gold shows that, far from being a stabilizing force, the flow of gold from the Americas created anxieties among Spaniards and shaped a host of distinct behaviors, cultural practices, and intellectual pursuits on both sides of the Atlantic. Elvira Vilches examines economic treatises, stories of travel and conquest, moralist writings, fiction, poetry, and drama to reveal that New World gold ultimately became a problematic source of power that destabilized Spain’s sense of trust, truth, and worth. These cultural anxieties, she argues, rendered the discovery of gold paradoxically disastrous for Spanish society. Combining economic thought, social history, and literary theory in trans-Atlantic contexts, New World Gold unveils the dark side of Spain’s Golden Age.