Biography of Juan de Mariana: The Influence of the Spanish
Scholastics (1536-1624) JUAN DE MARIANA: THE INFLUENCE OF THE
SPANISH SCHOLASTICS By Jesus Huerta de Soto The prehistory the
Austrian School of economics can be found in the works of the
Spanish scholastics written in what is known as the "Spanish
Golden Century," which ran from the mid- sixteenth century
through the seventeenth century.1 Who were these Spanish
intellectual forerunners of the Austrian School of economics?
Most of them were scholastics teaching morals and theology at
the University of Salamanca, in the medieval Spanish city
located 150 miles northwest of Madrid, close to the border of
Spain with Portugal. These scholastics, mainly Dominicans and
Jesuits, articulated the subjectivist, dynamic, and libertarian
tradition on which, two-hundred-and-fifty years later, Carl
Menger and his followers would place so much importance.2
Perhaps the most libertarian of all the scholastics,
particularly in his later works, was the Jesuit Father Juan