It has been seventy years since historian Richard Henry Tawney
concluded in his Religion and the Rise of Capitalism that, “the
true descendant of the doctrines of Aquinas is the labor theory
of value.” By this, he appears to mean that Saint Thomas
Aquinas’ writings in value theory entail the proposition that
the basis of value of an economic good is the amount of human
labor expended in producing it. Thus, Tawney adds, “the last of
the Schoolmen was Karl Marx.” Tawney was, of course, mistaken.
From Aquinas to Marx Economics, as understood in the modern
sense, occupied a subordinate place in relation to ethics and
law in Catholic medieval doctrine. Within this framework,
economic value was not regarded as an intrinsic quality but,
rather, as the physical, mental, and moral significance given to
an object by the evaluating subject’s assessment of the object’s
desirability, utility, and scarcity. According to Schumpeter in
his History of Economic Analysis, value theory analysis by the
Scholastic Doctors “lacked