Free-Market Philosophy Runs Deeper Than You Think

Juan de Mariana, SJ (1536–1624)

By Samuel Gregg

This review appears in the Summer 2024 issue of the Coolidge Review. Request a free copy of the print issue.

The Political Economy of Juan de Mariana
by John Laures, SJ (Fordham University Press, 1928)

Much of what we think of as distinctly modern in economic thought has much older roots.

Consider, for example, that one of the most insightful analyses of fiscal and monetary topics was published more than four hundred years ago. The author of this work was not an economist but a moral theologian.

Since its founding in 1540 by Saint Ignatius of Loyola, the Society of Jesus (commonly known as the Jesuits) has produced a number of formidable intellects. It has produced its share of controversial thinkers as well.

The Spanish Jesuit Juan de Mariana (1536–1624) qualifies on both counts.

LIMITS ON THE STATE

Father Mariana is best remembered today for his treatise De rege et regis institutione [On the King and the Education of the King], published in Toledo in 1599. In this book, he affirmed that it could be lawful to kill a tyrant.

From the standpoint of natural law philosophy and Catholic theology, this was not a new doctrine. Mariana, however, provided more expansive criteria for when the people could reassert their sovereignty over the monarch in this drastic way. Specifically, he identified three instances: if the ruler (1) violated the truths of religion, (2) obstructed lawful assemblies of the people, or (3) taxed the people without their consent.

These claims—along with the fact that Mariana’s tyrannicide theory was invoked to justify the assassination of France’s King Henry IV in 1610—rendered Mariana’s writings suspect among Europe’s Catholic and Protestant rulers. The Father-General of the Jesuits eventually forbade members of the order from teaching that killing tyrants could be lawful. Meanwhile, Mariana’s De rege was publicly burned by order of the parlement of Paris.

Mariana’s writings on tyrannicide were not the only reason he attracted opprobrium. Mariana also identified strong limits on the state’s economic powers. For instance, in his De monetae mutatione [On the Alteration of Money], published in Cologne in 1609, Mariana condemned the common practice of monarchs’ pursuing inflationary practices to pay for war or to reduce the size of state debt.

The priest, it turns out, had a great deal to say about political economy. 

Mariana and other Spanish Jesuits understood and applied “almost all the elements of modern Fiscal Science.”

MORALIST AND ECONOMIST

Most of Mariana’s economic thought can be described as proto–free market, especially on monetary questions. That becomes clear from a book published in 1928 by Fordham University Press, The Political Economy of Juan de Mariana. Father John Laures, a fellow Jesuit, produced this exhaustive treatment of Mariana’s economic thought and his contributions to topics like taxation and public finances.

Laures was especially well equipped to write this text. Not only did he possess the medieval and early modern languages needed to read Mariana’s writings, but Laures also was a trained historian. Moreover, he had a “thorough command of economics,” as economist Edwin R. A. Seligman observed in the book’s foreword.

Laures begins by discussing Mariana’s political theory—his ideas about the origins of the state, the nature of sovereignty, law and legislation, and general principles of government. On that basis, Laures examines Mariana’s conception of the state’s economic functions. This covers subjects ranging from the nature of private property to government’s role vis-à-vis commerce and trade. Laures then turns to Mariana’s theory of money and the ways in which it contributed to the overall development of monetary theory. He concludes by analyzing Mariana’s thoughts on fiscal issues and how to reform public finances.

The modern economist theorizes from a social science standpoint to frame sound policy. By contrast, Mariana the moral theologian approached economic matters primarily from the standpoint of determining right and just actions. De monetae mutatione thus combined ethics and economics. On some issues, Laures concludes, the Spanish Jesuit was “too much of a moralist and too little of an economist.”

Nonetheless, Laures shows how much attention Mariana devoted to the empirical dimension of topics like inflation and the economic consequences of high taxation levels. Indeed, Laures says that “almost all the elements of modern Fiscal Science were applied, or at any rate known,” by Mariana and other Spanish Jesuits.

Mariana explored the economic forces driving the calamities that befell the Spanish empire during the reigns of Philip II and Philip III. He also traced out the economic logic underlying fiscal and monetary decisions that compromised Spaniards’ economic liberty. Those decisions allowed the Spanish state to annul its freely undertaken obligations to those from whom it had borrowed vast sums of money. All these developments contributed to Spain’s losing its status as the world’s superpower in the early seventeenth century.

Mariana developed the principles of political economy nearly two centuries before Adam Smith.

AHEAD OF HIS TIME

Laures notes that Mariana’s insights on political economy were “forgotten completely” until the late nineteenth century. Unfortunately, the pattern has played out again in recent decades. The Political Economy of Juan de Mariana remained out of print for many years until the Ludwig von Mises Institute made an edition available. Such oversights don’t merely shortchange Mariana. They also compromise our understanding of political economy. For as Laures notes, this Spanish Jesuit “developed the principles of Political Economy nearly two centuries before the classical economists made it an independent science.”

Neglecting the past forces us to relearn basic truths. By ignoring Mariana and other thinkers, Laures says, “economists had to rediscover what was taught uninterruptedly by churchmen since the later Middle Ages.”

Samuel Gregg is Friedrich Hayek Chair in Economics and Economic History at the American Institute for Economic Research and the author of sixteen books, including, most recently, The Next American Economy: Nation, State, and Markets in an Uncertain World.