Economic Thought Before Adam Smith
Economic Thought Before Adam Smith is Volume 1 of Murray Rothbard’s An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought (Edward Elgar, 1995), tracing economics from Aristotle and the canon lawyers to Adam Smith. It is the wiki’s grounding source for the School of Salamanca.
The Two Theses
The book is a polemical history with two revisionist claims:
- Economics began before Smith — with natural law. Rothbard argues that systematic economic reasoning grew out of the scholastic natural-law tradition, reaching an early peak in the late Spanish scholastics, who already had a subjective-utility theory of value, the just price as the market price, and the quantity theory of money. On this telling the discipline did not spring from The Wealth of Nations but was rediscovered and, in places, set back by it.
- Smith was a wrong turn. Rothbard’s most contrarian move is to treat Adam Smith not as the founder of economics but as a figure who displaced the more correct subjective-value tradition (the Salamancans, Cantillon, Turgot, the French liberals) with a labour-and-cost theory of value that misled economics until the 1870s marginalist revolution recovered the older insight.
Structure
The volume runs chronologically: the Greeks (with Aristotle’s analysis of money and exchange), the medieval canonists and Scholastics, Chapter 4 on the late Spanish scholastics (the wiki’s anchor — Cajetan, Vitoria, de Soto, Molina, Suárez, Azpilcueta, and Mariana), the mercantilists, the French and Italian pre-Austrians (Cantillon, Turgot), and finally a critical treatment of Smith and the classical school.
Place in This Wiki
This book is where the wiki’s natural-law spine and Austrian spine are shown to share a root: Rothbard’s claim that the natural-law scholastics were also the first economists. It is by Rothbard and reflects his strong interpretive priors — the Salamanca-as-proto-Austrian and Smith-as-wrong-turn theses are genuinely contested in mainstream history of economic thought, and the book should be read as an argument rather than a neutral survey.
See Also
- Murray N. Rothbard - author reference
- School of Salamanca - the concept this book grounds
- Natural Law and Natural Order - the tradition the book ties to the origins of economics
- Austrian Economics - the school whose prehistory this book traces
- Hard Money - the sound-money lineage the book traces back to the scholastic quantity theory and anti-debasement arguments
- The Cantillon Effect - The principle that new money is non-neutral: whoever receives it first gains real purchasing power at the expense of those who receive it last — the distributional injustice of inflation.
- Richard Cantillon - Irish-French banker and economist (c. 1680s–1734) whose Essai first analyzed the non-neutral, step-by-step injection of money — the Cantillon effect.
Sources
- Rothbard, Economic Thought Before Adam Smith (Full Text) - full-text PDF extract; Chapter 4 for the School of Salamanca, with value, price, and money theory across the volume