Medieval Islamic Economic Thought

Filling the Great Gap in European Economics

S.M. Ghazanfar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134430048
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Economic History
• Index: Economics

This book is a collection of papers on the origins of economic thought discovered in the writings of some prominent Islamic scholars, during the five centuries prior to the Latin Scholastics, who include St. Thomas Aquinas. This period of time was labelled by Joseph Schumpeter as representing the 'great gap' in economic history. Unfortunately, this 'gap' is well embedded in most relevant literature. However, during this period the Islamic civilization was one of the most fertile grounds for intellectual developments in various disciplines, including economics, and this book attempts to fill that blind-spot in the history of economic thought.

1
SCHOLASTIC ECONOMICS AND ARAB SCHOLARS

The “Great Gap” thesis reconsidered¹

S.M.Ghazanfar

Introduction

Joseph Alois Schumpeter (1883–1950) stands among the intellectual giants of the twentieth century, especially in the field of economics; in his long and varied impact on the profession, he is second only to Maynard Keynes. He was a pragmatist in his economic philosophy, an “objective scientific investigator with no particular axe to grind” (Newman et al., 746). His encyclopedic History of Economic Analysis, edited after his death by his wife and published in 1954, is a monument to his gigantic and versatile achievements; and it remains the locus classicus of almost all works in this area.²

The inspiration for the present paper comes primarily from this Schumpeterian classic (1954), as do the quotations from Schumpeter that appear here. However, my purpose is a bit out of the ordinary: I propose to take issue with the “Great Gap” thesis that this eminent scholar propounded. He argued that “economic analysis begins only with the Greeks”, not to be reestablished until the Scholastics emerged with St Thomas Aquinas; the many “blank” centuries within that span represent the Schumpeterian “Great Gap” (52). This thesis has been deeply entrenched as part of the accepted tradition and is reflected in almost all relevant literature.

I shall begin with a brief discussion of the “Great Gap” thesis and the tradition it perpetuated in the profession, followed by some analysis and evidence disputing its validity. Next I shall present illustrative synopses of the economic thought of a few selected Arab scholars who, writing prior to the medieval European Scholastics, offered rather detailed and sophisticated discourses on numerous economic issues.³ Then, some evidence will be presented regarding the transmission of Arab economic thought into Latin and the incorporation of that stream into Scholastic economics. I shall conclude this paper with a plea that the contributions of the Arab scholars to economic thought be “rehabilitated” in the science of economics for the sake of doctrinal continuity as well as objectivity.

The “Great Gap” thesis and the perpetuation of a tradition

In his History, Schumpeter presents “the intellectual efforts that men have made in order to understand economic phenomenon or, which comes to the same thing, the history of the analytic or scientific aspects of economic thought” (3). He states that scientific analysis is

an incessant struggle with creations of our own and our predecessors’ minds and it “progresses”, if at all, in a criss-cross fashion, not as logic, but as the impact of new ideas or observations or needs, and also as the bents and temperaments of new men, dictate. Therefore, any treatise that attempts to render “the present state of science” really renders methods, problems, and results that are historically conditioned.

(4)

Schumpeter’s main purpose is “to describe what may be called the process of Filiation of Scientific Idea…the process by which men’s efforts to understand economic phenomena produce, improve, and pull down analytic structures in an unending sequence”. But, “this filiation of ideas has met with more inhibition in our field”. Thus, he says, the obvious answer is “the study of doctrinal history” (6).

Schumpeter defines science as “tooled knowledge”, typified by the use of “special techniques” and the “command of facts unearthed by these techniques which are beyond the range of the mental habits and the factual knowledge of every day life” (7). Then, after classifying Greek economic thought as being consistent with his definition of science (in terms of economic orthodoxy whereby, for example, St Thomas’ “just price” is viewed as equivalent to the normal, competitive market price: see Schumpeter, (93); see also de Roover (1965)), Schumpeter leaps over to the thirteenth century and chooses St Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica as the key to scientific thought and “the earliest and most important step in methodological criticism taken in Europe after the breakdown of the Graeco-Roman world” (8). Thus, despite his earlier emphasis on the evolutionary nature of economic thought, subject to “predecessors”, “historical conditioning” and “process of filiation”, now Schumpeter disregards the possibility of almost any developments, economic or otherwise, elsewhere during the intervening period—i.e. between the Greeks and the Scholastics.⁴

Later, Schumpeter is more explicit. Before undertaking a discussion of the “classical situation” that emerged with Adam Smith, he attempts to cover

the whole span of the more than 2,000 years that extends from the “beginnings” to about twenty years after the publication of the Wealth of Nations. This task is much facilitated by the further fact that, so far as the purposes of history are concerned, many centuries within that span are blanks.

(52)

In chapter 2 of part II, Schumpeter begins with a discussion of the “Great Gap”. Reference is made to the Byzantine emperors who must have “reasoned” about a “host of legal, monetary, commercial, agrarian, and fiscal problems…If they did, however, the results have been lost” (73). Further, not much of any significance happened in the Germanic states of the West, either. The philosophers who adorned the courts of Germanic rulers “touched upon economic questions incidentally, if at all”. Such arguments lead to Schumpeter’s conclusion:

So far as our subject is concerned we may safely leap over 500 years to the epoch of St Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) whose Summa Theologica is in the history of thought what the western spire of the Cathedral of Chartres is in the history of architecture.

(74)

The implication here is that for more than five hundred years prior to the writings of the Scholastics, nothing of any significance to economics was said or written anywhere else—as though the period of Europe’s Dark Ages was a universal phenomenon that extended over the intellectual evolution of the rest of the world.

Thus Schumpeter strengthened and perpetuated a tradition that, unfortunately, was already well established in the literature from about the late 1800s. There is hardly any book, beginning with William J.Ashly’s An Introduction to English Economic History and Theory (1888), that does not echo Schumpeter’s sentiments, punctuated only by a very rare footnote or reference to Arab scholarship during those “blank” centuries.

We can verify briefly this persistent tradition in more concrete terms. About the most widely read post-Second World War text has been Eric Roll’s, originally published in 1954; and it fully reflects, to this day, the extant tradition -there is not a single reference to any of the Arab precursors of the Scholastics. In 1964, Henry Spiegel published his edited volume on the subject, which “covers Aristotle down to the present” and is intended to be “international in scope” (Spiegel 1964, ix). Further, while introducing Richard Tawney’s essay on medieval economic thought, Spiegel says this “thought is inspired by ethics, and reflects the doctrines of Aristotle as well as the Hebrew-Christian tradition” (Spiegel 1964, 16). There is no mention of the Arab-Islamic tradition that influenced the Scholastics; the same is true of Tawney’s essay. Another example is the Spengler-Allen compilation of essays on this subject, almost as much a classic as Schumpeter’s History; here, too, those intervening centuries (about 500–1200AD) are assumed “blank”.

Another well-received book on the subject recognizes, referring to the medieval economic thought, that “it is inconceivable that there was no ‘economic thought’ over so many years—even in the Dark Ages” (Newman et al., 15). Yet the editors do not explore the “inconceivable”, and simply begin with the Scholastics; the tradition persists. The same is true of a relatively recent book by Barry Gordon, whose title Economic Analysis Before Adam Smith suggests that it might deviate from the tradition; the book is intended to cover the “ideas, personalities, and events of antiquity, the middle ages, and the Renaissance” (Gordon 1975, xi). However, aside from a brief reference to “Arab commentators like Avorres [Averroes] and Avicenna”, the “gap” lingers on (1975, 154).

The only recent scholar who briefly departs from the Schumpeterian tradition is Karl Pribram (1877–1973), whose classic has been published recently (also posthumously). Pribram chooses to begin with the thirteenth century. While claiming that the “history of economics starts with the Thomistic economic doctrines”, he recognizes the influence of not only the Aristotelian thought on the Scholastics but the “treatises in which Arabian philosophers had interpreted Aristotle’s work in the light of their own reasoning” (Pribram, 4). Elsewhere, while tracing the evolution of Europe’s Renaissance and discussing the “disintegration of Thomistic reasoning”, he mentions “two significant streams” of influence emanating from the Arab-Islamic world. Thus

one stream originated in Italian cities, which in the wake of the Crusades had established relations with the traders of the Near East and had adopted various institutions and devices which were at variance with the rigid pattern of the medieval social and economic organization. The other, far more important, stream started, within the body of Scholastic theologians, who derived their intellectual armory from the works of Arabian philosophers.

(Pribram, 21)

Here one can see some clues as to the origin and evolution of Scholastic economics.⁵

However, the critical question is this: if economic analysis began with the Scholastics, how were they able to develop and assimilate such a voluminous body of thought on economic issues (not to speak of other matters of human intellectual evolution) during the thirteenth, fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries? George O’Brien, writing on medieval economics in the 1920s, quotes a contemporary French scholar named Jourdain as saying

that he carefully examined the work of Alcuin, Rabanas Mauras, Scotus Erigenus, Hincmar, Gerbert, St Anselm and Abelard—the greatest lights of theology and philosophy in the early Middle Ages— without finding a single passage to suggest any of these authors suspected that the pursuit of riches, which they despised, occupied a sufficiently large place in national as well as individual life to offer to the philosopher a subject fruitful in reflections and in results.

(O’Brien, 14)

That is, these pre-Thomas Latin Scholastics had nothing to say on economic matters; thus they can be eliminated as sources of influence on Thomistic economic thought.

Such “irrelevance” of economics in early Christian thought is clearly acknowledged even by Schumpeter. Lamenting this situation, Schumpeter writes that

whatever our sociological diagnosis of the mundane aspects of early Christianity may be, it is clear that the Christian church did not aim at social reform in any sense other than that of moral reform of individual behavior. At no time even before its victory, which may have roughly dated from Constantine’s Edict of Milan (313AD), did the church attempt a frontal attack on the existing social system or any of its more important institutions. It never promised economic paradise, or for that matter any paradise this side of the grave. The How and Why of economic mechanisms were then of no interest either to its leaders or to its writers.

(72)

However, Schumpeter argues that the thirteenth century is distinguished from the previous era due to the theological-philosophical revolution, which was caused by the resurrection of “Aristotelian thought”. But he dismisses Aristotelian influence as the chief cause of St Thomas’ “towering achievement”. He insists, “I do not assign to the recovery of Aristotle’s writings the role of chief cause of thirteenth century developments. Such developments are never induced by an influence from outside” (88).

What was true in Schumpeter’s time and what has since become even clearer is something amply manifested through research in medieval history: that is, Scholasticism was ecclesiasticism made up of Patristic, Aristotelian, Neoplatonic and Arab-Islamic thought. Schumpeter acknowledges, explicitly or implicitly, all except the last as the major sources of influence. He seems aware of such an influence, as is evident from his brief statement and a footnote, concerning “Semite mediation” (87) through Avicenna (Ibn Sina, 980–1033), Averroes (Ibn Rushd, 1126–98), and Maimonides (Ibn Maimon, 1135–1204). Beyond this, however, Schumpeter chose not to explore. In the words of Bernardelli, who, incidentally, points out a similar, but historically minor, “mishap” in Schumpeter’s History, such an attitude is “all the more disappointing”, as Schumpeter “must have been well aware of the fascinating process of cultural diffusion” between the Arab world and the West; and by restricting himself to Europe, Schumpeter “grossly underestimated the richness in analytical content of the Mesopotamian contributions” (Bernardelli, 320).

Clearly, the reason for Schumpeter’s omission could not be the lack of availability of the works of Arab scholars. For almost a century prior to Schumpeter’s time, a plethora of those volumes was available in all major European languages (with which Schumpeter was familiar), and these works showed that of all the medieval scholars mentioned by Schumpeter, there was none that had not been influenced by Arab scholars.⁶ The names cited by Schumpeter are: Robert Grosseteste, Alexander of Hales, Albertus Magnus, St Thomas Aquinas, St Bonaventura, Duns Scotus, Roger Bacon, Marsilius of Padua, Richard of Middleton, Nicholas Oresme, and Joannes Buridanus; but there are others who were similarly influenced—such as Siger of Brabant, John Peckham, Henry of Gant, William of Occam, Walter Burley, and William of Auvergne (see, for example, Afnan; Callus; Copelston; Crombie; Durant; Hammond; Harris; Leff; Myers; Sarton; Sharif; Sheikh). Surely, the possibility of this influence should have made Schumpeter a little tentative in insisting on the “discontinuity” in intellectual evolution, even if he was reluctant to acknowledge the possibility of Arab scholars’ impact on Scholastic economic thought, and even if these scholars were to be viewed simply as “interpreters” or “transmitters” of Greek thought.

Whatever might have been Schumpeter’s motivation for disregarding the influence of Arab-Islamic scholars, the results have been most unfortunate for the history of economic thought.⁷ The fact that his book became a classic helped to perpetuate what we may call a “blind spot” in economics. Any attempt at extracting the economic thought of St Thomas, as Schumpeter did, must lead one to consult his Opera Omnia, Summa Theologica and Summa contra Gentiles, and one cannot do so without seeing some references to Arab scholars, such as Al-Farabi (Alfarabus), Ibn Sina (Avicenna), Averroes (Ibn Rushd), and Al-Ghazali (Algazel). While such encounters are unavoidable, they seem to have failed to arouse scholarly curiosity on the part of Schumpeter and others who wrote in his tradition. Thus one looks in vain in the works of an equally distinguished scholar, Jacob Viner, who discusses the economic ideas of Scholastics, especially St Thomas Aquinas; and he, too, accepts the “gap” and chooses to treat the several intervening centuries as mere “blanks”.⁸

Despite the foregoing, however, there are a few scholars of medieval history who would reject the Schumpeterian “Great Gap” as patently absurd:

1. “No historical student of the culture of Western Europe can ever reconstruct for himself the intellectual values of the later Middle Ages unless he possesses a vivid awareness of Islam looming in the background” (Butler, 63).
2. “Without the influence of Arabian Peripateticism, the theology of Aquinas is as unthinkable as his philosophy” (Harris, 40).
3. “The fact that Aquinas derived ideas and stimulus from a variety of sources tends to suggest both that he was an eclectic and that he was lacking in originality…In other words, the more we know about Aristotle and about Islamic and Jewish philosophy, as also of course about previous Christian thought, the more we may be inclined to wonder what, if anything, is peculiar to Aquinas himself” (Copelston, 181).
4. “In the 12th and 13th centuries, the first period of European impingement, Arabic philosophical writings exerted a significant stimulative influence on the great synthesis of Christian Aristotelianism by St. Albert the Great and St.Thomas Aquinas…[T]his influence has not only been extensive and profound, but relatively continuous and astonishingly diversified” (Rescher, 156–7).
5. “The Arab has left his intellectual impress on Europe, as, before long, Christendom will have to confess; he has indelibly written it on the heavens, as anyone may see who reads the names of the stars on a common celestial globe” (Draper, vol. 2, 42).

Indeed, it is the enormity of this kind of diverse influence of Arab-Islamic knowledge upon medieval Europe which forms the basis of Haskins’ book title, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (1927).

Arab scholars’ economic thought and its transmission to European Scholastics: a sketch

It is appropriate at this point to present a brief outline of the available corpus of economic ideas emanating from Arab scholars prior to the emergence of Scholastic economic thought, and to offer some evidence as to the transmission of those ideas to the Scholastics. Indeed, it is possible to demonstrate, based on available historical research, that the Arab scholarship, itself stimulated by the Greeks and further developed in light of the Islamic ethos, not only inspired Scholastic thought, but that much of that scholarship became incorporated in Scholastic writings.

A survey of the relevant literature enables one to identify numerous prominent Arab scholars (both from the Islamic East and the West).⁹ As with the Scholastics, the primary focus of these scholars was not the domain of economic aspects of lif...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• CONTRIBUTORS
• FOREWORD
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• 1: SCHOLASTIC ECONOMICS AND ARAB SCHOLARS
• 2: ECONOMIC THOUGHT OF AN ARAB SCHOLASTIC
• 3: ECONOMIC THOUGHT AND RELIGIOUS THOUGHT
• 4: A REJOINDER TO “ECONOMIC THOUGHT AND RELIGIOUS THOUGHT”
• 5: EXPLORATIONS IN MEDIEVAL ARAB-ISLAMIC ECONOMIC THOUGHT
• 6: HISTORY OF ECONOMIC THOUGHT
• 7: UNDERSTANDING THE MARKET MECHANISM BEFORE ADAM SMITH
• 8: INACCURACY OF THE SCHUMPETERIAN “GREAT GAP” THESIS
• 9: EXPLORATIONS IN MEDIEVAL ARAB-ISLAMIC ECONOMIC THOUGHT
• 10: MEDIEVAL ISLAMIC SOCIO-ECONOMIC THOUGHT
• 11: POST-GREEK/PRE-RENAISSANCE ECONOMIC THOUGHT
• 12: THE ECONOMIC THOUGHT OF ABU HAMID AL-GHAZALI AND ST THOMAS AQUINAS
• 13: EARLY MEDIEVAL ISLAMIC ECONOMIC THOUGHT
• 14: PUBLIC-SECTOR ECONOMICS IN MEDIEVAL ECONOMIC THOUGHT
• 15: MEDIEVAL SOCIAL THOUGHT AND EUROPEAN RENAISSANCE
• BIBLIOGRAPHY