Hugo Grotius on Usury: Acknowledging the End of the Scholastic Argument

André Lapidus

The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 2023, vol. 30, issue 6, 1031-1049

Abstract: This paper explores the way the Scholastic argument against usury, which culminated in the 13th century with Thomas Aquinas’s question on interest loans in the Summa Theologiae, found an end with Hugo Grotius’s introduction of economic issues, in De Jure Belli ac Pacis (1625). Whereas Grotius inherited at least part of his predecessors’ repugnance of interest lending, he found in his questioning of categories from Roman law the source of both a criticism of the main features of the Scholastic argument and an alternative analysis of interest loans in which the income received by the lender is explained and legitimate.

Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/09672567.2023.2225865 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:eujhet:v:30:y:2023:i:6:p:1031-1049

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/REJH20

DOI: 10.1080/09672567.2023.2225865

Access Statistics for this article

The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought is currently edited by José Luís Cardoso

More articles in The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().