ABSTRACT
The history of ‘economics’ strictly speaking is of short duration. The most defensible terminus a quo is the decade beginning in 1885, which saw the foundation of the American Economic Association, the first numbers of the Quarterly Journal of Economics and the Economic Journal, and the publication of Marshall’s Principles (Coats 1993). But ‘economic thought’ of some kind is a detectable feature of every civilised society. ‘Economic thought’ – like all other ‘thought’ – is and must be conceived and developed within the metaphysical and theological presuppositions of its time and place. In the Christian West, from the thirteenth to the eighteenth century, ‘economic’ thought can be regarded for the most part as a specialised branch of moral theology: in particular, of casuistry. Mutatis mutandis, much the same can be said of Talmudic economic doctrine during the same period (e.g. Kleiman 1987).
