ABSTRACT
‘Catholic Social Thinking’ has become a valuable intellectual tool for those who advocate social reform in the present era of the limited state, whether from a left-wing or a right-wing point of view. 1 It embodies a tradition of thought leading back to Aristotle, and one of its key components is Scholastic economic thought propounded by the university academics or ‘schoolmen’ of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The economic issues they sought to address, the morality of usury, the nature of the ‘just price’ may seem to us arcane, but their premises that economic activity should promote justice in individual exchanges, while also ensuring that the outcomes of exchange across society are just, offer a valuable alternative to the conventional economic ‘rational agent’. 2 They can also be surprisingly easily applied to some current issues, such as those concerning the social movement for fair trade between the developed and developing world. While opinions vary as to Fairtrade’s impact, most concede that at the least it offers some, but not all, producers of primary goods a ‘shaped advantage’ through direct access to global production chains. 3 In this chapter, I argue that the mechanisms of fair trade can be grounded in Scholastic economic thought. It is a modern vehicle for the concerns of the schoolmen that economic activity should promote justice in individual exchanges, while also ensuring that the outcomes of exchange across society are just. Specifically, we shall examine whether fair trade helps or hinders the economic system in accommodating the requirements of commutative and distributive justice. The analysis is dialogical in nature, and removes the veil of anonymity by which markets hide the identity of participants within any transaction, so that individual transactions can be scrutinized. Lifting the veil of anonymity denies the final consumer the opportunity to benefit passively from unjust economic relationships at any point within a production process. In this way, just as elements of the fair trade debate are illuminated by reference to a seemingly anachronistic theory, so too the contemporary debate about fair trade can illustrate how Scholastic thinkers understood consumption relations.
