CHAPTER I
THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND
"Que pourrions-nous gagner," once wrote a celebrated economist, "à recueillir des opinions absurdes, des doctrines décréesm et qui méritent de l'être? Il serait à la fois inutile et fastidieux de les exhumer." One who studies the development of social theory can hardly hope to avoid the criticism which is brought against those who disturb the dust in forgotten lumber-rooms. If he seeks an excuse beyond his own curiosity, he may find it, perhaps, in the reflection that the past reveals to the present what the present is capable of seeing, and that the face which to one age is a blank may to another be pregnant with meaning. Writing when economic science was in the first flush of its dogmatic youth, it was natural that Say should dismiss as an unprofitable dilettantism an interest in the speculations of ages unillumined by the radiance of the new Gospel. But to determine the significant of opinion is, perhaps, not altogether so simple a matter as he supposed. Since the brave days when Torrens could say of Political Economy, "Twenty years hence there will scarcely exist a doubt respecting any of its fundamental principles," how many confident certainties have been undermined! How many doctrines once dismissed as the emptiest of superstitions have revealed an unsuspected vitality!
The attempt to judge economic activity and social organization by ethical criteria raises problems which are eternal, and it is possible that a study of the thought of an age when that attempt was made, if with little success, at least with conviction and persistence, may prove, even today, not
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