Blog — Elementa Œconomicæ

A scholium on Schumpeter

In his History of Economic Analysis, Schumpeter seems to attribute the idea of complacibilitas to Saint Antoninus, identifying it as a precursor to subjective value theory (alongside Irving Fisher’s desiredness). In fact, the term was coined by Saint Bernardino of Siena, who drew upon the three elements that Peter John Olivi —the true inventor of this concept— identified as constituting economic value. While I cannot quite justify Schumpeter’s omission of Bernardino (except perhaps for his manifest intention to treat Antoninus as the fourteenth-century’s representative figure), I find it perfectly understandable that he overlooked Olivi. After all, neither saint mentions him by name, and he was utterly forgotten following his condemnation by John XXII. Moreover, it was not until 1953 —three years after Schumpeter’s death— that Dionisio Pacetti established that Olivi was the true author of the Tractatus de contractibus, the work in which this crucial idea was first formulated. Strictly speaking, Pacetti had recovered the treatise in a 1936 article, but he treated it as Bernardino’s copy, making it unlikely to have caught Schumpeter’s attention.

Peter John Olivi, for his part, was not merely among the earliest precursors of subjective value theory, but also of the distinction between money and capital. I’ll venture to translate a brief passage here:

Tractatus de contractibus, part one, first question, sections 9-11: “The value of things is measured according to the greater or lesser satisfaction of our will (beneplacitum nostre voluntatis) that their possession brings. Indeed, to use something [in Olivi’s proper sense, where use-value (virtuosity, according to Bernardino) is predicated of those things whose natural properties are most apt and efficient for our utility] is to profit from or hold something under the control of our will; thus, a significant portion of its value is measured by the satisfaction of our will —whether it be more or less pleased to possess one thing or another”.