Abstract

Many times the Jesuit Juan de Mariana has been presented like a “communist”, or a “socialist”, or an “individualist”, a “classical liberal”, a “libertarian”, an “austrian economist”. The first consideration someone can do is all these traditions are very different each other and the second is that, apparently, they have few in common with catholic tradition. In this work the author tries to describe the complex intellectual world in which Juan de Mariana gave his contribution to economic thought, supposedly in the same line of the tradition of future Austrian Economics. In fact, according with recent studies of many authors, the prehistory of the Austrian School of Economics can be found in the works of the Spanish Scholastics, written in that historical period which is known as the “Spanish Golden Century” and ran from the mid-sixteenth century through the seventeenth century. According with Friedrich A. Hayek, some researches by Marjorie Grice- Hutchinson, Raymond de Roover and Murray N. Rothbard demonstrate that the basic principles of the theory of the competitive market were worked out by the Spanish Scholastics of the School of Salamanca and that economic liberalism was not designed by the Calvinists, but by the Spanish Jesuits. The works written by Alejandro Antonio Chafuen and Jesús Huerta de Soto stressed that perhaps the most libertarian of all the scholastics, particularly in his later works, was exactly Father Mariana. There is no dubt that Mariana has anticipated some important points of Austrian Economics, but is this enough to think about him like a libertarian? It’s possible to give two different answers to this question, both correct: the first one as an economist, and the second one as a historian of political thought