Abstract

We can discover an original conception of the market and economy in the writings of Thomas Aquinas, only when we forget the prejudice, so characteristic among the historians of economic thought, concerning the economic primitivism of the scholastic economic doctrine. On the contrary, a reading of this doctrine situated inside the appropriated canonistic and theological context or vocabulary, can reveal the deepness of the connections between the medieval ecclesiastic ideology inherited by the Dominican Doctor, and his representation of the civic economy as a materialisation of the Christian unanimity. Church and market emerge in the thomistic lexicon as a double and corresponding reality, fundamental for the public happiness of the citizens or inhabitants (or "fideles") of the Christian "respublica".