José Luis Cendejas Bueno

The article presents a set of articles on the present and projection of the scholastic tradition. The starting point is the anthropological turn that, within scholasticism and at the beginning of the fourteenth century, privileged the study of ethics, law and politics and, consequently, the forced development of a moral theology concerned with the human coexistence. The second scholasticism, prolonging this tradition throughout the 16th and 17th centuries, could not remain oblivious to the implications of the profound changes that were taking place: the Discovery of America, the Protestant Reformation, the development of a commercial proto-capitalism and the strengthening of the monarchies. As the Reformation was consolidated in a good part of the European territories, intellectual borders were raised between the various confessions. However - and this is the focus of the papers presented - these borders were porous and, despite the climate of confrontation, various indirect communication channels managed to maintain a single intellectual republic.

This work deals with the long trajectory that goes from Roman legal thought to Locke's explanation of the origin of property, money and, ultimately, political power. Vitoria, Suárez and Locke start from considering a primordial prepolitical state of equal freedom for all and common property, in which humanity could have been before the establishment of the characteristic institutions of the civil state. Despite the presence of elements of continuity with respect to Vitoria and Suárez, by replacing the prelapsary state of innocence with a status naturae that does not require any theological reading, and that Locke places in a truly existing historical time, the English author formulates a strictly secular theory, based on the long tradition of ius naturale, on the origins of civil government and private property.

Following Thomas Aquinas, Francisco de Vitoria's analysis of justice in exchanges takes place by commenting on the corresponding questions of the Summa Theologica. The identification of the just price with that of common estimation occurs under a sufficient concurrence of sellers and buyers. A high level of concurrence limits the ability to take advantage of the need on the other side of the market. This fact guaranties a full consent of the parties involved in trading. Under conditions of market power or when some authority fixes a legal price, just price should also be taken as a normative ideal.