[Footnote 1:  ’Res potest plus vel minus valere tribus modis; primo secundum suam virtutem; secondo modo secundum suam caritatem; tertio modo secundum suam placibilitatem et affectionem....  Primo observat quemdam naturalem ordinem utilium rerum, secundo observat quemdam communem cursum copiae et inopiae, tertio observat periculum et industriam rerum seu obsequiorum’ (Funk, Zins und Wucher, p. 153).]

[Footnote 1:  ‘Sollicitudo et periculum,’ Op. cit., IV. xv. 10.]

It will be apparent from the whole trend of the above that, whereas the remuneration of the labour of all those who were engaged in the production of an article, was one of the elements to be taken into account in reckoning its value, and consequently its just price, it was by no means the only element.  Certain so-called Christian socialists have endeavoured to find in the writings of the scholastics support for the Marxian position that all value arises from labour.[1] This endeavour is, however, destined to failure; we shall see in a later chapter that many forms of unearned income were tolerated and approved by the scholastics; but all that is necessary here is to draw the attention of the reader to the passages on value to which we have referred.  One of the most prominent exponents of the untenable view that the mediaevals traced all value to labour is the Abbe Hohoff, whose argument that there was a divorce between value and just price in the scholastic writings, is ably controverted by Rambaud, who remarks that nobody would have been more surprised than Aquinas himself at the suggestion that he was the forerunner of Karl Marx.[2]

[Footnote 1:  Even Ashley states that ’the doctrine had thus a close resemblance to that of modern Socialists; labour it regarded both as the sole (human) cause of wealth, and also as the only just claim to the possession of wealth’ (Op. cit., vol. i. part ii. p. 393).]

[Footnote 2:  Op. cit., p. 50.]

The idea that the scholastics traced all value to the labour expended on production is rejected by many of the most prominent writers on mediaeval economic theory.  Roscher draws particular attention to the fact that the canonist teaching assigned the correct proportions in production to land, capital, and labour, in contrast to all the later schools of economists, who have exaggerated the importance of one or the other of these factors.[1] Even Knies, who was the first modern writer to insist on the importance of the cost of production as an element of value, states that the Church sought to fix the price of goods in accordance with the cost of production (Herstellungskosten) and the consumption value (Gebrauchswerte).[2] Brants takes the same view.  ’The expenses of production are in practice the norm of the fixing of the sale price in the great majority of cases, above all in a very narrow market, where competition is limited; moreover, they can, for reasons of public