English Calvinist Opinion on Usury, 1600-1640
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4457187 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Charles H George (corresponding author) |
| Year | 1957 |
| Volume | 18 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 455 |
| Publication date | 1957-10-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of the History of Ideas (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0022-5037 • E-ISSN: 1086-3222 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/2707559 |
| OpenAlex | W2327725647 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 6 |
One of the most persistently vexing analytical problems in the history of Christian ideas is that of describing and explaining the interesting change in the Protestant Christian viewpoint on the taking of interest on loans. This change, all students agree, was consummated in the seventeenth century. It is obviously one of the crucial events in the modernizing of the Western Christian ethic. It is hoped that certain aspects of this change will be made clearer by a study of the casuistry of the Calvinist divines of the English church-and to a lesser extent of the lay writers on usury who wrote from a Protestant orientation-in the generations which preceded those Civil Wars which were a watershed in the history of English social thought. The reason for such a focus is that nearly all modern writers on usury are agreed that the change in opinion was associated with Calvin and Calvinism and with co-ordinated capitalistic economic and social developments. England was in this epoch, 1600-1640, perhaps the leading exponent in all Europe of Calvinist theology; and also this was in England a period of important capitalistic growth. Thus the laboratory conditions for a study of the interrelationships of Calvinism and the social pressure for a new ethic of usury are unusually good. Before grappling with the thorny problems that beset the historian of this particular era of transition, it will be well to describe the larger context out of which our particular difficulties arise. Considerable work has been done on the history of usury as an idea in the Christian West, and certain trends seem clear enough.2 We know that throughout the Middle Ages the Roman Catholic church had taken a very dim view indeed of usury as an idea while making the needed adjustments to usury as business practice. The explanation of the antipathy of the Church to usury is not far to seek. The economic chaos of the later Roman Empire had ruined even the Roman bourgeoisie, and then the rude early centuries of struggle in a primitive agrarian society (not unlike the Hebrew economy which had given birth to those anti-capitalist sentiments so common in the Old Testament) had left
Economics · Islam · Theology · Usury · Legal principles and applications · Philosophy
| Unique citing works | 6 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0.09 |
| Citation span | 1958 - 2020 (63) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 6 |