A HISTORY OF IPE THOUGHT AMONG EARLY WRITERS

Economics is a term derived from the Greek term Oekonomy and was meant to describe the ways households allocated their resource into artefacts of life. Yet, when taken up in the grand scale of the comprehensive relational view of society and economy that was held by the Greeks, say by Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics and by Plato in his Republic, the concept of economics as a study of man extended to society at large. Within this study problems of ethics and values were taken up as were those of the production, acquisition and distribution of wealth. Also were taken up the moral questions surrounding these effects of life. For example, Aristotle considered wealth as a abhorring from the ethical point of view; interest on business transactions as reprehensible; perfection in ethical behaviour as necessary for social reconstruction. Yet, when the question of economic realism was faced, Aristotle surrendered to these necessary evils that he considered to be so. To Plato societal change could not come about unless the ethical perfection of citizens made aggregation of individuals possible to culminate to the political state. Happiness to Aristotle was a supreme good of itself, and this meant a bundle of acquisitions that promoted social well-being. In the midst of all these Greek virtues, the household was seen as a social unit tied to the social superstructure. Plato treated man the individual as a social being in the midst of the total moral society in his Republic.

The treatment of the individual or household as a moral unit of social reconstruction, the centre of possibility for a moral society to emerge, made the study of economics in the midst of all these avenues of thought to be indispensably a study of a relational order. In this issues of wealth, social contract and the moral law were intertwined. Markets could then not be construed as sheer systems of individualistic exchange of goods and services as we have come to inherit the treatment in pure economic terms. Rather, markets were required to reflect the preferences of ethically transforming individuals, without which a true social transformation could not be possible. The study of economic problems were taken up by the family in the moral texture of social contract. Thus, in this broad sense, despite treating the limited scope of the family as a unit of analysis, Aristotle's view of oeconomy was that of modern days political economy. With Plato this meaning was keener as he could not consider man as an Island but as a social collective.

Henry George points out that Montcretien, the Physiocrat was the first one in Western literature to use the term political economy. To the physiocrats, economy meant the budding discipline of studying intersectorial relations. This relational order was governed not simply by the ends of net produit to measure the total wealth of the nation. Rather, the concept of Jus Divinum as the masterplan working behind the orderly functioning of nature and markets, of the sanctity of agriculture as the primal productive activity, the basic needs regime of growth and development as the prescription for national planning, all meant the forerunner of the much later idea of the input-output model. The combination of the basic needs, the Jus Divinum in the working of markets and the categorization of productive labour with the sectorial allocation of the net produit, clearly showed the depth of relational view and its market and social consistency that occurred to the physiocrats. It was thus proper for economics to be construed in this extensive social and juridical sense of political economy. Such a concept of the discipline made sharp distinction from the mercantilist economic phampleteerism. That is, even though the mercantilists considered the affairs of economics, i.e. bullions theory of money and national wealth along with politics, this treatment did not gain any depth of theorizing and rigour. The physiocrats could provide that scientific essence to explain the relational order of economy activities and society. Hence, by this sheer theoretical precept (normative law) of the physiciocrats, they could pronounce to history the concept of political economy, while the mercantilists could not.

Between the Greeks and the physiocrats, Western history of economic thought has remained silent on what transpired. Schumpeter noted Ibn Khaldun in a footnote and few of the Western economic histrorians until only recently, have gone beyond Ibn Khaldun to look at the politico-economic thoughts of the early Islamic thinkers. Since knowledge is not a discontinuous jump in history, it becomes, it is then unlikely that the ideas such as, Jus Divinum as natural law of the divine order playing itself out in the social economy, could have simply sprung from the writings of Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas. Contrarily, the eighteenth century Enlightenment was a conscious abandonement of the metaphysical ideas that were held by the Church in respect to enterprise and science. It was for this reason that the Age of Moral Philosophy dominated by the Church mind was subsequently replaced by the Age of Enlightenment. In order for the strong roots of natural liberty as a character of the Divine Laws in the order of things to continue in a strong way in the sciences, its epistemological roots must have sprung from sources that questioned metaphysics deeply and upheld analytical wisdom in high esteem. Could it be that these were sheer imitations of Greek thought to the Enlightenment thinkers? We know that the works of the Greek thinkers came to the Western world only after the sack of Constantinople in the hands of the Christian crusaders. It was then that the translations of the Greek works into Arabic were spread out in Occidental Europe. These brought Europe to light. In this process could it be that the Greek thought were passed on by the Arab scholastics in un-revised form? History bears testimony to the substantial changes and originality that were contributed by the Arabs to Greek thought although through the principle of continuity of knowledge, Greek thought was taken in substantial ways to build upon the structure of Medieval scholasticism. This is a fact that is proven in the field of mathematics and philosophy.

What about the contributions of the early Islamic writers in the field of political economy? What did political economy mean to the early Islamic thinkers? Here we will examine the thoughts of Ibn Taimiyyah, Ibn Khaldun, Imam Shatibi and Imam Ghazzali. Our principal objective will be to show that the field of political economy seen as the interplay of the state, individual and the economy through the function of the precepts of the Divine Laws in these, constituted a treatment of the moral order of markets and society that was coherently built upon the essentially Islamic precepts of the Unity of God and its explications by the life of the Prophet Muhammad together with the diverse ramifications that these engendered. In this way we will argue that the rationalistic order or the God-benign order of the Greeks did not provide the groundwork of the Islamic thinking on political economy. Consequently, when the statecraft was handed over to the Western World, for example in the guise of the Jus Divinum, Jus Pretium (Just Price) and the Natural Law, to the scholastics, the physiocrats, these concepts did not remain to be the pure and sole Greek concepts, but underwent substantive change in the hands of the Islamic scholastics before they were bequeathed to the Western World.