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[Expositions 13.1 (2019) 46–66] Expositions (online) ISSN: 1747–5376 

Creativity and Cleverness within Discipline in  

The Study of Man and the Study of Happiness 

 

PETER BOETTKE 

CLARA ELIZABETH JACE 

George Mason University 

 

 

Once man is conceived in the image of an artifact, who constructs himself through 

his own choices, he sheds the animalistically determined path of existence laid out 

for him by the orthodox economists’ model. A determined and programmed 

existence is replaced by the uncertain and exciting quest that life must be.  

 –James Buchanan1 

 

1. Introduction 

In Aquinas and the Market (2018), Mary Hirschfeld plays the role of scholarly ambassador 

between two highly specialized disciplines that too rarely interact: economics and theology. Her 

thorough exposition of economics provides students of theology with a welcome introduction to 

the discipline well worth a careful reading. We are economists by training, so our criticisms will 

focus on this aspect of her work. But, her excellent account of the thought of Aquinas, it should be 

acknowledged, will help students of economics learn the relevance of Thomist philosophy for their 

work in the positive analysis of human decision making as well as normative welfare economics. 

And due to the ease with which Hirschfeld negotiates not only between economics and theology, 

but also engages biblical reading, Church doctrine, practical affairs, and a broader culture 

conversation, Aquinas and the Market is fit for a much broader audience: parishes, churches, 

synagogues, mosques, temples, and other communities of faith.2 Hirschfeld envisions a Thomistic 

economics in which “the overarching question is how economic life should serve genuine human 

happiness” (209). We agree that this is the upmost question and hope to show that who answers 

this question is of upmost importance methodologically, analytically, and social philosophically.3  

Embracing the Thomistic view of happiness as the pursuit of the ultimate good through rightly-

ordered reason (i.e., virtue) is an ongoing process of solving three kinds of problems: the technical, 



47 Boettke and Jace 

   

the economic, and the moral. Discerning the role economics plays in this quest means locating 

which kinds of problems the discipline of economics is best equipped to address, and how the 

discipline can contribute to a productive conversation on those problems.4 Technical problems are 

defined as choosing among alternative means to achieve a stated end. These are in essence 

“engineering” problems, best addressed by decision science, and are wrestled with continuously 

throughout all levels of society (e.g., firms, governments, families, churches, etc.) by conscious 

planning and management of organizational activities. The question for social science is not 

whether to have planning or no planning, but who is doing the planning, how do alternative 

organizational arrangements impact those planning decisions, and for whom are those decisions to 

be made.5 Economics adds greatly to this conversation by thinking through the situational logic of 

organizational arrangements. 

Strictly speaking, economic problems are defined by the allocation of scarce resources among 

competing ends. Individuals are best equipped to solve these problems due to “knowledge 

problems” and “incentive alignment” reasons. Conflating the economic problem with the technical 

problem is a source of much confusion in the scientific as well as broader cultural conversation. 

Economics, as a social science, is not primarily concerned with “allocation” so much as “exchange 

relationships” and the institutions within which exchange takes place.6 Much of Hirschfeld’s 

rightful criticisms of textbook economics stem from this conflation in some presentations of the 

subject. We hope to highlight how this can be avoided by focusing on exchange and institutions, 

rather than optimization and allocational efficiency.  

Finally, moral problems involve “the proper exercise of human reason that lies not only in 

discerning what goods are worthy of pursuit but also in thinking of how to order the infinite goods 

in our lives into a meaningful whole” (82). Despite her rejection of Deirdre McCloskey’s narrow 

reading of prudence, we believe that Hirschfeld would ultimately agree with McCloskey that 

narrow self-interest explanations (what McCloskey dubs “prudence only” explanations7) are not 

only bad social philosophy, they also reflect bad economic reasoning and cannot explain 

fundamental issues in commercial life let alone large scale questions such as modern economic 

growth. But, it is important to balance that critique of prudence only reasoning with an 

acknowledgement that explanations that are blind to prudence considerations are perhaps even 

worse exercises in social science and social philosophy. Moreover, we would argue that only a 

human person can make these moral choices, but with the important caveat that we must recognize 



Creativity and Cleverness within Discipline 48 

   

how communities and cultures play an indispensable role by framing the choice environment 

within which individuals choose.8 The distinction between the three kinds of problems is not fixed 

in any real sense, but it gives a clue as to the limits of economics in answering certain questions.  

This review proceeds as follows. First, we present the main arguments in Hirschfeld’s text, 

paying special attention to the types of problems discussed over the course of the book. Second, 

we enter into direct conversation with our fellow economists to address the valid critiques made 

by Hirschfeld. We suggest that a clear picture of the required reconstruction of a useful economics 

that can contribute to the cultural conversation Hirschfeld wants to cultivate is already latent in the 

writings of several scholars in economics that she failed to draw on. These are not obscure thinkers, 

but leading figures in the history of the discipline and Nobel Prize winning economists.9 Finally, 

we close by introducing a group of Thomist economists from sixteenth-century Spain: The School 

of Salamanca. This group of professor-priests developed the first body of economic analysis using 

the scholastic method (of which Aquinas is the model) and promulgated their ideas in guides for 

confessors, merchant business ethics handbooks, public lectures, and letters to the king, among 

other avenues. It is their role as confessors for merchants that interests us most here, as it is in this 

capacity that the visions of man-as-he-is and man-as-he-could-be come together most intensely. 

The overarching point of this review is that the social function of confessors, or moral leaders more 

broadly, is the key to bringing Hirschfeld’s project, Thomistic economics, to life.10  

 

2. Themes of Aquinas and the Market 

Hirschfeld’s six chapters can be summed up by three themes: explaining the economic view of the 

person, juxtaposing it with the Thomist view of the person, and providing a positive account for 

the ways in which Thomist insights can be incorporated into economic thought. No economist 

would take issue with her presentation of the principles, though her critiques occasionally slip back 

into narrow definitions of self-interest, utility, economic goods, etc. which unfortunately obscure 

her underlying point.11 Hirschfeld’s presentation, it merits repeating, is not restricted to academics 

but is meant to encourage a deeper cultural conversation about the humane economy. We agree 

with that message wholeheartedly. In that regard is useful to remember that Hirschfeld’s practical 

discussion bridges not only the academic disciplines of economics and theology, but the lessons 

from these disciplines for faith communities in general. Indeed, the natural law tradition of 

Aquinas has roots not only in his Catholicism, but in Protestantism (reformed), Judaism 



49 Boettke and Jace 

   

(Maimonides), Islam (Averroes), and by its very definition, can resonate with all peoples in all 

times.  

In Hirschfeld’s preface she describes her initial attraction to economics, “to have smart things 

to say about human flourishing,” the increasing frustrations she had with the metaphysics implied 

by the economic view of the person, and her subsequent expedition into “a theological approach 

to economics based on the thought of Thomas Aquinas […] a vision of a humane economy” (xvi). 

Instead of reading the book as a critique of economics and the market economy based on Aquinas, 

it should be clear to the reader that Hirschfeld is proposing a marriage between economics and 

theology as a way to seek answers to her own life’s guiding questions.  

Chapter One opens with an investigation: “Does [capitalism] promote a culture that is 

excessively materialistic?” (1). Arguing in the affirmative, Hirschfeld criticizes the existing 

separation between economics and theology and presents her vision of a renewed partnership in 

which theology, the queen of the sciences from the scholastic point of view, takes the lead role 

again as it did in an earlier time. She goes on to describe the disorder that arises when economics 

instead supplants theology: “[O]nce the public square is shaped around the shared goal of 

achieving prosperity, the instrumental character of prosperity becomes obscured. We forget to ask 

what our material wealth is for […]” (3). The answer to that question cannot be found in 

economics. Hirschfeld herself argues that the economic view of the person “is thus impeded in 

multiple ways from pursuing happiness as Aquinas understands it. Insofar as descriptions of 

practical reason serve as guides to how we live, the rational choice model cannot be seen as 

neutral” (209). We agree, the economist qua economist is unable “to distinguish between natural 

and disordered concupiscent desires,” a distinction that is necessary for making a moral judgement 

(167). Consider the concrete case, Hirschfeld introduces, of whether or not one should purchase a 

dishwasher:  

 

The question of whether the dishwasher promotes or hinders the flourishing of the 

household thus depends on what the dishwasher is really ordered to. The key here 

is that the proper decision making involves looking at goods and service in a larger 

context, asking what role they play in constructing the shape of our lives. (177–

178) 

 



Creativity and Cleverness within Discipline 50 

   

The knowledge required to answer this moral question is concentrated most fully in the 

individual, though her close friends and faith community can exemplify prudence and remind her 

to orient her choices toward the ultimate good. On the incentive side, an individual generally has 

the strongest natural desire for her well-being, though family, friends and close community can 

once again help her see which choices will actually result in her true happiness.12 Hirschfeld makes 

a rather stark contrast, claiming that “Economic logic is a matter of calculations, whereas prudence 

is a matter of discernment” (179). But she may be overplaying her hand here. Calculation is a 

necessary input into a responsible discerning by a prudent decision maker. Critical to advancing 

the very cultural conversation that Hirschfeld is aspiring to cultivate is an intellectual discipline 

that enables the conversation to move from a discourse over desirable ideals to sorting based on 

their practical feasibility, and finally to the harsh reality of their financial viability.13 None of this 

intellectual discipline and weeding out of loose argumentation can happen unless we acknowledge 

the knowledge problems actors face that must be resolved, the incentive alignment issues that must 

be tackled by that actors we are studying, and the essential role that economic calculation plays in 

this resolving and tackling of the social dilemmas faced. The economic point of view does add 

something valuable to the cultural conversation even in the illustration of a mundane decision—

for example, predicting which dishwasher will be chosen given constraints and the relative prices 

of alternatives offered in the marketplace. Let us be quick to remind everyone that Hirschfeld’s 

main point throughout her explanation of the economic way of thinking is that while it certainly 

has its place, it is a poor substitute for full moral reasoning. But who could disagree? 

Aquinas’s view of the human person and his corresponding argument for what true happiness 

consists of is central to Hirschfeld’s exposition. Questions 1–5 (I–II) of Aquinas’s Summa 

Theologica consider the various sources of happiness for human beings—such as wealth, fame, 

power, and pleasure—to investigate whether any of these things can logically be the source of true 

happiness for humans. He finally concludes that true happiness can only be found in God, thus all 

human choices will only result in happiness so long as they are aimed at this uncreated, eternal 

Good.14 For Aquinas, “It is our act of becoming beings who can pursue these goods in an excellent 

way that constitutes the full realization of our nature […] our truest happiness lies in the agency 

we exercise in obtaining them” (108). The virtues—and prudence in particular—enable people to 

use their freedom to choose most excellently. In sum: “Prudence is Aquinas’s alternative to the 



51 Boettke and Jace 

   

rational choice theory of economists as an account of the type of reason that can guide us toward 

genuine happiness” (106).  

Hirschfeld, throughout her text, is seeking to find the common ground for a lasting union 

between economics and theology, and she believes one promising path is that economists view all 

human acts as aiming at infinite happiness (utility). However, she asserts that economists are 

misguided by thinking about it in overly narrow and in explicitly quantitative terms, since Aquinas 

would argue that “reason is not inherently quantitative in nature” but qualitative in that it concerns 

a fullness, a completion of the human person as he was created to become (80). This undue 

emphasis on measurable objectives over richer qualities also influences the economists’ obsession 

with economic growth.15 Hirschfeld asks: “We will always be infinitely far from satiety, so what 

sort of good does economic growth actually achieve?” (63). From a policy perspective, this 

suspicious view of economic growth makes sense, since trying to orchestrate growth via public 

policy is an act of extreme hubris. Rather, economic growth is desirable because it reflects that 

wealth is being created—the clever people we are studying are peacefully cooperating and 

exercising their creativity. They, not us, must have found rules that enable them to live better 

together than they ever could in isolation. Consider that sustainable economic growth is actually 

just the side-effect of many moral behaviors: saving for one’s future, supporting a family, investing 

in children, etc. Hirschfeld is in favor of exploring broader measures for a country’s well-being. 

The key is to keep the material, quantitative aspects of wealth creation aligned with the higher 

human goods. Her broad vision of Thomist economics is expressed by two basic principles:  

 

The first, as we have seen, is the importance of ordering lower ends to higher ends. 

Markets and financial instruments are ordered to the provision of natural wealth, 

which, in turn, is ordered to human happiness understood as perfection […]. The 

second basic principle is that our economic exchanges must be just. There should 

be some rough equivalence in exchange. (133–134) 

 

Insofar as economic analysis cannot be used to adjudicate between the goodness of ends, this is 

where moral leaders come into play. Economists must humbly step out of the way for this 

particular endeavor.  

 



Creativity and Cleverness within Discipline 52 

   

3. Message to Economists 

Hirschfeld rightly calls out economists who try to solve moral problems from their economic 

perspective. Though her solution is to replace the economic view with a more theologically-

informed view of the person—a move for which we have our own hesitations—her criticisms of 

standard textbook economics and a lot of loose thinking in welfare economics appear to be solidly 

grounded. Consider one of her most incisive arguments: “Insofar as descriptions of practical reason 

serve as guides to how we live, the rational choice model cannot be seen as neutral. Economists 

may deny that their models serve as guides, but their introductory textbooks show otherwise” 

(209). Either economists must acknowledge and act out the position that the rational choice model 

is meant to describe rather than prescribe actions, or economists must come up with a better guide 

for human behavior. Like behavioral economics, Hirschfeld is much in favor of the latter solution. 

The mainline tradition of economic scholarship (introduced in n9 below) sees both options as 

compatible within their own spheres. Proper use of a tool requires that the craftsman knows its 

limits. While the rational choice model maps very well onto human problem-solving in both the 

technical and economic sense, it cannot capture certain important aspects. In other words, though 

it demands equal dignity and capability across human actors, it leaves key mysteries of the human 

person unaddressed. Hirschfeld writes: 

 

The rational choice model cannot account for the creativity involved in 

entrepreneurship, as the Austrian school of economics has long argued […]. But 

entrepreneurship seems to be nearer this sort of self-creation than a model of profit 

maximization would suggest […] one could at least say that the fact of 

entrepreneurship should make economists wary about identifying reason so 

narrowly with the calculations of a particular sort of instrumental reason. (77–78)  

 

At this juncture in her argument, though, she compels us to discuss the missed opportunities for 

the reconstruction of economics as well as Hirschfeld’s opportunity to engage in a more nuanced 

conversation with other economists who resided at the borderland between economics and 

theology. Consider the case of Philip Wicksteed. Wicksteed was not only a theologian, but a 

classicist and medievalist as well as an economist of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. 

Wicksteed’s The Common Sense of Political Economy (1910) was a classic in the development of 



53 Boettke and Jace 

   

early neoclassical economics. For the epigraph to the entire work, Wicksteed choose a quote from 

the German poet Goethe that reads: “We are all doing it, though none of know we are doing it.” 

Note here that contrary to the instructive or prescriptive view of the rational choice model and 

marginal analysis, Wicksteed is arguing that in our capacity as human choosers we engage in these 

sort of decision calculus—both large and small—constantly throughout our days. He provides 

ample illustrations to make his point, from the housewife organizing the affairs for her family to 

Caesar’s choice of when to cut off his motivating speech to his troops before battle. We are, indeed, 

all doing it, though none of us know we are doing it. Furthermore, as Wicksteed argues, there is a 

“non-tuism” in economic relations. There is nothing degrading or revolting to our higher purpose, 

he assures his readers, from the economist’s recognition that in the complex division of labor that 

constitutes modern commercial society individuals will mutually further each other’s purposes 

because each are interested in furthering their own. Paul, we learn in Acts, was able to advance his 

ministry through the production and sale of tents. That his goal was not to secure profits as an end, 

but instead to advance his ministry and the spread of the word of Christ, is perfectly consistent 

with the economic way of thinking. By overplaying her hand at times and not finding these allies 

in the history of the discipline, Hirschfeld is forced to tread a lonely path. 

The insights of Wicksteed might have changed the way, for example, that Hirschfeld discussed 

the relationship between the firm, the market, and virtue. “The virtuous firm thus attends to 

profits,” she tell us, “but not with the aim of maximizing them. Rather, the aim would be to ensure 

that the goods and services it produces are of value to the community and that the resources used 

in the production of those goods and services are being used wisely” (138, also see 154). However, 

this just brings us back to our distinction between who is to do the planning/management, and who 

is the responsible actor. Hirschfeld’s position is subtle because she is far from an interventionist 

with a moral purpose in mind. This is not her prescription. But in imagining the humane economy, 

who is to determine the objective function of the firm owner and/or manager? Yes, Aquinas’s 

framework may give us scope for envisioning business practices that are in the service of higher 

goods that produce genuine human happiness, but who makes that decision in the humane 

economy? And doesn’t that bring us back not only to the broader cultural conversation that 

Hirschfeld wants to cultivate, but also to a recognition within that conversation of the non-tuism 

and the essential role of economic calculation in organizing economic life? 



Creativity and Cleverness within Discipline 54 

   

In our reading, we want to stress as well that Wicksteed is not the only missed opportunity for 

scholarly engagement in Hirschfeld’s discussion. Frank Knight, who first studied theology prior 

to pursuing economics, is another early neoclassical economist who had a much richer view of the 

individual as well as the ongoing economic process than is presented in the textbook caricature of 

both homo economicus and perfect competition. As Hirschfeld has already acknowledged in her 

passing reference to the Austrian School, thinkers such as Ludwig von Mises and F. A. Hayek 

could have been grouped in the same intellectual camp as Wicksteed and Knight in seeing both 

the science of economics and the broader social philosophical tradition within which economics 

developed—what in Adam Smith’s time was called the Moral Sciences—as providing scope for 

the sort of questions her Thomist perspective wants to put on the table. As very appreciative readers 

of her excellent book, we wish Aquinas and the Market had grappled with this broader history of 

the discipline—a history where the borderland between economics and theology was often the 

starting point, was routinely crossed, and where many leading practitioners comfortably resided. 

The Natural Law tradition, for example, was part of the educational background of economists and 

political economists throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth century, and continued into the 

beginning of the twentieth. 

The question that motivated the classical economists as well as the early neoclassical 

economists was to discover what institutional arrangement could, while relying only on the 

ordinary motivations of individuals with limited cognitive capacities, induce them to realize 

productive specialization and peaceful social cooperation. Their answer was that such a system 

could be found in the private property and competitive market order. This discovery did not 

commit them to any wooden conception of laissez-faire. Their argument for private property and 

free competition did not rely on any assumption of full and complete rationality, or any notion of 

perfect competition. But it did attempt to instill an appropriate appreciation of the cleverness and 

creativity of ordinary individuals to realize mutual gains from trade, and in the power of “invisible 

hand” reasoning to unearth the mysteries of the complex coordination of human society. The social 

cooperation under the division of labor illustrated in Adam Smith’s discussion of the production 

and distribution of the common-woolen coat, as well as the power of the price system to guide 

decisions near and far as illustrated in F. A. Hayek’s tin example, are developed to convey a sense 

of awe in the spontaneous order of commercial life. It was an argument about the utilization of 

local knowledge and the alignment of incentives. It is precisely through the workings of the 



55 Boettke and Jace 

   

institutional framework of property, prices, and profit-and-loss, that individuals were prodded, 

guided, lured and disciplined in such a way that the invisible hand proposition about the common 

good was derived from the rational choice postulate about the pursuit of private interest.  

The economist Dennis Robertson (1956) asked rhetorically “What Do Economists Economize 

On?” His answer, we argue, is critically valuable to Hirschfeld’s discussion of economics and 

theology. We economists, he argued, economize on love in our explanations of the workings of 

social systems. Love is the most precious of all resources. If our explanations of social order 

required love to make them work, then this precious and scarce resource would be exhausted in 

short order. But precisely because through the tools of economic reasoning, we can demonstrate 

how knowledge problems are addressed and incentive alignment issues are resolved through the 

pursuit of self-interest (rightly understood) within a private property market economy, then love 

can be conserved and directed toward more valuable pursuits in human society. It is through such 

a chain of reasoning, one might suggest, how a vision of a humane economy can be moved from 

contemplation of the desirable to the realm of the feasible and ultimately to the practice of the 

viable. 

Questions of justice (see Hirschfeld 183–186), and the obstacles to justice, become concretely 

institutional as much as deeply philosophical. Institutional problems demand institutional 

solutions, as well as philosophical speculation. 

Hirschfeld spends a significant time in Aquinas and the Market discussing the limitations of the 

basic view of the individual decision maker in textbook neoclassical economics. And while she 

draws from developments in behavioral economics to make points of criticism, this is not her main 

tool of intellectual leverage. But once again, we fear she may have missed an important opportunity 

in her discussion of the model of rational choice and discerning acts as opposed to calculative acts. 

The reason we believe this is a missed opportunity is not due to a methodological defense of 

parsimony and “as if” styles of reasoning in defense of textbook models of rational choice. Instead, 

we want to suggest that calculating need not reduce down to a simple exercise in maximizing often 

for the very reasons that Hirschfeld has already identified. Calculation in modern economic life is 

vital precisely because economic actors must choose in a world of uncertainty, and must find 

coping mechanisms for their ignorance, and to discover various ways to peer through the dark fog 

of the future to pursue imagined futures. Behavioral economics is not very helpful with this since 

it still leaves the rational choice as maximizing model as the normative benchmark against which 



Creativity and Cleverness within Discipline 56 

   

fallible but capable human choosers are judged against. Instead, Hirschfeld could have turned to 

Nobel Prize winning economists such as James Buchanan and his idea of artifactual man (used as 

our epigraph), Vernon Smith and his notion of ecological rationality, and Elinor Ostrom and her 

development of the behavioral approach to rational choice theory. These approaches represent a 

form of rational choice theory as practiced by humans. And these humans are engaged in the agony 

of choice that constitute the very discernment that Hirschfeld discusses. 

This discerning human chooser is the foundational building block of mainline economics from 

Adam Smith to Vernon Smith. Again, the core idea in this tradition of scholarship is that the 

invisible hand proposition is derived from the rational choice postulate via institutional analysis. 

Context matters. That context in human social interaction is provided by the institutional 

framework under examination. The constitutive parts of that institutional framework are the formal 

and informal rules of the social game and their enforcement. Rules of just conduct must be every 

bit as central to the discourse on economic growth as resource ownership, capital accumulation, 

the allocation of labor talents, and entrepreneurial innovation. Furthermore, this knowledge of the 

interaction between the economic/financial, the political/legal, and the social/cultural must all be 

incorporated as thoroughly as is possible in the broader cultural conversation that Hirschfeld is 

attempting to cultivate. 

But, if all is how we say it is with the mainline tradition of economic scholarship, what keeps 

modern mainstream economists tethered to their narrowly-defined rational choice model, their 

static models of competitive equilibrium, and their sophisticated statistical analysis of data sets? 

Hirschfeld proposes a theory: “Although economists see themselves as generating knowledge for 

its own sake, the prestige of the discipline is tied up with their ability to offer advice to policy 

makers on how to regulate markets to pursue various goals” (200). Perhaps this desire to be 

politically valuable also keeps the economics profession from engaging with other disciplines. 

Nearly every economist would acknowledge that other disciplines generate insights into the human 

condition, though in practice few are willing to engage in anthropology, sociology, history, etc. 

From Aquinas’s point of view, this is inefficient; “a Thomistic economics would be explicitly 

oriented toward interdisciplinary study” (211). We see the tradition of mainline economics, in both 

its emphasis on intellectual humility and deeper conception of the human person, as a solution to 

many of the critiques levied by Hirschfeld against economists. 

  



57 Boettke and Jace 

   

4. Pragmatic Implications: The Role of Confessor 

Economics as a discipline historically served to put parameters on utopias. Political economy at 

its finest is by definition non-ideal theorizing. Given scarcity, thus the necessity of trade-offs, and 

thus the necessity of negotiating those trade-offs, we rely on aids to the human mind that are 

provided by the pattern of property rights, relative prices, and profit-and-loss statements. Part of 

Hirschfeld’s message which cannot be denied is that incentives are tricky, and there is no morally 

neutral way for economic policy makers to manipulate human actors through structuring of 

incentives to induce behavior. Strings are definitely attached to all such efforts, whether we are 

talking about tax and subsidy schemes, stimulants for private investment, or reforms intended to 

produce efficient governance in the public sector. The deeper cultural conversation must address 

the tricky nature of incentives, the unintended consequences of even the most public-spirited of 

initiatives, and the strings attached to the nudging of private and public decisions. Being critical 

of these efforts, however, does not give license to ignore the reality of constraints and feasibility 

tests. Political economy at its finest must be non-ideal theorizing if it is going to help in our public 

deliberations over improvements in the human condition. 

At the end of the day, Hirschfeld is a trained economist—one who has demonstrated mastery 

of the economic way of thinking. This is why her desire to reside at the border between economics 

and theology is so intriguing. An economist who “got religion” and rejected economics would not 

be that interesting, or at least not any more interesting than a theologian who gave up on grace to 

embrace the harsh logic of economics. No, what makes Hirschfeld’s work so compelling is her 

desire to reconcile and enrich the conversations from both sides through this intellectual union. As 

a result, while she is willing to let her mind wander to contemplate the utopian ideal, she comes 

back to the reality of imperfect humans operating in an imperfect world. Hirschfeld makes it clear 

that she is not interested only in contemplating an ideal of human choice—worthy as that is—but 

also in how people really act. As we have argued, the individual is not left to her own devices 

when encountering the moral problems of life. While she alone must ultimately choose, she can 

assemble a community of prudent friends around her to aid and encourage her in choosing ends 

that will correspond with her true happiness. This is where the role of a confessor—or close friends, 

respected moral role models, and other secular substitutes—comes into play.16  

One magnificent historical example of confessors in the history of Thomist economics is the 

School of Salamanca, a group of professor-priests in sixteenth-century Spain.17 Many of them were 



Creativity and Cleverness within Discipline 58 

   

Dominicans just like St. Thomas Aquinas, and all of them studied his thought and wrote in the 

same scholastic method. The story of Tomás de Mercado, one of the foremost scholars of the 

School, exemplifies their tradition. Mercado, a Dominican priest and lecturer at the University of 

Salamanca, authored one of the first and most famous merchant handbooks at the request of his 

close merchant friend Angelo Brunengo. Many confessors and scholars at the time viewed 

merchant activity with suspicion, and the result was contradictory advice in the confessional.18 

This confusion led merchants to request formal guidance on their work as new trade opportunities 

multiplied with the discovery of the New World. Mercado saw that the work of transporting goods, 

drawing up contracts, and changing of currency served the common good and could be justly 

pursued. He offers this advice to merchants on choosing a confessor: “Before you choose one, you 

should make sure that he is learned, wise and somewhat understood in business, without being too 

scrupulous…the little learned, inexperienced and scruffy lawyer is not for the merchant.”19 These 

original Thomist economists were ultimately interested in the morality of economic life (being that 

their primary role was that of confessor), and it was by establishing the first body of economic 

thought that they were able to better distinguish among the technical, economic, and moral 

problems facing their parishioners. They supplemented their economic analysis with business 

ethics based on natural law and emphasized activities that would now be understood as field work 

and interdisciplinary study. The fruitful partnership between economics and theology illustrated 

throughout Aquinas and the Market found its embodiment in the scholars of the School. Familiar 

with the account of the Fall in Genesis, these scholars recognized that human choice is “not about 

efficiently getting what we want so much as it is about learning how to want what is genuinely 

good” (Hirschfeld 84).  

 

5. Concluding Thoughts 

One of the virtues of the economic way of thinking from a moral perspective is that it teaches its 

students to focus on the unseen effects of a choice. In Aquinas and the Market, Hirschfeld 

thoroughly illustrates the disorder that arises when human choice is both modeled and guided by 

purely material metrics. It need not be so, and Hirschfeld offers a vision of a humane economics 

that is founded upon a richer view of the human person. However, by its nature of a scientific 

discipline practiced by imperfect human persons, economics will never be able to solve anything 

more than technical and economic problems, no matter how accurate its model of the human 



59 Boettke and Jace 

   

person. We argue that the mainline economics tradition offers a more fitting approach to the 

economic view of the person, without stepping into the business of moral prescription. Moral 

problems can only be worked out by the individuals and communities with the necessary 

contextual knowledge and best-aligned incentives. The School of Salamanca contains various 

elements of what Hirschfeld is looking for from economics—the full realism of imperfection 

married to a vision for a better person. What enabled these scholars to take this approach was the 

fact that they were active professors, priests, and confessors. For this reason, we see this text 

bearing the most fruit in faith communities which possess the necessary knowledge and incentives 

to help one another in living their freedom to choose excellently.  

Let us end with another appeal to Hirschfeld regarding the potential opportunity to diagnose 

the shortcomings of mainstream economics for participating in the cultural conversations she 

hopes to cultivate. The reason why the mainline economics of Adam Smith and David Hume, of 

J. B. Say and J.S. Mill, and of Carl Menger and Alfred Marshall was displaced by the mainstream 

economics of J.M. Keynes and Paul Samuelson in the second half of the twentieth century was, as 

Hirschfeld alludes to, the hubris of economists as social engineers. Economics in the process was 

transformed from a tool of social understanding in the hands of the classical political economists 

to a tool of social engineering in the hands of the economic scientists of the neoclassical 

synthesis.20 

There were pockets of resistance to this transformation, and Hirschfeld’s effort to reconstruct 

economics along lines that could usefully dialogue with theology might benefit from more 

engagement with the ideas of these resistors. The challenge to the hubristic excess of modern 

mainstream economics was not relegated to heterodox edges but finds adherence among notable 

Nobel Prize winning economists. In F.A. Hayek’s Nobel Lecture in 1974, “The Pretense of 

Knowledge,” he begins by imploring his fellow economists to recognize that they had indeed made 

a mess of things. He warns that the scientistic attitude which modern mainstream economics had 

adopted not only threatened to reduce the discipline to the state of charlatanism but places the 

economists in the position of tyrant over their fellow citizens and potential destroyers of 

civilization. Economists, Hayek insists, are students of civilization—never saviors. We must be 

restricted to this role if we are going to effectively prevent the hubristic tendencies of economists 

to turn them into dangers to society. Prior to his lecture, Hayek also made dinner remarks arguing 



Creativity and Cleverness within Discipline 60 

   

that a Nobel Prize in economics should not have been created since it gave too much authority to 

its recipients in matters of public policy discussions. 

Hayek was not alone in calling for humility in our discipline. James Buchanan begins his 1986 

Nobel address by telling the audience that we economists must cease practicing our professional 

task as if our job was to offer advice to a benevolent despot. This is not our job, and never was 

appropriate for us to assume this was our job within a functioning democratic society. Elinor 

Ostrom, in her 2009 Nobel lecture entitled “Beyond Markets and States,” joined the group of 

voices calling for a more humble and ultimately more democratic approach to social science and 

public policy. She sums up what she has learned as follows: 

 

The most important lesson for public policy analysis derived from the intellectual 

journey I have outlined here is that humans have a more complex motivational 

structure and more capability to solve social dilemmas than posited in earlier 

rational-choice theory. Designing institutions to force (or nudge) entirely self-

interested individuals to achieve better outcomes has been the major goal posited 

by policy analysts for governments to accomplish for much of the past half century. 

Extensive empirical research leads me to argue that instead, a core goal of public 

policy should be to facilitate the development of institutions that bring out the best 

in humans. We need to ask how diverse polycentric institutions help or hinder the 

innovativeness, learning, adapting, trustworthiness, levels of cooperation of 

participants, and the achievement of more effective, equitable, and sustainable 

outcomes at multiple scales.21 

 

Humility and a sense of awe at the amazing cleverness and creativity in the face of a wide variety 

of social dilemmas that the subjects of our studies exhibit must move to the center of our 

professional mindset and inform the economic contribution to the broader cultural conversation 

that Mary Hirschfeld’s Aquinas and the Market invites us to join. 

 

 

 

 



61 Boettke and Jace 

   

Notes 

 

1. “Natural and Artifactual Man” 110 in What Should Economists Do? 

2. “A theological economics is, of course, of immediate interest for believers who worry 

about how to reconcile their economic pursuits with their faith commitments” (3). 

3. It is important to stress from the beginning of our commentary that Hirschfeld is primarily 

talking about the cultural conversation, and not public policy advice. She practices great 

intellectual humility, and her writing throughout is inviting and open to a multiplicity of 

perspectives. Our criticisms are primarily raising the possibility of “sins of omission” not 

“sins of commission" that could be important correctives to the dialogue. 

4. One of us (Boettke) is an author of the textbook, The Economic Way of Thinking from the 

10th thru 13th (2003–2014) editions of the book. Hirschfeld singles out this textbook 

(202n25) as equating reason with instrumental reasoning of the means/ends variety of 

positive economics. The book does spend a lot of time trying to get students to understand 

the implications of scarcity and thus trade-offs, but the book explicitly recognizes the limits 

of economics. The original author, Paul Heyne, as a matter of personal history, traveled a 

similar path to that of Hirschfeld’s though in the opposite direction—from student of 

theology to student of economics. He wrestled throughout this intellectual career with the 

dialogue between the two disciplines. See not only the concluding chapter to the various 

editions on “The Limits of Economics,” but also his collection of essays “Are Economists 

Basically Immoral?” and other Essays on Economics, Ethics and Religion. Hirschfeld’s 

singling out of this work as representative is a missed opportunity we see throughout her 

book because the approach is a decidedly “catalactic” or “exchange” paradigm rather than 

an “optimizing” and “allocation” one. The key mantra in this discussion in The Economic 

Way of Thinking is that economics cannot tell anyone whether profits are deserved or not, 

but economics can inform on the consequences of various answers to that question. We 

will return to this theme about what economics can, and cannot, offer to the broader cultural 

conversation. 

5. See Hayek, “The Use of Knowledge in Society.” 



Creativity and Cleverness within Discipline 62 

   

6. See Buchanan, “What Should Economists Do?” (1964) in What Should Economists Do?; 

also see Kohn. 

7. See The Bourgeois Virtues, “Not by P Alone: A Virtuous Economy,” and Bourgeois 

Dignity. 

8. Hirschfeld points out that, for Aquinas, “human actions are also always moral actions […]. 

An action that does not move us toward our own perfection is a morally bad act, but it 

would also be inefficient in that it is incoherent to think of an efficient movement away 

from our proper end” (70).  

9. Boettke’s Living Economics and F.A. Hayek, Mainline Economics (eds. Boettke, Haeffele 

and Storr), and Mitchell and Boettke’s Applied Mainline Economics have made the 

distinction between mainline and mainstream economists. Hirschfeld is understandably 

focused on an engagement with mainstream economics as defined over the past half-

century, but economics has a longer history and a more philosophically nuanced and 

sophisticated treatment of these issues that is much closer to her own position. We believe 

she could usefully leverage this tradition so we will discuss this possibility. 

10. Hirschfeld states: “Aquinas, of course, is not addressing an audience of potential policy 

makers. In the prologue to the Summa Theologica, he says his intent in writing is to offer 

a better introduction to theological science than was available. It is meant for the 

‘instruction of beginners.’ Aquinas’s target audience was young Dominicans studying for 

the priesthood, and the immediate need for a coherent theological treatment was for priests 

to offer parishioners practical guidance” (200, emphasis added). 

11. An example of this: “For Aquinas, prudence is not an exercise in constrained maximization 

[…] it is the virtue that perfects all of our decision making, not just those decisions taken 

in light of our own narrow self-interest” (110, emphasis added). Or another case: “A 

fundamental argument in favor of markets is that they maximize welfare. Is that argument 

as powerful if we pause and remind ourselves that technically all that means is that markets 

meet consumers’ preferences as well as possible?” (48, emphasis added). There are a few 

ways in which one could take issue with the understanding of consumer preferences 

implied in this statement but suffice it to say that for the majority of the world, what 



63 Boettke and Jace 

   

economists describe as “consumer preferences” is a father’s desire for food for his family 

to a mother’s wish for her daughter’s education. 

12. Importantly, Aquinas acknowledges the primacy of self-love: “accordingly, a man ought, 

out of charity, to love himself more than he loves any other person” (ST II–II: 26: 4). 

13. In Governing the Commons, Elinor Ostrom addresses the intellectual discipline that 

economic reasoning provides in discussions about social systems of exchange, production 

and distribution. “As an institutionalist studying empirical phenomena,” she states,  

I presume that individuals try to solve problems as effectively as they can. 

That assumption imposes a discipline on me. Instead of presuming that 

some individuals are incompetent, evil, or irrational, and others are 

omniscient, I presume that individuals have very similar limited capabilities 

to reason and figure out the structure of complex environments. It is my 

responsibility as a scientist to ascertain what problems individuals are trying 

to solve and what factors help or hinder them in these efforts. When the 

problems that I observe involve lack of predictability, information, and 

trust, as well as high levels of complexity and transactional difficulties, then 

my efforts to explain must take these problems overtly into account rather 

than assuming them away. (25–26) 

Also see where Ostrom argues that the metaphor of the prisoners’ dilemma is precisely the 

wrong metaphor because in that game the prisoners are unable to change the constraints, 

and what she wants to explore is how the creative and clever actors within potential 

dilemmas craft new rules to the game that engender outcomes other than “remorseless 

tragedies” (7). 

14. “Final and perfect happiness can consist in nothing else than the vision of the Divine 

Essence. To make this clear, two points must be observed. First, that man is not perfectly 

happy, so long as something remains for him to desire and seek: secondly, that the 

perfection of any power is determined by the nature of its object” (ST I–II: 3: 8).  



Creativity and Cleverness within Discipline 64 

   

15. Note here that a thoroughgoing subjectivism of, say, the founders of the marginalist 

revolution such as Carl Menger and especially the development of that subjectivist 

approach to value, costs, and expectations by subsequent thinkers such as Ludwig von 

Mises, F. A. Hayek, G. L. S. Shackle, and James M. Buchanan might avoid some of the 

pitfalls Hirschfeld attributes to textbook neoclassical economics. 

16. We are not pursuing this line of thought, but it would be a worthy exercise (in our opinion) 

to explore the confessor role in moral education with Adam Smith’s discussion of the 

impartial spectator in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). 

17. See Grice-Hutchinson and Jace. 

18. See Hirschfeld (200) and the material quoted above in n6 concerning Aquinas’s intended 

audience and his instructional purpose. 

19. Mercado 51. 

20. See Boettke, “Economics and Public Administration.” 

21. Ostrom, “Beyond Markets and States” 237. 

 

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Buchanan, James. What Should Economists Do? Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1979. 



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