6 - The just price and the just wage

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Prices and wages were closely connected and often discussed together in the medieval period. According to a thirteenth-century Roman lawyer, ‘A price is given according to the estimate of a thing, but a wage according to the estimate of the use of a thing.’ In estimating a wage, the ‘thing’ being used was labour: a wage was the price for the use of someone's labour. Yet often the labour of a craftsman or merchant was one of the factors taken into account when a price was fixed, so that, too, was to some extent a ‘wage’. In scholastic literature prices tended to overshadow wages because scholastics were not usually wage-earners. Lawyers, however, were equally concerned with both, if only because they involved the legal concept of justice.

Justice became attached to prices and wages because both were the result of a balance, supposedly a fair one, achieved between two parties, seller and buyer or employer and employee. As Aquinas appreciated:

a reward is something repaid to someone in return for work, as a sort of price paid for it. Thus just as the payment of the just price for goods received from someone is an act of justice, so too the payment of a reward for work is an act of justice.

Scholastics and lawyers built on different foundations – the former on divine law and on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics (v, v); the latter on certain texts of Roman law. This often led them to differing conclusions.