Erkölcsi norma és politikai gazdaságtan (13−21. század)
Moral Norm and Political Economy (13th–20th Century)

Summary/Abstract: This article focuses on the existence of norms of justice within economic systems – past and present. Are they spontaneously produced by the economic system? If not, is it possible to introduce into an economic system values that are foreign to it? To what extent can public authorities, institutions or individuals intervene to establish economic variables of great importance (prices, wages, interest rates, etc.) at a level of a predetermined standard of justice? These questions have a long history in the Western tradition, where economy was sufficiently developed for market exchanges and market prices to play an important role. The study first addresses the notion of fair price developed by theologians and scholastic jurists from the thirteenth century onwards, in order to propose a norm to control the market and ensure fair exchanges. The paper then turns to the invention of the notion of competition. Can the market itself produce fair prices if competition is free and efficient? This question has been debated at length by economists from the eighteenth century onwards, especially by the German ordoliberalism of the 1930s, which sought the conditions to establish a competitive order (Wettbewerbsordnung), a notion at the root of the economic philosophy of the Treaty of Rome (1957) and the European Union. Lastly, it deals with the way in which economic science today introduces the norm of justice into economic reasoning, with the work of George Akerlof and Janet Yellen on fair wages, and that of experimental economics on the sense of justice among economic agents.

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