page_title: History of economic thought
section_title: Duns Scotus
hierarchical_section_title: History of economic thought / Economic thought in the Middle Ages (500–1500 AD) / Duns Scotus
caption_attribution_description: English: John Duns Scotus One of Scotland's greatest men and arguably the most forward thinking man of the 13th century. John of Dunse (as it was then spelt) was so controversial because of his forward thinking, many thought he was mad. Hence the word dunse or dunce for a poor scholar. He was educated at the Franciscan Grammar school in Haddington and though he never joined the Franciscan brotherhood,he is revered within that order. There are Duns Scotus colleges on the Continent. This statue stands in the public park of his home town, Duns in Berwickshire.
context_page_description: The history of economic thought deals with different thinkers and theories in the subject that became political economy and economics, from the ancient world to the present day in the 21st Century. This field encompasses many disparate schools of economic thought. Ancient Greek writers such as the philosopher Aristotle examined ideas about the art of wealth acquisition, and questioned whether property is best left in private or public hands. In the Middle Ages, scholasticists such as Thomas Aquinas argued that it was a moral obligation of businesses to sell goods at a just price.
  In the Western world, economics was not a separate discipline, but part of philosophy until the 18th–19th century Industrial Revolution and the 19th century Great Divergence, which accelerated economic growth.
context_section_description: One of Aquinas' main critics was Duns Scotus (1265–1308), originally from Duns Scotland, who taught in Oxford, Cologne, and Paris.  In his work Sententiae (1295), he thought it possible to be more precise than Aquinas in calculating a just price, emphasizing the costs of labor and expenses, although he recognized that the latter might be inflated by exaggeration because buyer and seller usually have different ideas of a just price. If people did not benefit from a transaction, in Scotus' view, they would not trade. Scotus said merchants perform a necessary and useful social role by transporting goods and making them available to the public.
caption: Duns Scotus (1265–1308)
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