A MARGIN NOTE ON MEDIEVAL THOUGHT ABOUT MONEY AND THE INTEREST RATE

摘要

In the medieval period, the issue of interest was highly significant in economic discussion. Despite a shared vision of money, the Islamic world and Christian West in the late middle ages had different attitudes to the legitimacy of interest. This divergence has been interpreted by neo-Institutional-ist theory in the light of the religious institutions' power to influence the economic side of society. Conclusions differ if the analysis comes from a Veblenian Institutionalist perspective. This approach in fact shows that while in Christian Europe interest rate theory developed hand-in-hand with the unfolding of the multiple functions of money in a society gradually evolving towards capitalism and with the secularization of economics, in the Islamic West, partly due to a different development of the socio-economic fabric, there were contrasting outcomes both in the role played by monetary financial institutions and in the developments of theoretical thought.