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PhD Thesis Wout Vandermeulen, version public defence.pdf
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; Druwé, Wouter- Abstract
- (en) This project is situated on the crossroads between law, morality, economics, ethics and theology. Through an analysis of the shifting early modern economic, legal and political context, it examines changing ideas within legal and moral theological thought related to situations of economic dominance (then known as "monopolia"). An analysis of over 500 primary sources lays out the basic framework of proto-competition law thinking in the work of learned jurists and the current of moral theologians known as "the School of Salamanca". The second part of the thesis then examines the link, alleged by a number of recent publications, between German Ordoliberalism in the 20th century and this early modern framework. Which elements of early modern ideas, if any, survived into the modern world? It established that the School of Salamanca can, in fact, be considered to be the first intellectual current within the Western tradition to provide a comprehensive model for the normative analysis of new phenomena related to economic power emerging during the 16th and 17th centuries. This model was based on a broad reading of the term "monopolium", and hallmarked by a principal prohibition with large leeway for exceptions, notably in case of monopolistic privileges granted by the Sovereign. The project then affirmed that Salmantine scholasticism strongly influenced not only subsequent generations of moral theologians until the 20th century, but also scholars belonging to the learned legal and (proto-)economic traditions. Indeed, a strain of continuity within centuries of intellectual developments was discovered: throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, the main outlook on "monopolia" (or their vulgarised equivalents) was determined by a normative system based on a morally-loaded system of "natural law". This "natural law" served as an ontologically superior order which determined that trade and exchange should principally be free. The degree to which exceptions to this freedom were possible was of course the topic of debate in all three traditions, but this basic outlook -- which was conceived first by the School of Salamanca, to which many authors from different disciplines explicitly referred -- remained dominant until the second half of the 19th century. Consideration was then made of the German Ordoliberals, who are classically seen as one of the main sources of inspiration for the modern framework of European competition law as it has existed since the 1950s. Even though they were naturally an intellectual current shaped by the experiences of the first decades of the 20th century, a degree of indirect influence from the School of Salamanca was nevertheless discovered. Naturally, certain fundamental elements of their theories differed from the outlook of the Early Modern Period (e.g. the role of the price mechanism), but it was demonstrated that a string of tradition carrying notions of "natural law" and "the natural order" as criteria of legitimacy persisted between the 16th century and the German Ordoliberal School. It was thus confirmed that the normative connection between pre-modern and modern in the history of competition is an element which has been fundamentally overlooked in existing scholarship. The project is thus not only an exploration of this underestimated connection, but also an appeal for future research projects into this notion, as well as legal history more generally speaking.
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Citations
Vandermeulen, W. (2026). The natural roots : the early modern framework of competition-law thinking (16th-18th centuries) and its reception, with a specific focus on German ordoliberalism (20th Century). https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/276968