Many times the Jesuit Juan de Mariana (1535-1624) has been presented like a “communist”, or a
“socialist”, or an “individualist”, a “classical liberal”, a “libertarian”, an “austrian economist”.
The first consideration someone can do is all these traditions are very different each other and the
second is that, apparently, they have few in common with catholic tradition. In this work the author
tries to describe the complex intellectual world in which Juan de Mariana gave his contribution to
economic thought, supposedly in the same line of the tradition of future Austrian Economics. In fact,
according with recent studies of many authors, the prehistory of the Austrian School of Economics
can be found in the works of the Spanish Scholastics, written in that historical period which is
known as the “Spanish Golden Century” and ran from the mid-sixteenth century through the
seventeenth century. According with Friedrich A. Hayek, some researches by Marjorie Grice-
Hutchinson, Raymond de Roover and Murray N. Rothbard demonstrate that the basic principles of
the theory of the competitive market were worked out by the Spanish Scholastics of the School of
Salamanca and that economic liberalism was not designed by the Calvinists, but by the Spanish
Jesuits. The works written by Alejandro Antonio Chafuen and Jesús Huerta de Soto stressed that
perhaps the most libertarian of all the scholastics, particularly in his later works, was exactly Father
Mariana. There is no dubt that Mariana has anticipated some important points of Austrian
Economics, but is this enough to think about him like a libertarian? It’s possible to give two different
answers to this question, both correct: the first one as an economist, and the second one as a
historian of political thought.
