By James M. Kushiner, The Fellowship of St. James -
The Enlightenment may claim many successes because of science and technology, but it failed economics. John D. Mueller argues in his 2010 book Redeeming Economics: Rediscovering the Missing Element, that modern Enlightenment views of economics suffer from the omission of factors that had previous been considered central to a complete understanding of human economics.
Basically, there are four activities key to classical human economics, as developed by Thomas Aquinas, following Aristotle and Augustine: Humans produce, exchange, distribute, and consume goods.
Adam Smith, considered the father of modern economics, says Mueller, simplified this scheme, eliminating two of the four elements, distribution and consumption. Rather than focusing on marketplace supply and demand and price, which "produce" and "exchange" deal with, "economics is essentially a theory of providence. It mostly concerns human providence, describing how we provide for ourselves and other persons we love, using scarce means that have alternate uses." (3-4) Mueller proceeds to present economics in detail on three levels of operation: personal, domestic, and political, because, we are, as Aristotle put it, "rational, matrimonial, and political animals." (5) The matrimonial is the domestic level.