The legal treatment of labour by the School of Salamanca

In the Europe of the Catholic Counter-Reformation, the theological treatises of the early modern scholastics aimed to moralise the emerging economic and social life of their time. Although casuistry prevented any unified conception of labour, it is nonetheless possible to identify a philosophical and legal doctrine linking God, the political community and the labour of every officer, banker, money-changer, merchant, craftsman, worker and labourer. Each occupation ensures the temporal survival and spiritual salvation of the individual in the service of the political community, provided it is exercised in accordance with the virtue of justice.