----------------- HES POSTING ----------------- Dear Ms.Dugan: Towards the end of your message you wrote:"Millenium is a long time.What about Thomas Aquinas ?HE STARTED TO SPEAK ABOUT PROFIT IN A MORE POSITIVE WAY". Your statement has merit only if you ignore other civilizations (in particular medieval Islamic civilizations). Some of us engaged in what we have called the Schumpeterian Great Gap thesis debate have tried to argue against the Eurocentrism of the Schumpeterian Gap thesis; we have demonstrated that various Arab, Persian and other Muslim thinkers wrote and discussed many issues we now discuss in economics before Aquinas. Muslim scholars,who inherited Greek and Iranian (i.e., Persian) thought ,and Islamic ethos, viewed economics ,and thus profits very positively and discussed many economic concepts discussed in Europe later on. These scholars, many of whose writings were translated to Latin, influenced Aquinas and others in economics. In a HOPE paper (1998) I even traced Adam Smith's division of labor to these scholars (including Smith's celebrated pin factory example).In fact,it was the writings of Islamic cholars( Ghazali,Ibn Sina,Ibn Rushd,etc.) that introduced Aquinas to Aristotle. Remember that before the call to Islam, Mohammad and his companion engaged in trade extensivelyand as some have argued, "The Meccan milieu of Mohammad his followers was a business milieu." Historian S.D.Goitein has discussed the emergence of a bourgeoisie in early Islamic history which lasted for several centuries. For the economic content of the medieval Islamic scholars you can see the works of Essis, Ghazanfar, Hosseini and others (in HOPE and elsewhere ). Sincerely, Hamid Hosseini ------------ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ------------ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]