Abstract
The concept of sufficiency—what it meant to have enough—was fundamentally a religious category in early modern England, debated through a series of scriptural passages, notably the petition in the Lord’s Prayer for daily bread. In the era of the Reformation, Protestant writers interpreted these passages to require the equitable redistribution of wealth so that everyone might have enough. In the increasingly capitalist context of Elizabethan and Stuart England, however, these passages were reinterpreted to authorize private wealth, culminating in the work of John Locke, for whom the accumulation of riches represented sufficiency rather than excess because money, unlike bread, does not spoil. This article thus traces the process by which the Christian ethics of sufficiency ceased to provide a theoretical constraint upon capitalism.
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Notes
- 1.
I would like to refer the reader also to Kaye (2014), where the history of balance across a similar period is examined. His conclusions resonate with my own, and balance or equilibrium is, in many ways, a cognate concept with that of sufficiency. An inspiring examination of the interplay between market prerogatives and morality is to be found in Davis (2013).
- 2.
There are striking resonances here with the later Protestant reconfiguration of ‘sufficiency’ in the light of ‘callings’, as described in Ethan Shagan’s chapter.
- 3.
This can be viewed at http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/Viewer.aspx?ref=add_ms_54180_f136v.
- 4.
Much is often made of the association between Jewish communities and usury. Two observations are important here: usury was increasingly practiced by Christians, exploiting the loopholes explored later in this article; and Jewish law did not straightforwardly allow usurious practices, but was, if anything, more subtle and nuanced than Christian law on this point (Soloveitchik 1989, pp. 340–341).
- 5.
It would be anachronistic to push this too far. There is no straightforward intellectual genealogy to establish here, and the methods of the medieval scholastics differed substantially. It is, nevertheless, striking that similar discourses emerged in comparable historical situations of rapid population growth and economic expansion.
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Skoda, H. (2019). Enough-ness in the Later Middle Ages. In: Ingleby, M., Randalls, S. (eds) Just Enough. Palgrave Pivot, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56210-4_3
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