This MedLibrary.org supplementary page on Natural economy is provided directly from the open source Wikipedia as a service to our readers. Please see the note below on authorship of this content, as well as the Wikipedia usage guidelines. To search for other content from our encyclopedia supplement, please use the form below:
Related Sponsors
 |
Please help improve this article or section by expanding it. Further information might be found on the talk page or at requests for expansion. (September 2007) |
 |
This article or section contains too many quotations for an encyclopedic entry. Please improve the article or discuss proposed changes on the talk page. You can the article to add more encyclopedic text or link the article to a page of quotations, possibly one of the same name, on Wikiquote. See Wikipedia's guide to writing better articles for further suggestions. (March 2008) |
| Part of a series on |
| Economic systems |
| Economic ideologies |
| Anarchist · Capitalist · Communist Corporatist · Fascist · Georgist Islamic · Laissez-faire Market socialist · Mercantilist Protectionist · Socialist Syndicalist · Third Way |
| Sectors and systems |
| Closed (Autarky) · Digital · Dual Gift · Informal · Market · Mixed Natural · Open · Participatory Planned · Subsistence Underground · Virtual |
| Other types of economies |
| Anglo-Saxon · Feudal · Global Hunter-gatherer · Information Newly industrialized country Palace · Plantation · Post-capitalist Post-industrial · Social market Socialist market · Token Traditional · Transition |
|
Business and economics portal |
Natural economy refers to a type of economy in which money is not used in the transfer of resources among people. It is a system that instead uses the exchange of goods and services through direct bartering or trade.
Belgian economic historian Henri Pirenne noted that:
"German economists have invented the term Naturalwirtschaft, natural economy, to describe the period prior to the invention of money. (...) The writers who describe this period as one of natural economy obviously do not intend the term to be understood in any absolute sense. They are well aware that ever since its invention, money has been in continuous use among all the civilised people of the West, and that the Roman Empire handed it on without interruption to its succession states. Thus when the early Middle Ages are described as a period of natural economy, all that is meant is that the part played by money was then so small as to be almost negligible. Undoubtedly there is a good deal of truth in this contention; but at the same time we must be on our guard against exaggeration" (Henri Pirenne, Economic and social history of medieval Europe. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1936, p. 103-104).
The term is also used by Karl Marx in his economic writings such as Grundrisse and Capital. Marx comments as follows:
Natural economy, money-economy, and credit-economy have (...) been placed in opposition to one another as being the three characteristic economic forms of movement in social production. In the first place these three forms do not represent equivalent phases of development. The so-called credit-economy is merely a form of the money-economy, since both terms express functions or modes of exchange among the producers themselves. In developed capitalist production, the money-economy appears only as the basis of the credit-economy. The money-economy and credit-economy thus correspond only to different stages in the development of capitalist production, but they are by no means independent forms of exchange vis-à-vis natural economy. With the same justification one might contrapose as equivalents the very different forms of natural economy to those two economies. In the second place, since it is not the economy, i.e., the process of production itself that is emphasised as the distinguishing mark of the two categories, money-economy and credit-economy, but rather the mode of exchange — corresponding to that economy — between the various agents of production, or producers, the same should apply to the first category. Hence exchange economy instead of natural economy. A completely isolated natural economy, such as the Inca state of Peru, would not come under any of these categories. - Capital Vol. 2, chapter 4 [1]
 |
This economics or finance-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |
Wikipedia content modification information:
- This page was last modified on 27 September 2008, at 14:37.
Wikipedia Authorship and Review
Wikipedia content provided here is not reviewed directly by MedLibrary.org. Wikipedia content is authored by an open community of volunteers and is not produced by or in any way affiliated with MedLibrary.org.
Wikipedia Usage Guidelines
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article on "Natural economy".
The URL for this specific entry is:
All Wikipedia text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. (See Copyrights for details). Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.