Anthony Gill (University of Washington - Department of Political Science; Baylor University) has posted Of Principals, Agents, and Transaction Costs: A Response to d'Avray (Public Choice. Forthcoming 2025) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Can the organization and actions of the medieval Christian Church and its leaders be understood through the theoretical lens of economics and public choice? This is the central question raised by noted Oxford historian David d’Avray in his review of the works of Robert Ekelund, Robert Tollison, and collaborators. While d’Avray has many specific issues with Ekelund and Tollison’s (henceforth ET) analysis, he centers his main critique on whether the Christian Church can be understood as a centralized economic firm. Instead of resembling a modern corporation, d’Avray holds that “the medieval church [sic] was a multitude of discrete systems within a common legal framework” (p. 1). He does grant that the Church was “a unified system in some respects: compulsorily unified in belief and held together by the system of canon law” (p. 3 emphasis added). However, General Motors, the illustrative example used in Sacred Trust (Ekelund et al., 1996: 20), and the Church are two different beasts (p. 3). This is consistent with d’Avray’s assertions that an economic analysis of the Church as a firm is at best a metaphor even though ET assert it is literally a firm (see p. 1, 5, and 7). By insinuating that economics can provide no more than metaphor, he essentially denies ET any credible claim to causal explanation. This is unfortunate given that the Church is the most enduring hierarchical institution human history has known, lasting for at least 1,700 years if not two millennia. Economic theory in its many guises has added immensely to our understanding of complex organizations. Any organizational structure capable of lasting millennia, and attracting a billion adherents, should fall within the explanatory domain of public choice, if not political economy more broadly
