What can we learn from Luther today? Here are a few clues, tentative and certainly selective, and by all means subjective. They are answers, which the material presented in the preceding pages can – but by no means has to – offer especially in the light of the issues of our times (this is one but by no means the main or exclusive function of history). Times will move on and situations change; therefore, the following points are above all a snapshot. However, as has been argued in previous chapters, the crucial points Luther made in this text are timeless, and chances are that they will be equally important to economic reasoning in future decades if not centuries to come, in a similar way as they applied to Reformation Germany at the dawn of the modern age. They are by no means exhaustive or authoritative; the reader is left to choose her own interpretation by reading the original pamphlet Von Kauffshandlung und Wucher (On Commerce and Usury, 1524) herself which is presented in a new translation at the end of the present volume.

Lesson Number One: We do not have to accept the economy and financial markets as a given. This does not mean that free markets in general, and deregulated financial markets in particular, are bad things per se. But rather than working to some often invoked eternal economic laws, the economy and markets are malleable. We are – that means we ought to be – in control of markets and not the other way round. In recent years, especially with the recent elections to the European Parliament (May 2014) people have, for instance, voiced their anxiety relating to specific problems of governance vs. agency. There seems to be an increasing awareness of the power we have taken away from the states over the past thirty years or so and handed over to supra-territorial institutions which are not under democratic control any more but will implement major decisions that are likely to affect the well-being of society at large without much possibility of the community or society to control or respond to these things.