History of Economic Analysis part 21 doc

The author regrets ‘that younge studentes be alwayes over hastye in utterynge theire Jugementes,’ and the ‘scysme in matter of relygyen’; recommends better training all round, going so f

Continent.9 Instead of attempting to do this we shall, however, follow a much easier course that is fortunately open to us There are a number of publications that may be considered as general surveys of the economics of the time In part, at least, they supply what we need We shall confine ourselves to the most widely known of these treatises.10

The Discourse of the Common Weal contains three dialogues that deal with a wide

variety of topics The author regrets ‘that younge studentes be alwayes over hastye in utterynge theire Jugementes,’ and the ‘scysme in matter of relygyen’; recommends better training all round, going so far as to consider superiority in ‘lernynge’ as one of the reasons for Julius Caesar’s victory over Pompey; condemns enclosures in so far as they turn arable land into pasture; criticizes the rising business corporations and their monopolistic practices; disapproves of debased currency and of inflation that hurts people whose incomes do not react promptly, such as the laborers,11 landlords, and even the King’s Highness; recommends the fostering of young industries as well as the accumulation of a monetary fund for emergencies (‘sodeyne eventes’)—money being as

it were a ‘storehouse of any commodity’ and nervus bellorum; does not favor the export

of raw materials, especially of wool; frowns upon these ‘straungers’ who sell nothing but frivolous stuff that costs them little though the English pay dearly for it, and buy in return good honest English goods, if indeed they do buy anything and do not take ‘monye 9

The best way for the reader to satisfy himself of this quickly is to glance through the source book

already mentioned, Bland, Brown, and Tawney, English Economic History: Select Documents (1914), and through the still more useful compilation, Tawney and Power, Tudor Economic

Documents, being select documents illustrating the economic and social history of Tudor England

(3 vols., 1924), the third volume of which contains ‘pamphlets, memoranda, and literary extracts.’ 10

This is a book entitled A Compendious or briefe examination of certayne ordinary complaints, of divers of our countrymen in these our days: which although they are in some part iniust

frivolous, yet are they all by way of dialogues throughly debated discussed To Miss Elizabeth Lamond we owe an excellent critical edition under the title A Discourse of the Common Weal of this Realm of England (1893), which besides the text presents the results of careful researches into

the nature and the origin of the work She attributed it to John Hales, a public official who also served in parliament and on the commission on enclosures of 1548, and assumed that it was written

in 1549 Both statements have been questioned But for us it is more important to note that the edition printed in 1581, and from which were made all the later editions (1751, 1808, 1813, 1876), differs from an earlier one (1565), the most important difference being the addition of a passage on the causes of the rise in general prices: whereas the edition of 1565 speaks only of the deterioration

of the coinage, the later one also mentions the increase in the supply of the precious metals

Whoever made this addition therefore may be entitled to a share in such credit as this ‘discovery’ deserves, though Bodin’s priority (Response aux paradoxes de Monsieur de Malestroit, 1568; see

below, ch 6), not only as to publication but also as to the discovery itself, is of course established beyond doubt by the existence of the volume of 1565 On the works of Clement Armstrong or Armeston that would have served our purpose equally well, see S.T.Bindoff’s paper in the

Economic History Review, 1944

11

The Elizabethan Statute of Apprenticeship, 1562/3 (5 Eliz c 4), introduced, however, what we should call index wages: that is to say, wage rates were to be adjusted annually according to the changes in the cost of living

currant’ outright, which they prefer to do of late; feels that foreign commodities should

be taxed so that domestic producers might be able to compete; wants to see the nation’s

money kept in the country and to recover that which has already left it And so on

From these indications, the reader should be able to draw a picture of our author’s economics Of course, it was popular—preanalytic—economics But most of it was sound common sense The ‘doctor’ of the dialogues was evidently a thoroughly reasonable man and never said anything that would seem absurd to the intelligent layman

or politician of today In one respect, however, he was especially reasonable for his time

He distrusted regulation less than did the liberals of the nineteenth century but more than

we do ourselves He did not like compulsion He wished to work with and not against the profit motive, which he considered quite essential Moreover, he sometimes saw below the surface of things For instance, he saw quite correctly that the encroachment of sheep runs upon the arable land had much to do with the policy that aimed at keeping wheat cheap by means of price fixing and export prohibitions, and thus defeated its purpose by altering the relative profitability of wheat and wool production in favor of the latter This piece of reasoning (analoga of which are frequently met with in the writings of the Consultant Administrators) goes beyond the obvious In its implications, it approaches the status of analytic work

4 THE SYSTEMS, 1600–1776

[(a) Representatives of the Earlier Stages.]

The richer developments of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are much more difficult to convey Keeping in mind our plan of campaign we shall, in this section, provisionally disregard everything else and go through with our survey of the

‘systematic’ literature of those two centuries until we reach the neighborhood of the

Wealth of Nations The earlier stages of this type of work will be represented by

Montchrétien for France, by Bornitz and Besold for Germany, and by Fernández Navarrete for Spain

Antoyne Montchrétien, Sieur de Watteville (c 1575–1621), Traicté de l’oeconomie politique (1615), seems to have been the first to publish a book under the title of Political

Economy This was, however, his only merit The book is a mediocre performance and completely lacking in originality Though there is a rough common sense about its recommendations, it abounds in elementary slips of reasoning that indicate a level of competence rather below than above its own time For a thoroughly different appraisal, see T.Funck-Brentano’s introduction to his edition of the work (1889), and also

P.Lavalley’s study, L’Oeuvre économique de Antoine de Montchrétien (1903)

Jacob Bornitz, Tractatus politicus de rerum sufficientia in republica et civitate procuranda (1625), an ill-digested compilation of economic facts; Christoph Besold’s (1577–1638) Collegium politicum (1614), Politicorum libri duo (1618), and, to mention another of his numerous works, Synopsis politicae doctrinae (1623), moved on the higher

level of the polyhistoric learning of this famous teacher, though he was inferior to Bornitz

in factual knowledge; his treatment of interest anticipated that of Salmasius; Bodin’s influence is unmistakable

Pedro Fernández Navarrete, Discursos (first 1621; later edition under the title Conservación de monarquías, 1626) This author, an officer of the Inquisition, displays a

remarkable freedom from the tendency of his (and our own) time to overstress the importance of the monetary factor and a not less remarkably sound judgment in maintaining that a normal process of industrialization would have gone far toward remedying the ills from which Spain was suffering (the value added to raw materials by human labor being much more important than gold and silver, see the sixteenth of his

fifty Discursos) and that this process was capable of being accelerated by removing

obstacles I feel fairly confident that I am right in preferring Fernández Navarrete’s

performance to that of the equally well-known Moncada (Discursos, 1619, republished as late as 1746 under the title Restauración politica de España) so far as ability to analyze is

concerned

Four further names will suffice to characterize what may be considered a more advanced stage: Martinez de la Mata, who developed a program of industrial policy on the lines of Fernández Navarrete; Seckendorff, who wrote the first outstanding treatise on the public administration and policy of German principalities; the great name of Sully, whom we neglect as we must; and Du Refuge (Philippe de Béthune), who went much beyond either Bodin or Montchrétien

Francisco Martinez de la Mata is known for his Memorial ó discursos en razón del remedio de la despoblación, pobreza y esterilidad de España (1650; the Epitome de los discursos…1701, is all I know; Sempere y Guarinos, op cit vol III contains extracts) This work of the self-styled ‘servant of the afflicted poor’ (siervo de los pobres afligidos)

must have been a great success The fundamental soundness of its main thesis—the same

as Navarrete’s—is, in fact, beyond doubt and was to be repeated by a chorus of later economists

Veit Ludwig von Seckendorff (1626–92), himself a distinguished administrator,

published in 1656 the Teutscher Fürstenstaat, the classic work of its genus Behind the

descriptive and pedagogic program there is a definite social vision and a definite policy The given end being a numerous and well-employed population, protection and internal freedom of industry and trade—which will of itself eliminate obsolete craft guilds— compulsory elementary education, and a system of taxation based upon the excise— which by bearing lightly on the higher incomes will increase employment—are the principal means envisaged We shall presently see that this was, and con-tinued to be, the typical program—and, by implication, the typical analysis of the German and Italian

‘cameralists’ throughout their careers, that is, up to the first decades of the nineteenth century The man who first formulated it definitely and correctly, and in doing so anticipated, in some points, the developments of more than a century to come, was no second-rater On the contrary, he towers high, as a man and as an intellect, above many a writer who figures much more prominently in these pages But explicit analysis, that is, conscious efforts to state relations of causation or interdependence, is hard to find in his work And what there is of it, is not up to much

Maximilien de Béthune (1560–1641), created Duke de Sully by Henry IV, the latter’s minister of finance, was a much greater and especially stronger man than was the most famous of his successors, Colbert He reformed the fiscal system of France most successfully and saw much beyond the range of what he actually accomplished Moreover, he knew—which is the criterion of greatness in a fiscal administrator—how to

make fiscal policy an element and tool of general economic policy His Économies royales (first publ 1638; a selection, which is all I know, has been republished in Guillaumin’s Petite bibliothèque économique) are substantially memoirs of his

administration and make, in their quaint form, charming and most instructive reading But there is no point in calling him a forerunner of the physiocrats, on the strength of his preoccupation with the welfare of the agrarian population and of his saying that

husbandry and pasture were the two mamelles of France Nothing can be more obvious

than that this man was entirely innocent of any theory whatever

Eustache Du Refuge’s* work, Le Conseiller d’estat ou recueil général de la politique moderne (1645), descends from that of Bodin The first forty chapters deal with the

various forms of government, tolerance, the duties of magistrates, conscription, and so on; Chapters 41 to 44 are to all intents and purposes a treatise on economics and economic policy in outline; the rest includes, among other things, public finance, especially taxation, and marks another step toward A.Smith’s Fifth Book Du Refuge’s economics is remarkable in several respects In particular he was the first author I know

of to distinguish and at the same time to co-ordinate the effects of ‘parsimonie’ (ch 44)

which conserves wealth and of l’espargne (hoarding, ch 49) which interferes with

commerce In this and in other points he made a creditable effort to analyze

Throughout the rest of the seventeenth and practically the whole of the eighteenth century the same type of work was turned out by an increasing number of writers, among whom academic teachers rapidly gained the majority In some countries, especially in Germany,

it was the main domestic source of economic teaching even in the first decades of the nineteenth century Much of it was, however, so distressingly unoriginal and so obviously written in response to demand rather than to creative impulse that there would be no point

in following its history in any detail For our purposes, that is to say, in order to get an idea of its general character and to see how far it had advanced at the threshold of the Smithian age, it will suffice to introduce two eighteenth-century authors of international reputation, Uztáriz and Justi, and to take up for discussion one of the works of the latter

Gerónimo Uztáriz (1670–1732) wrote a treatise entitled Theórica y práctica de comercio y de marina (1st ed 1724, two other editions

improved by the author himself), which may be said to be related to

Martinez de la Mata’s as the latter’s treatise is to Fernández Navarrete’s

It was translated into English and French and widely read and admired

The title is misleading in two respects First, it suggests limitation to

topics of international trade, whereas it deals comprehensively with practically all the problems of taxation, monopoly, population, and so on

that come within the range of ‘applied’ economics Second, the title also

suggests theoretical analysis, though none is to be found in the treatise:

*

[This work, Le Conseiller…(published anonymously), was attributed to Du Refuge when J.A.S

used it in the Kress Library; recently it has been attributed to Phillipe de Béthune, Comte de Selles

de Charost There is an English translation as early as 1634 which implies an earlier date for the original French publication.]

what he, like so many later economists, means by theory is criticism and recommendation as distinguished from the presentation of facts The care and space bestowed on the latter (he reprinted or extracted so many documents as to make his treatise serve the purposes of a source book) is what strikes the reader first The recommendations acquire for us additional historical interest when we remember that Uztáriz held public office of the policy-making kind at the time when Cardinal Alberoni was

at the head of affairs: the latter followed—not without considerable success—exactly the policy of armament and industrialization that Uztáriz recommended in the treatise which appeared five years after the Cardinal’s fall Whatever this fact may mean—the reader’s guess is as good as mine—our author must certainly be commended, considering the then situation of his country and the standpoint from which he viewed it, for the correctness of such analysis as may have been behind his recommendation

[(b) Justi: the Welfare State.]

Johann Heinrich Gottlob von Justi (1717–71) was a professor for part of his life and an administrator of public enterprises for another part His intellectual equipment covered all the natural-law philosophy of his and the preceding epoch but was enriched by practical experience in a way in which the two were rarely combined Of course, we must grant the professor a fair ration of ponderous triviality, and also allow for his way

of arriving at common-sense conclusions by a circuitous route that leads through questionable political philosophies An example will illustrate the latter point: freedom is absolute by virtue of natural law; only, as the professor has somewhere learnedly shown, it consists in freedom to obey the laws and the rulings of the bureaucracy; but the latter as taught by Justi is so very reasonable that after all we come out of the woods with the

result to be presented in the text Of Justi’s numerous works his System des Finanzwesens (System of Public Finance, 1766) has been chosen by Professor Monroe for partial publication in Early Economic Thought (1924) Our sketch in the text is based upon Die Grundfeste zu der Macht und Glück-seeligkeit der Staaten oder ausführliche Vorstellung der gesamten Polizeywissenschaft (The Groundwork of the Power and

Welfare of States or Comprehensive Presentation of the Science of Public Policy, 2 vols., 1760–61) We are concerned with the first volume only The second con-tains, in the spirit of that science of administration, dissertations on religion, science, the government of the private household, civic virtues, fire brigades, insurance—of which Justi was a

fervent advocate—regulation of dress, and the like His Staatswirtschaft

(1755) would have served equally well

Instead of Justi, I might have chosen Joseph von Sonnenfels (1732–

1817; Grundsätze der Polizey, Handlung, und Finanzwissenschaft, 1765–

7), who was in several respects superior to Justi, though in substance he

moved on the latter’s and Forbonnais’ lines The son of a Berlin rabbi, he

became, after emigrating to Vienna, one of the lights of that ‘age of reason’ and took part, both as an academic teacher (being the first professor of policy and cameral science in Vienna) and as a civil servant

in many of the legislative reforms of his time: he was a member of what

may be described as Joseph II’s brain trust His book remained the official

textbook within the Austro-Hungarian monarchy until 1848 The subject

of his inaugural lecture (1763) deserves to be noticed It was on the Inadequacy of Mere Experience in Economics

The subject of Justi’s inquiry is what German historians call the Welfare State

(Wohlfahrtsstaat) in its historic individuality and in all its aspects That is to say, he dealt

with economic problems from the standpoint of a government that accepts responsibility for the moral and economic conditions of life—just as modern governments do—in particular for everyone’s employment and livelihood, for the improvement of the methods and organization of production, for a sufficient supply of raw materials and foodstuffs, and so on through a long list of topics that include beautification of cities, fire insurance, education, sanitation, and what not Agriculture, manufactures, commerce, money, banking—all come in for discussion from this point of view, technological and organizational aspects receiving much attention But having thus pinned his faith to a principle of comprehensive public planning, he, like Seckendorff and most of the writers between these two, did not arrive at the practical conclusions this principle might lead us

to expect On the contrary, he was by no means blind to the inherent logic of economic phenomena, and did not wish to replace it by government fiat Price fixing, for instance, was a measure to which the government had the right and duty to resort for particular purposes in particular circumstances, but it was to be avoided as much as possible He took Mirabeau to task for teaching, among other ‘false, nonsensical, and monstrous doctrines,’ that the lowering of interest depends upon the will of government whereas actually ‘nothing is so little subject to it.’ Nor was he blind to the potentialities of free enterprise, on which he looked with detachment but without hostility In fact, notwithstanding his approval of government regulation, which goes so far as to make him admit the expediency of enforcing the production of certain things by government decree,

he stated as a general principle that all industry and commerce really needed was freedom and security Though he would not advise the liquidation of artisans’ guilds—because they were there and might just as well be used for filling some administrative functions

he considered useful—he nevertheless looked upon them as a nuisance and advised governments not to be hard on outsiders And, though he taught that high protective duties and even import prohibitions and compulsion to buy domestic products might

‘sometimes’ be in the public interest, he nevertheless declared it to be his opinion that ‘in general’ there should be no impediment to imports beyond an ad valorem duty of 10 per cent—a condition which none of us would be able to distinguish from unrestricted free trade

Many other instances could be adduced for what to nineteenth-century liberals simply spelled discreditable inconsistency, which they were inclined to attribute to the fact that Justi lived in a transitional age: while still a victim of exploded error, he could not quite shut his eyes to the new light But if we look more closely at the particular cases to which

he applied his principle of planning, a very different explanation suggests itself He saw the practical argument for laissez-faire not less clearly than did A.Smith, and his bureaucracy, while guiding and helping where necessary, was always ready to efface itself when no guidance or help seemed needed.1 Only he saw much more clearly than did the latter all the obstacles that stood in the way of its working according to design Also,

he was much more concerned than A.Smith with the practical problems of government action in the short-run vicissitudes of his time and country, and with particular difficulties

in which private initiative fails or would have failed under the conditions of the German industry of his time His laissez-faire was a laissez-faire plus watchfulness, his private-enterprise economy a machine that was logically automatic but exposed to breakdowns and hitches which his government was to stand ready to mend For instance, he accepted

as a matter of course that the introduction of labor-saving machinery would cause unemployment: but this was no argument against the mechanization of production

because, also as a matter of course, his government would find equally good employment

for the unemployed This, however, is not inconsistency but sense And, to us who are apt

to agree with him much more than we do with A.Smith, his vision of economic policy might look like laissez-faire with the nonsense left out.2 But two Spanish examples show still better than does Justi’s how well the best brains of that time knew their ‘applied economics’: I am referring to Campomanes and Jovellanos,3 who rose to prominence in the reform era of Charles III They were practical reformers in the line of economic liberalism, and neither bothered about nor contributed to the progress of analysis But they understood the economic process better than did many a theorist And, in view of the

date of Campomanes’ Discurso (1774) it is not without interest to observe how little, if anything, he stood to learn from the Wealth of Nations

1

This was not merely a dream It will be pointed out below that the bureaucracy of the typical German principality actually tried to behave like this

2

Such views, which were extremely common at the time, naturally assumed an anti-Smithian garb

that exaggerates the difference This was the case, e.g., with Justus von Möser (Patriotische Phantasien, 1774–86), whose name I also mention for another reason His interest in the

description of individual historical patterns—a sort of historical miniature painting—has induced some historians of thought to assign to him the position of early romanticist or forerunner of the historical school: an example of those unrealistic attributions that, once made, keep on distorting our views of groups and developments He was an excellent man, no doubt, but he was no

economist at all

3

Pedro Rodriguez, Count Campomanes (1723–1802) was by training a jurist-economist of the continental type A man of wide culture and great ability, he tried his hand, both in office and out of

it, on all the great economic problems of his time and country Of his writings, the one most

relevant to our purpose is his Discurso sobre el fomento de la industria popular (1774), which was

to move McCulloch to fervent eulogy The Respuesta fiscal (1764), concerning the grain trade,

should also be mentioned

Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos (1744–1811), a man of similar type but of a less prosperous career, among many other things wrote two reports, one on the liberty of the industrial arts (1785), and another, on behalf of the Royal Economic Society of Madrid, on agrarian legislation (1794), in both

of which the principles of economic liberalism are expounded, but judiciously tempered by

practical considerations They were published (1859) in the Biblioteca de Autores Españoles

However, their dates reduce their importance, as compared with Campomanes’ tracts, for the historian of economic thought

This covers, and indeed sums up, a large part of continental seventeenth-and eighteenth-century economics The reader should realize, however, that though in practical insight and practical usefulness, it was—at least as it came to be taught

eventually—hardly inferior to the Wealth of Nations, it also was, with the exception to be

noticed presently, completely outdistanced by the latter as regards analytic achievement Justi’s work exemplifies this weakness as clearly as it exemplifies those merits I have said that he was not blind to the inherent logic of economic phenomena But this was mere prescientific intuition He did nothing to show how they hang together and how they determine each other, which is where scientific economics begins He was not alive

to the necessity of proving propositions—for instance, his proposition that mechanization creates unemployment—or of using any tools not at the layman’s command His arguments were the arguments of untutored common sense; it was only when he argued against another author that he attempted any analysis at all And when he did so, he occasionally slipped up badly To quote an instance, he was not above pulling the

following atrocious boner: suppose that two countries, A and B, are exactly alike in every respect except that A holds twice as much monetary silver as B; while their states of welfare will be exactly equal, prices in A will be twice as high as prices in B; but owing

to the double quantity of money, A’s rate of interest will be half of B’s rate of interest and therefore A, producing more cheaply, will undersell B and keep on drawing money from

it, which will increase employment in A, and so on (Die Grundfeste, p 611)—and all that

in spite of the facts that his reasoning on interest was otherwise quite sensible, that in general he did not at all overrate the advantages that accrue to a country from an abundance of metals, and that he emphasized the basic importance of consumption not less than did A.Smith

[(c) France and England.]

The French civil servant was educated as an abbé or else as a lawyer Economics was not taught, as a distinct subject, until during and after the revolution Could it be that this great disadvantage carried some compensation? In any case, the much less voluminous French literature of the systematic type rose in the eighteenth century to a level far and away above the German Since we reserve such peaks as Boisguillebert, Cantillon, Turgot, and, of course, the physiocrats for discussion in the next chapter, we may content ourselves with the five following names—Forbonnais, Melon, Mirabeau, Graslin, and Condillac Forbonnais,4 who might be compared with Justi or Sonnenfels, is the

4

François Véron de Forbonnais (1722–1800) was a businessman and civil servant and, being a Frenchman, addressed a different public and envisaged different conditions, so that the similarity between his and Justi’s performances does not stand out at first sight Fundamentally, however, he did—very successfully—the same kind of thing His practical grasp of the social and economic situation confronting him was his, as it was Justi’s, chief merit He is at his best in his analyses of definite sets of historic facts such as the finances of France from 1595 to 1721 (1758) or the

finances of Spain (1753) For us the most interesting of his works are: Élémens du commerce (1754 and 1766) and Principes et observations économiques (1767; the latter is available in the

Guillaumin collection, reading recommended: not below the average nineteenth-century textbook and superior to a good many) His recommendation of an ad valorem import duty of 15 per cent may be mentioned as one of several instances of parallelism between his views and those of Justi,

whom the first volume of his Élémens may have influenced That he influenced Sonnenfels as

much as did Justi is obvious from acknowledgments

prototype of the ‘useful’ or ‘sound’ economist of whom the public approves No historian will ever sing his praises; for the historian who is interested only in what policy a man was for or against will not be satisfied and will put down Forbonnais as an eclectic without originality; and the historian who looks for contributions to our analytic apparatus will also be dissatisfied, for he will not find it, and he will notice clumsy and pedestrian behavior whenever Forbonnais did venture upon theoretical ice But few economists ever said or implied so little that is definitely and provably wrong in either fact or logic He is an outstanding example by which to illustrate the truth that to be an economist or physician is one thing and that to be a theorist or physiologist is quite another thing

Markedly inferior to Forbonnais in these respects and but little above him in analytic proficiency, Melon5 has fared somewhat better at the hands of later critics But his performance, which, so far as ‘principles’ are concerned, partly anticipated Forbonnais’,

is of much the same nature His contribution to mone-tary theory will be noticed in a subsequent chapter The elder Mirabeau6 is primarily known as the head, in succession to Quesnay, of the physiocrat group, but he had independently established himself before that by a work that may be called a systematic treatise on all the problems of applied economics written from a very personal standpoint—systematic unity being achieved by making those problems pivot on Population and Agriculture Its analytic merit is negligible, but all the greater was its

5

Jean François Melon (1675–1738) was a public servant who worked with John Law during the

short career of the latter’s ‘system’ and thus had first-hand knowledge of it His Essai politique sur

le commerce (1734, English trans 1738) was a great success in France and abroad and exerted

considerable influence The misleading term Neo-Mercantilism is sometimes used to designate the views on foreign trade and finance that he and other eighteenth-century writers espoused (see

below, ch 7) See G.Dionnet’s Le Néomercantilisme au XVIII e siècle et au début du XIX e siècle (1901) and also L de Lavergne’s Les Économistes français du dix-huitième siècle (1870)

6

Victor Riquetti, Marquis de Mirabeau (1715–89), called the elder to distinguish him from his son, the Mirabeau of the Revolution, was an eccentric aristocrat of exuberant vitality and irrepressible impulses It is difficult to understand—except on the hypothesis that force of temperament and glowing phrases will always carry everything before them—how it was that this man, whose unquestioned ability was completely spoiled by lack of judgment, could have enjoyed, though only for a few years, an international and national fame much greater than that of any other economist before or after, not excluding A.Smith or K.Marx This happened in the first part of his career, that

is, before he had joined the physiocrats, and on the strength of a performance that cannot be called impressive in anything except passionate phraseology This performance, anonymously published

in three parts under the title L’Ami des hommes, ou traité de la population (1756), will have to be

mentioned again in our chapter on population Of all the other works of Mirabeau—he left dozens

of volumes besides a quantity of unpublished material—only the subsequent parts (4–6) of L’Ami (1758 and 1760), the Philosophie rurale (1763), and the Théarie de l’impôt (1760) call for notice in

this book The last two are, however, physiocratic, at least in principle, and therefore need not

detain us here See L and C.de Loménie, Les Mirabeau (1879–91) and L.Brocard, Les Doctrines économiques et sociales du Marquis de Mirabeau dans L’Ami des hommes (1902)

success Graslin’s7 reputation never was what it should have been because he put so much emphasis upon criticism of the physiocrats—which is in fact the best ever proffered—that his readers were apt to overlook his positive contribution Actually, his

Essai analytique presents the outlines of a comprehensive theory of wealth as a theory of

total income rather than of income net of all producers’ expenses including wages—a not inconsiderable improvement considering the role the latter was to play later on Also he was above his contemporaries in insight into the problem of incidence of taxation Finally, Condillac’s work8 does not indeed quite merit the eulogies of W.S.Jevons, who called it ‘original and profound’ and of H.D Macleod, who called it ‘infinitely superior

to A.Smith’s.’ The eulogies are amply accounted for by the enthusiasm of those two authors for what they believed to be an early formulation of their own theory of value But there was nothing original about it and, considering all the predecessors on that path,

we should wonder at Condillac’s inefficient handling of it rather than at his sponsorship

of it Still, the book is a good if somewhat sketchy treatise on Economic Theory and Policy and much above the common run of its contemporaries

England was still more immune to ‘systemitis’ than was France Excepting the Wealth

itself, there is but one book of the strictly systematic type to mention, but this one is of

first-rate importance, Steuart’s Principles.9 It was intentionally and laboriously systematic: what he wanted was to consolidate the factual and analytic knowledge of his time into a ‘regular science,’ that is to say, he clearly aimed at the same goal as A.Smith

Comparison with the Wealth of Nations is rendered difficult by two facts In the first

place, Steuart’s work did not ride, like Smith’s, on the wave of a single and simple policy that was rapidly conquering public opinion On the contrary, he grouped all that really interests the public around the old-fashioned figure of an imaginary patriot statesman who in infinite wisdom watches the economic process, ready to interfere in the national

7

Jean J.L.Graslin (1727–90), Essai analytique sur la richesse et sur l’impôt (1767; new ed by A.Dubois, 1911) See J.Desmars, Un précurseur d’A.Smith en France, J.J.L.Graslin (1900) His

correspondence with Baudeau is of considerable interest (2 vols., 1777–9)

8

Le Commerce et le gouvernment…(1776) by the sensationalist philosopher and psychologist we

have already met above The relation between his psychology and his utility theory of value should not be overstressed As we know already and as we shall see more fully later on, the latter has a quite independent history of its own that harks back to the scholastics rather than to Hartley

Condillac’s relation to the physiocrats should not be overstressed either Rather he had learned

from Turgot See, however, A.Lebeau, Condillac économiste (1903)

9

Sir James Steuart (1712–80), the scion of a family that held a prominent position in the Scottish magistracy, was educated as a lawyer, and, being an adherent of the Stuarts, lived in exile from

1745 to 1763—three facts that go some way toward explaining both the nature and the reception of his performance; on the one hand, there is something un-English (which is not merely Scottish) about his views and his mode of presentation, the latter being stiff and embarrassed in the bargain;

on the other hand, he was, and even after he had regained the rights of citizenship remained,

distinctly under a cloud Such things count In particular, they make it easy for competitors to pass

a man by in silence, which is precisely what A.Smith did An Inquiry into the Principles of Political Economy…1767, accordingly was never much of a success in England even before it was

completely overshadowed by the Wealth of Nations But it received rather more than its due from some of the Germans Other writings by Steuart will be mentioned later His collected Works were

edited by his son (1805)