An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought
Bibliographical essay
Overall bibliographies
Ancient thought
Medieval thought
The late scholastics
Luther and Calvin
Anabaptist communism
Non-scholastic Catholics
Monarchomachs: Huguenots and Catholics
Absolutism and Italian humanism
Absolutism in France
Mercantilism
Seventeenth century French mercantilist thought
French liberal opposition to mercantilism
English mercantilists: sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries
Locke and the Levellers
English mercantilists: late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
Modern economics: Richard Cantillon: founding father
Early mathematical economists
The physiocrats and laissez-faire
A.RJ. Turgot
Ferdinando Galiani
The Scottish Enlightenment
The celebrated Adam Smith
The spread of the Smithian movement
Malthus and population
In a comprehensive history of economic thought, it is clearly impossible for a bibliographical essay to attempt to list, much less annotate, every source for that history, much less for the ancillary fields of history of social, political and religious thought, as well as economic history proper, all of which in my view must be brought into the picture of the development and the clashes in the field of economic thought. The best I can do, then, is to describe and annotate those sources, largely secondary ones, which I found most helpful in working on this study. In that way, the bibliographical appendix may serve as a guide to readers who wish to delve into various topics and areas in this vast and complex field, which in many ways touches on the entire history of western civilization.
Overall bibliographies
By far the most comprehensive bibliographical essay in the history of economic thought is the remarkably full treatment in Henry W. Spiegel, The Growth of Economic Thought (3rd ed., Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), which now stretches to no less than 161 pages, and is the most valuable aspect of the book. The four-volume New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics (London: Macmillan and New York: Stockton Press, 1987), contains a number of excellent essays on particular economists. At the other end of the spectrum, the brief sketches in the unpretentious paperback by Ludwig H. Mai, Men and Ideas in Economics: A Dictionary of World Economists, Past and Present (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1977) are surprisingly useful.
Ancient thought
The only book covering all ancient economic thought in countries including Mesopotamia, India and China is Joseph J. Spengler, Origins of Economic Thought and Justice (Carbondale, 111., Southern Illinois University Press, 1980). Although Professor Spengler probably would not have agreed with this assessment, his book demonstrates that virtually nothing of interest emerged out of the economic thought of these ancient civilizations. The exception is Chinese political philosophy (particularly Taoism), on which the definitive work is the illuminating Kung-chuan Hsiao, A History of Chinese Political Thought, Vol. One: From the Beginnings to the Sixth Century A.D. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979). On a Chinese advocate of laissez-faire, see Joseph J. Spengler, ‘Ssu-ma Ch’ien, Unsuccessful Exponent of Laissez Faire’, Southern Economic Journal (Jan. 1964), pp. 223–3.
The only histories of economic thought that do justice to the Greek contribution are Spiegel, The Growth of Economic Thought and Barry Gordon, Economic Analysis Before Adam Smith (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1975). Spiegel is particularly good on Democritus and Gordon is good on Hesiod and deals extensively with Greek economic thought. Gordon is also unique in dealing fully with Jewish economic thought. His title is misleading, however, since the book stops with the late scholastics, considerably before the time of Adam Smith.
S. Todd Lowry, ‘Recent Literature on Ancient Greek Economic Thought’, Journal of Economic Literature, 17 (March 1979), pp. 65–86, provides a comprehensive annotated bibliographical review of Greek economic thought. Also see Lowry, The Archaeology of Economic Ideas: The Classical Greek Tradition (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987). The Oxford W.D. Ross edition of the works of Aristotle is the standard one. On the fascinating controversy on the meaning of Aristotle’s equation of exchange, Josef Soudek’s lengthy, scholarly, but totally wrongheaded reading of Jevons into Aristotle is in Josef Soudek, ‘Aristotle’s Theory of Exchange: An Inquiry into the Origin of Economic Analysis’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 96 (Feb. 1952), pp. 45–75, while Barry Gordon plumps for Aristotle as a proto-Marshallian: ‘Aristotle and the Development of Value Theory’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 78 (Feb. 1964), pp. 115–28. Far better are two scholars who had the courage to see the equation of exchange as nonsense: the great interpreter of Aristotle, H.H. Joachim, in his Aristotle: The Nichomachean Ethics (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1951), esp. 148–51, and the ancient historian Moses I. Finley, in his ‘Aristotle and Economic Analysis’, Past and Present (May 1970), pp. 3–25, reprinted in Finley (ed), Studies in Ancient Society (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974), pp. 26–52.
A detailed critique of the various Latin translations of Aristotle’s discussion of economic value is in Odd Langholm, Price and Value in the Aristotelian Tradition (Bergen: Universitetsforlaget, 1979).
Joseph J. Spengler, in his excellent ‘Aristotle on Economic Imputation and Related Matters’, Southern Economic Journal, 21 (April 1955), pp. 371–89, shows that Aristotle’s imputation theory was a forerunner of praxeological and Austrian imputation theory of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Spengler himself, however, undervalued the results of his own inquiry, since he didn’t realize that Aristotle’s imputation theory was an important contribution to action analysis and praxeology even if it did not deal with strictly economic matters.
Also on Aristotle as a pre-Austrian, see Emil Kauder, ‘Genesis of the Marginal Utility Theory: From Aristotle to the end of the Eighteenth Century’, Economic Journal, 43 (Sept. 1953), pp. 638–50.
On Plato as totalitarian, see the hard-hitting and highly influential work by a leading modern philosopher, Karl R. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (3rd rev. ed., 2 vols, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957). Unfortunately, Popper confuses the political totalitarianism of Plato with the spurious tyranny allegedly implied by the fact that Plato believed in absolute truth and in rational ethics. To a modern, wishy-washy ad hoc metaphysician like Popper, any firm belief in truth, in black and white, smacks of ‘dogmatism’ and ‘despotism’. Setting the philosophic record straight in defence of Plato, in reply were John Wild, Plato’s Modern Enemies and the Theory of Natural Law (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), and Ronald B. Levinson, In Defense of Plato (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953). For an attack on Plato’s totalitarianism and an exposition of the sophists, the opponents of Socratic philosophy, as classical liberals in politics, see Eric A. Havelock, The Liberal Temper in Greek Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957). On the other hand, for a more recent article confirming the view that the Greek polis was inherently statist, had no conception of classical liberalism or individual freedom, and was grounded on the labour of slaves, see Paul A. Rahe, ‘The Primacy of Politics in Classical Greece’, American Historical Review (April 1984), pp. 265–93.
On Plato and the division of labour, see Williamson M. Evers, ‘Specialization and the Division of Labor in the Social Thought of Plato and Rousseau’, The Journal of Libertarian Studies, 4 (Winter, 1980), pp. 45–64; Vernard Foley, ‘The Division of Labor in Plato and Smith’, History of Political Economy, 6 (Summer 1974), pp. 220–42: Paul J. McNulty, ‘A Note on the Division of Labor in Plato and Smith’, History of Political Economy, 7 (Autumn 1975), pp. 372–8; and Foley, ‘Smith and the Greeks: A Reply to Professor McNulty’s Comments’, ibid., pp. 379–89.
On the influence of Plotinus and man’s alleged inherent alienation to overcome through history, see the illuminating discussion in Leszek Kolakowksi, Main Currents of Marxism, I: The Founders (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), pp. 11–23.
Cicero’s eloquent quotation on the definition of the natural law may be found, among other places, in Michael Bertram Crowe, The Changing Profile of the Natural Law (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977), pp. 37–8, Crowe including natural law theorists among the Greeks and Romans; and his parable of Alexander and the pirate in Cicero’s On the Commonwealth (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1929), Book III, SIV, p. 210.
Medieval thought
A valuable overall study of medieval economic thought, including that of the early Church Fathers, is in Gordon, Economic Analysis Before Adam Smith. Two indispensable articles on the theory of the just price are: Kenneth S. Cahn, ‘The Roman and Frankish Roots of the Just Price of Medieval Canon Law’, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History, 6 (1969), pp. 3–52, on the early Roman and canon law; and the book-length monograph by John W. Baldwin, ‘The Medieval Theories of the Just Price: Romanists, Canonists, and Theologians in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 49 (1959). The definitive study of medieval and later theories of usury is John T. Noonan, Jr, The Scholastic Analysis of Usury (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957).
The conventional neglect and systematic misinterpretation of medieval and late scholastic economic thought began to be rectified in Joseph A. Schumpeter’s great History of Economic Analysis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1954), especially the first half of Part II, Chapter II. The fullest research for this revision, however, has been provided for us in the extensive writings of Professor Raymond de Roover. De Roover’s most important and most anthologized article was his ‘The Concept of the Just Price: Theory and Economic Policy’, Journal of Economic History, 18 (Dec. 1958), pp. 418–34; here de Roover demolishes the historiographic misinterpretation of Heinrich von Langenstein. Also see de Roover, ‘Joseph A. Schumpeter and Scholastic Economies’, Kyklos, 10 (1957–2), pp. 115–46; idem., ‘The Scholastics, Usury and Foreign Exchange’, Business History Review, 41 (Autumn 1967), pp. 257–71: and the collection of essays in Raymond de Roover, Business, Banking, and Economic Thought; In Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (ed. J. Kirshner, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974).
The vital contribution to economic thought of Pierre de Jean Olivi has been finally brought to light by de Roover, in his San Bernardino of Siena and Sant’ Antonino of Florence: The Two Great Economic Thinkers of the Middle Ages (Boston: Baker Library, 1967), pp. 19–20, 41–2. Also see Julius Kirshner, ‘Raymond de Roover on Scholastic Economic Thought’, in de Roover, Business, Banking and Economic Thought, pp. 28–30. On Olivi as Joachimite and leader of the Spiritual Franciscans, see Malcolm D. Lambert, Medieval Heresy (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1977), pp. 182–206. On the Joachimite heresy, also see the vivid work by Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium (3rd ed., New York: Harper & Bros, 1970), pp. 99ff.
Michael Crowe’s Changing Profile of the Natural Law is a thorough study of the medieval theorists of natural law. Richard Tuck, Natural Rights: Their Origin and Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), illuminates a crucial distinction between active, or dominion, rights theories, and passive or claim theories.
A scholarly but accessible overall study of European economic history is the paperback, Carlo M. Cipolla (ed.), The Fontana Economic History of Europe, I: The Middle Ages (London: Collins/Fontana, 1972), which covers the medieval period. On population changes in that period, see J.G. Russell, ‘Population in Europe, 500–1500’, in the Fontana History, ibid. On the Great Depression of the fourteenth and first half of the fifteenth century, see Robert S. Lopez and Harry A. Miskimin, ‘The Economic Depression of the Renaissance’, Economic History Review, 14 (1962), and Edouard Perroy, ‘At the Origin of a Contracted Economy: the Crises of the 14th Century’, in Rondo E. Cameron, (ed.) Essays in French Economic History (Homewood, 111.: Richard D. Irwin, 1970), pp. 91–105. A subtle study of the economy of late medieval/early renaissance Europe is Harry A. Miskimin, The Economy of Early Renaissance Europe, 1300–1460 (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1969). On the fateful introduction of regular taxation into France, see Martin Wolfe, ‘French Views on Wealth and Taxes from the Middle Ages to the Old Regime’, in D.C. Coleman (ed.), Revisions in Mercantilism (London: Methuen &Co„ 1969), p. 190ff.
The late scholastics
For the late scholastics – i.e. in the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries – the works of Crowe (natural law), Tuck (natural rights), Gordon and de Roover (economic thought), and Noonan (usury) continue to be indispensable (see above). For the locus classicus of Crowe’s revisionist insights on the Ockhamite Gregory of Rimini as being actually in favour of an objective natural law, see Damasus Trapp, ‘Augustinian Theology of the 14th Century: Notes on Editions, Marginalia, Opinions and Book-Lore’, in Augustiniana, 6 (1956), pp. 146–274; idem, ‘Gregory of Rimini, Manuscripts Editions and Additions’, in Augustiniana, 8 (1958), pp. 425–43. The key revisionist work on Gabriel Biel is Heiko A. Oberman, The Harvest of Medieval Theology: Gabriel Biel and Late Medieval Nominalism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963). More recent confirmation on this revisionism is in D.E. Luscombe, ‘Natural Morality and Natural Law’, in N. Kretzmann, et al. (eds), The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 705–20. Also see A.S. McGrade, ‘Rights, Natural Rights, and the Philosophy of Law’, in ibid., pp. 738–56.
The School of Salamanca was first brought to the attention of economists in a splendid little book by Marjorie Grice-Hutchinson, The School of Salamanca: Readings in Spanish Monetary Theory, 1544–1605 (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1952). The scope of the book is far wider than the subtitle implies, and, in addition to a lucid text, it contains English translations of economic writings from many of the great Salamancans. More on the Salamancans and other Spanish economists of the period can be found in Grice-Hutchinson, Early Economic Thought in Spain, 1177–1740 (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1978). Also see de Roover, ‘Scholastic Economies’, in Business, Banking, and Economic Thought, pp. 306–35. Frank Bartholomew Costello, S.J., The Political Philosophy of Luis de Molina, S.J. (Spokane: Gonzaga University Press, 1974), is a lucid and well-organized work, and Bernice Hamilton, Political Thought in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1963), studies the legal and political thought of four Salamancan scholastics: Vitoria, DeSoto, Molina, and Suarez. Insights into the political philosophy of Suarez and the others can be found in the relevant volume of the mighty work by Frederick Copleston, S.J., A History of Philosophy, Volume III Ockham to Suarez (Westminster, Md: The Newman Press, 1959). On the political theory of the Salamancans, see the outstanding work by Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, Vol. II: The Age of Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978).
On the growth since World War II of the ‘revisionist’ view of the Spanish and other scholastics presented here, see Murray N. Rothbard, ‘New Light on the Pre-history of the Austrian School’, in E. Dolan (ed.), The Foundations of Modern Austrian Economics (Kansas City: Sheed & Ward, 1976), pp. 52–74.
The most up-to-date and developed work on the Spanish scholastics in Alejandro Chafuen, Christians for Freedom: Late-Scholastic Economics (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986). For a contrast between the Salamancan scholastics and the later seventeenth century Spanish mercantilists, see Louis Baeck, ‘Spanish Economic Thought: the School of Salamanca and the Arbitristas’, History of Political Economy, 20 (Autumn 1988), pp. 381–408.
Indispensable for the fascinating figure of Juan de Mariana is John Laures, S.J., The Political Economy of Juan de Mariana (New York: Fordham University Press, 1928). See also Guenter Lewy, Constitutionalism and Statecraft During the Golden Age of Spain: A Study of the Political Philosophy of Juan de Mariana, S.J. (Geneva: Librairie E. Droz, 1960). For Mariana on tyrannicide, along with a discussion of other such sixteenth century and later theorists, see Oscar Jászi and John D. Lewis, Against the Tyrant: The Tradition and Theory of Tyrannicide (Glencoe, 111.: The Free Press, 1957).
A fascinating account of the Jansenist struggle with the Jesuits on casuistry and usury is in J. Brodrick, S.J., The Economic Morals of the Jesuits (London: Oxford University Press, 1934). Also useful on both the Jesuits and their Protestant enemies is the informative but sometimes sloppily researched Hector M. Robertson, Aspects of the Rise of Economic Individualism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933). It is amusing that Brodrick’s book was written specifically to refute the thesis of Robertson that Catholic and especially Jesuit thinkers tended to favour the free market, and yet much of the two works confirm each other. Brodrick seems to believe that Robertson is attacking the Jesuits for immorality, whereas in our reading he is simply demonstrating their economic insight and good sense.
For an overall study of the Catholic Counter-Reformation, see Marvin R. O’Connell, The Counter Reformation: 1559–1610 (New York: Harper & Row, 1974).
On the commercial expansion of the late fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries, see in particular Harry A. Miskimin, The Economy of Later Renaissance Europe, 1460–1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977); and also C. Cipolla (ed.), The Fontana Economic History of Europe, Vol. 11, The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (London: Collins/Fontana 1974).
Luther and Calvin
An excellent and brief analysis is contained in Gary North, ‘The Economic Thought of Luther and Calvin’, The Journal of Christian Reconstruction, II (Summer 1975), pp. 76–108. Skinner’s Foundations Vol. II, is excellent on Luther and Calvin’s, especially the former’s, social and political philosophy, and that of their followers, on which also see the older work by John N. Figgis, Political Thought from Gerson to Grotius (1916, New York: Harper & Bros, 1960), especially Ch. III on ‘Luther and Machiavelli’. The Weber thesis is argued back and forth in Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Charles Scribner’s, 1930); the Weberian Ernst Troeltsch, The Social Teaching of the Christian Church, Vol. II (New York: Macmillan, 1931); Richard H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1937, New York: New American Library, 1954); and the Robertson and Brodrick books mentioned above. See also the critical study of Kurt Samuelsson, Religion and Economic Action (New York: Basic Books, 1961). A fruitful application of the Weber thesis to China and Japan is in Norman Jacobs, The Origin of Modern Capitalism and Eastern Asia (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1958). De Roover’s discovery of the thirteenth century Florentine motto, ‘In the name of God and of profit’, is in his ‘The Scholastic Attitude Toward Trade and Entrepreneurship’, in Business, Banking, and Economic Thought, p. 345. For Calvin and his followers on usury, see Noonan’s great work discussed above.
The brilliant Kauder thesis holds that Calvinism led to the labour theory of value in Britain while Aristotelian Thomism kept France and Italy to a subjective, consumer-oriented theory of value. This thesis may be found in Emil Kauder, A History of Marginal Utility Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965), and in Kauder, ‘The Retarded Acceptance of the Marginal Utility Theory’, Quarterly Journal of Economics (Nov. 1953), pp. 564–9. On such tough-minded Calvinists as the English Marian exiles and on the puritan devotion to work, see Michael Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965).
Perhaps the greatest work ever written in the history of economic thought was Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk’s Capital and Interest: Vol. I, History and Critique of Interest Theories (1921, South Holland, 111.: Libertarian Press, 1959). Böhm-Bawerk, the first great systematizer of the Austrian School of economics in the 1880s, wrote his survey and critique of preceding theories of interest before proceeding to develop his own theory in later volumes of his masterwork, Capital and Interest. While Böhm-Bawerk’s treatment of Salmasius is excellent and appreciative, his discussion of previous writers is greatly marred by his lack of knowledge of the scholastic thinkers, whom he dismisses all too briefly as ‘canonists’. The later scholastics have only been resurrected for economists since World War II.
Anabaptist communism
The outstanding work on the totalitarian messianic communism of the coercive wing of the Anabaptists is the brilliant, mordant, and hard-hitting work of Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium (3rd ed., New York: Harper & Row, 1970). This should be supplemented by the more recent work of Igor Shafarevich, The Socialist Phenomenon (New York: Harper & Row, 1980) which, though episodic, also explores socialism in other ages and other climes. All this should be considered in the general framework set forth in the deservedly classic work of Msgr Ronald A. Knox, Enthusiasm (1950, New York: Oxford University Press, 1961). A full if schematic account of Anabaptist theologies is in James M. Stayer, Anabaptists and the Sword (2nd ed., Lawrence, Kan.: Coronado Press, 1976). Willem Balke’s Calvin and the Anabaptist Radicals (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 1981) is an excellent study. George Huntston Williams, The Radical Reformation (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1962) is a thorough classic, now a bit outdated by more recent scholarship.
Non-scholastic Catholics
An excellent article on Copernicus’ monetary theory is Timothy J. Reiss and Roger H. Hinderliter, ‘Money and Value in the Sixteenth Century; the Monetae Cudendae Ratio of Nicholas Copernicus’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 40 (April-June 1979), pp. 293–303. On Copernicus, Oresme, and Aristophanes on Gresham’s law, see J. Laurence Laughlin, The Principles of Money (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1903), pp. 420ff. The best discussion of Lottini is in Emil Kauder, A History of Marginal Utility Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965). Also see Kauder, ‘Genesis of the Marginal Utility Theory: From Aristotle to the End of the Eighteenth Century’, The Economic Journal (Sept. 1953), pp. 638–50. On Lottini’s unsavoury activities, see Cecily Booth, Cosimo I: Duke of Florence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1921), pp. 131–2. On Davanzati, see the discussions in Kauder, History; Grice-Hutchinson, Early Economic Thought; Arthur Eli Monroe, Monetary Theory Before Adam Smith (1923, Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1965); and Joseph A. Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1954).
Monarchomachs: Huguenots and Catholics
Jászi and Lewis, Against The Tyrant; and J.W. Allen, A History of Political Thought in the Sixteenth Century (1928, 2nd ed., London: Methuen & Co., 1957), serve as useful introductions to the extensive literature on this subject. Skinner, Foundations, Vol. II, is excellent on the Huguenots and Buchanan. No one should neglect the only book in English on the Catholic League: Frederic J. Baumgartner, Radical Reactionaries: The Political Thought of the French Catholic League (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1976).
Absolutism and Italian humanism
The best discussion of the political theory of the Italian humanists and its relation to absolutism is in Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, Volume One: The Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968). On Diomede Carafa, see Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis, pp. 162–4. On Leon Battista degli Alberti and the Alberti family, see Raymond de Roover, ‘The Story of the Alberti Company of Florence, 1302–1348, As Revealed in Its Account Books’, in Business, Banking and Economic Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), pp. 39–84.
The clearest and most illuminating discussion of Machiavelli is in Skinner, Foundations, Volume One. Also see Isaiah Berlin, ‘The Originality of Machiavelli’, in M.P. Gilmore (ed), Studies on Machiavelli (Florence: G.C. Sansoni, 1972), pp. 147–206.
Absolutism in France
A highly lucid study of absolutist thought in France in the sixteenth century is William Farr Church, Constitutional Thought in Sixteenth-Century France: A Study in the Evolution of Ideas (1941, New York: Octagon Books, 1969). Church is particularly good on the absolutists after Bodin. On the influence of humanism in France and on French absolutist thought in general also see the excellent Skinner, Foundations, Vols I and II. These should be supplemented by the broader study of French political thought in Nannerl O. Keohane, Philosophy and the State in France: The Renaissance to the Enlightenment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980). Keohane is particularly perceptive on Bodin.
On Montaigne, also see Donald Frame, Montaigne: A Biography (New York: Harcourt Brace & World, 1965). On Occitan, see Meic Stephens, Linguistic Minorities in Western Europe (Llandysul, Dyfed, Wales: Gomer Press, 1976), pp. 297–308. The literature on the Montaigne fallacy and mercantilism is, surprisingly, virtually non-existent. The classical, though brief, statement is in Heckscher, Mercantilism, I, 26. The implications are developed in Ludwig von Mises, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics (3rd rev. ed., Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1966), pp. 664, 687. See also Odd Langholm, Price and Value in the Aristotelian Tradition: A Study in Scholastic Economic Sources (Bergen: Universitetsforlaget, 1979), pp. 30, 38n.
Mercantilism
The best introduction to the subject is an excellent work and a marvel of compression: Harry A. Miskimin’s The Economy of Later Renaissance Europe: 1460–1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). The great classic work, and deservedly so, is Eli F. Heckscher, Mercantilism (2 vols, 1935, 2nd rev. ed., New York: Macmillan, 1955). Heckscher’s emphasis on mercantilism as building the nation-state has suffered from unfair criticism in recent years. State-building, and Heckscher’s stress on mercantilist ideology, simply need to be supplemented by insight into mercantilism as a system of lobbying for and achieving monopoly and cartel privileges and subsidies from the state in return for political support and/or money to the Crown. I try to begin such a synthesis in my “Mercantilism: A Lesson for Our Time?’, The Freeman, 13 (Nov. 1963), pp. 16–27, reprinted in Ideas on Liberty, Vol. XI (Irvington-on-Hudson: Foundation for Economic Education, 1964). Robert B. Ekelund, Jr and Robert D. Tollison, Mercantilism as a Rent-Seeking Society: Economic Regulation in Historical Perspective (College Station, Texas: Texas A&M University Press, 1981) tries to fill the gap left by Heckscher. But while its gloss on Heckscher is sometimes useful, Ekelund and Tollison is excessively schematic, in the public choice tradition, undervaluing the role of ideas in history, especially the role of free market and classical liberal ideology.
John Ulric Nef, Industry and Government in France and England, 1540–1640 (1940, New York: Russell and Russell, 1968), is an excellent comparative study of the effect of mercantilist policies on industrial development in England and France. For England, S.T. Bindoff, Tudor England (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1950), is trenchant and surprisingly hard-hitting. For France, Charles Woolsey Cole, Colbert and a Century of French Mercantilism (2 vols, 1939, Hamden, Conn: Archon Books, 1964), is the classic work on Colbert and on French mercantilism, despite his admiration for both. The post-Colbert French story in the seventeenth century is told in Cole’s French Mercantilism, 1683–1700 (1943, New York: Octagon Press, 1965). Warren C. Scoville, The Persecution of Huguenots and French Economic Develop ment, 1680–1720 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960), presents an interesting revisionist critique of the extent of economic havoc actually wreaked by Louis XIV’s revocation of the Edict of Nantes.
On the English monopoly foreign trade companies in the Elizabethan era, see Murray N. Rothbard, Conceived in Liberty, Vol. 1: The American Colonies in the 17th Century (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1975).
On absolutism and re-enserfdom in Poland and eastern Europe in the sixteenth century, see Miskimin, Later Renaissance Europe, pp. 56–64; and Robert Millward, ‘An Economic Analysis of the Origin of Serfdom in Eastern Europe’, Journal of Economic History, 42 (Sept. 1982), pp. 513–48. For a somewhat similar process in Russia in the third quarter of the sixteenth century, see Alexander Yanov, The Origins of Autocracy: Ivan the Terrible in Russian History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981); and Aileen Kelly, ‘Russia’s Old New Right: Review of Yanov, Origins of Autocracy’, New York Review of Books, 30 (17 Feb. 1983), p. 34ff.
On the development of a system of taxation in France, see Martin Wolfe, ‘French Views on Wealth and Taxes from the Middle Ages to the Old Regime’, in D.C. Coleman (ed.), Revisions in Mercantilism (London: Methuen & Co., 1969), pp. 190–209. The classic treatment of the development of taxation under Philip the Fair is Joseph R. Strayer, ‘Consent to Taxation Under Philip the Fair’, in J.R. Strayer and C.H. Taylor, Studies in Early French Taxation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1939), pp. 3–108. A discussion of taxation in fifteenth and sixteenth century France, which takes the unconvincing revisionist position that early royal fiscalism differed sharply from the later mercantilism, is in Martin Wolfe, The Fiscal System of Renaissance France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972). For more on French taxation in the second quarter of the fourteenth century, see John Bell Henneman, Royal Taxation in Fourteenth Century France: The Development of War Financing 1322–1356 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971).
For an overview of the history of European banking in this period, see Murray N. Rothbard, The Mystery of Banking (New York: Richardson & Snyder/Dutton, 1983). On the Stop of the Exchequer, see the illuminating article by J. Keith Horsefield, ‘The Stop of the Exchequer’ Revisited’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 35 (Nov. 1982), pp. 511–28.
On the development of the public-debt state in England, see P.G.M. Dickson, The Financial Revolution in England: A Study in the Development of Public Credit, 1688–1756 (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1967). Also see the remarkable revisionist work of John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State, 1688–1783 (New York: Knopf, 1989). Brewer points out that necessary to the development of the public-debt state was the concomitant growth of the high-tax state, with specific taxes used to back specific long-run public debt in England. In particular, taxation was indirect, especially excise taxes on consumer goods. See also the important article on British taxation by Patrick K. O’Brien, ‘The Political Economy of British Taxation, 1660–1815’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 41 (Feb. 1988), pp. 1–32. Also see the revisionist comparison of taxation in Britain and France in this period, demonstrating that the much denounced level of French taxation was considerably lower than in Britain. Peter Mathias and Patrick K. O’Brien, ‘Taxation in Britain and France, 1715–1810. A Comparison of the Social and Economic Incidence of Taxes Collected for the Central Governments’, Journal of European Economic History, 5 (1976), pp. 601–50.
On Parliament’s fateful assertion of its authority over the king’s revenue in 1690, see Clayton Roberts, ‘The Constitutional Significance of the Financial Settlement of 1690’, The Historical Journal, 20 (1977), pp. 59–76. For an interesting article from a Marxist perspective which includes discussion of the Bank of England, see Marvin Rosen, ‘The Dictatorship of the Bourgeoisie: England 1688–1721’, Science and Society, 45 (Spring 1981), pp. 24–51.
Seventeenth century French mercantilist thought
On the views of the early French mercantilists, particularly Laffemas and Montchrétien, see Charles Woolsey Cole, French Mercantilist Doctrines Before Colbert (New York: Richard R. Smith, 1931). Also, on Montchrétien, see the typically incisive and sparkling discussion in Alexander Gray, The Development of Economic Doctrine (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1933), pp. 80–85. On Sully, see David Buisseret, Sully: and the Growth of Centralized Government in France, 1598–1610 (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1968). On mercantilist thought in the Richelieu, Mazarin, and Colbert eras, see Cole, Colbert and a Century of French Mercantilism. On the political thought of Louis XIV, see François Dumont, ‘French Kingship and Absolute Monarchy in the Seventeenth Century’, and Andrew Lossky, ‘The Intellectual Development of Louis XIV from 1661 to 1715’, in Raghnild Hatton (ed), Louis XIV and Absolutism (London: Macmillan, 1976).
French liberal opposition to mercantilism
On the Croquants and other peasant rebellions in seventeenth century France, see Roland Mousnier, Peasant Uprisings in Seventeenth Century France, Russia, and China (New York: Harper & Row, 1970). Lionel Rothkrug, Opposition to Louis XIV: The Political and Social Origins of the French Enlightenment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965) is indispensable on the growing liberal and laissez-faire opposition to mercantilism. Also highly useful is Nannerl O. Keohane’s Philosophy and the State in France, particularly on Joly, Vauban, Fenelon, the Burgundy circle, and Boisguilbert. On the latter, see in particular Hazel Van Dyke Roberts, Boisguilbert: Economist of the Reign of Louis XIV (New York: Columbia University Press, 1935), and Joseph J. Spengler, ‘Boisguilbert’s Economic Views Vis-a-Vis those of Contemporary Réformateurs’, History of Political Economy, 16 (Spring 1984), pp. 69–88. Charles Woolsey Cole, French Mercantilism, 1683–1700 (1943, New York: Octagon Books, 1965), is useful on the merchants and the council of commerce.
English mercantilists: sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries
The indispensable starting-point on the English mercantilists is the classic work of Jacob Viner, Studies In The Theory of International Trade (New York: Harper & Bros, 1937), pp. 1–118. Unfortunately, Viner is only the starting-point because of the extreme compression of his study, and because he does not deal with separate individuals or groups or engage in narrative analysis of different time-periods or interactions among the various individuals and groups.
On absolutists in the Tudor and Stuart eras, see W.H. Greenleaf, Order, Empiricism, and Politics: Two Traditions of English Political Thought (London: Oxford University Press, 1964). On Sir Robert Filmer, see Peter Laslett (ed.), Patriarcha and Other Political Works of Sir Robert Filmer (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1949); and Carl Watner, ‘“Oh, Ye are for Anarchy!”: Consent Theory in the Radical Libertarian Tradition’, Journal of Libertarian Studies, 8 (Winter 1986), pp. 111–37.
For the definitive demonstration that Sir Thomas Smith, not John Hales, was the author of the Discourse of the Commonweal of this Realm of England, see Mary Dewar, ‘The Authorship of the “Discourse of the Commonweal”,’ Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 19 (August 1966), pp. 388–400. The biography of Smith is Mary Dewar, Sir Thomas Smith: A Tudor Intellectual in Office (London: Athlone Press, 1964). The revisionist view that Smith, not Gresham, wrote the famous Memorandum for the Understanding of the Exchange is in Mary Dewar, ‘The Memorandum “For the Understanding of the Exchange”: Its Authorship and Dating’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 17 (April 1965), pp. 476–87. Raymond de Roover, while formally maintaining his original view that Gresham was the author, implicitly throws in the towel in Raymond de Roover, ‘On the Authorship and Dating of “For the Understanding of the Exchange’”, Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 20 (April 1967), pp. 150–52. Daniel R. Fusfeld offers the flimsy thesis that Sir Richard Martin was the author in his, ‘On the Authorship and Dating for “For the Understanding of the Exchange’”, Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 20 (April 1967), pp. 145–52.
For a comprehensive portrayal of Sir Edward Coke as mercantilist and parliamentary statist, see Barbara Malament, ‘The “Economic Liberalism” of Sir Edward Coke’, Yale Law Journal 76 (June 1967), pp. 1321–58. On the early common law not being opposed to monopoly, see William L. Letwin, ‘The English Common Law Concerning Monopolies’, University of Chicago Law Review, 21 (Spring 1954), pp. 355–85.
On Milles, Malynes, Misselden, Mun, and the East India controversy in the first half of the seventeenth century, see Barry E. Supple, Commercial Crisis and Change In England, 1600–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), pp. 197–224. Also see the insights in Joyce Oldham Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978). A refreshingly different approach, and closer to the Austrian perspective, may be found in some of the writers in Chi-Yuen Wu, An Outline of International Price Theories (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1939), pp. 13–74. Wu’s work was a doctoral dissertation under Lionel Robbins during the latter’s Austrian period.
Sir Francis Bacon’s commitment to English imperialism is examined in Horace B. White, ‘Bacon’s Imperialism’, American Political Science Review, 52 (June 1958), pp. 470–89. On Francis Bacon as a Rosicrucian-oriented mystic and purveyor of the pseudo-science of the occult Ancient Wisdom, see Stephen A. McKnight, Sacralizing the Secular: The Renaissance Origins of Modernity (Baton Rouge, LA: L.S.U. Press, 1989), pp. 92–7; Frances Yates, ‘Francis Bacon “Under the Shadow of Jehova’s Wings’”, in The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972); Frances Yates, ‘The Hermetic Tradition in Renaissance Science’, in C. Singleton (ed.), Art, Science and History in the Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967); and Paolo Rossi, Francis Bacon: From Magic to Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968).
On the importation of several leading European Baconians to England, by invitation of the puritan country gentry at the start of the English Civil War, see the fascinating article by H.R. Trevor-Roper, ‘Three Foreigners and the Philosophy of the English Revolution’, Encounter, 14 (Feb. 1960), pp. 3–20.
The Baconians, as well as late sixteenth century English mercantilist thought generally, receive an excellent and lively treatment in William Letwin, The Origins of Scientific Economics (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1965). The most recent major volume dealing with late seventeenth and eighteenth century economic thought overall, though stressing English and Scottish thought, is Terence Hutchison, Before Adam Smith: The Emergence of Political Economy, 1662–1776 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988). An early work, but still vitally important for illuminating the anti-working-class views of the English mercantilists and their adherence to ‘full employment’, is Edgar S. Furniss, The Position of the Laborer in a System of Nationalism: A Study of the Labor Theories of the Later English Mercantilists (1920, NY: Kelley & Millman, 1957).
The fullest account of the ‘King–Davenant law of demand’ is in John Creedy, Demand and Exchange in Economic Analysis (Aldershot, Hants: Edward Elgar, 1992), pp. 7–23, as well as in Creedy, ‘On the King-Davenant Law of Demand’, Scottish Journal of Political Economy, 33 (August 1986), pp. 193–212. D.A.G. Waddell, ‘Charles Davenant (1656–1714) – A Biographical Sketch’, Economic History Review, ser. 2, 11 (1958) pp. 279–88, is a convincingly revisionist view of Davenant.
Locke and the Levellers
A pioneering and indispensable work on the libertarian Commonwealthmen of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Britain is Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959). Directly inspired by Robbins was the outstanding work on the predominant influence of English libertarian thought on the American Revolution, Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967, Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992).
Unfortunately, emphasis on the libertarian nature of Lockean influence on the American Revolution quickly became deflected by the ‘Pocock thesis’, which created an artificial distinction between allegedly ‘modern’ radical individualists, believers in private property and the free market, as against admirers of ‘classical republican virtue’ who were basically statists and communitarians who harked back to ancient models. Actually, there is no reason why radical libertarians and free marketers cannot also be opponents of government expenditure and ‘corruption’; indeed, the two views usually go together. The major Pocockian work is J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975). For critiques of Pocock, in addition to the works of Isaac Kramnick and Joyce Appleby, see in particular the refutation of Pocock’s main case: the alleged ‘classical virtue’ rather than libertarianism of the largest single influence on the American revolutionaries: John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon’s impressive series of London newspaper articles in the early 1720s: Cato’s Letters. On Cato’s Letters as libertarian rather than Pocockian, see Ronald Hamowy, ‘Cato’s Letters: John Locke and the Republican Paradigm’, History of Political Thought, II (1990), pp. 273–94.
The Levellers are presented in collections of their tracts, such as in Don M. Wolfe (ed.), Leveller Manifestoes of the Puritan Revolution (1944, New York: Humanities Press, 1967). Also see the editor’s lengthy introduction to those tracts. A full treatment of the Levellers is H.N. Brailsford, The Levellers and the English Revolution (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1961). One of the best summaries of Leveller doctrine is in C.B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1962), pp. 137–59.
Richard Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics and Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986) is excellent on Locke’s radicalism and his connection with Leveller ideas. Ashcraft also provides the Shaftesbury explanation for the two Lockes: the early Baconian empiricist and absolutist of the Essay on Human Understanding, and the later systematic libertarian theorist. On Locke’s early Baconianism, see Neal Wood, The Politics of Locke’s Philosophy: A Social Study of ‘An Essay Concerning Human Understanding’ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983); and on Locke’s free market views, see Karen I. Vaughn, John Locke: Economist and Social Scientist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). The definitive edition of Locke’s notable Two Treatises of Government is the Peter Laslett edition (1960, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2nd ed., 1968); also see Laslett’s Introduction.
On Locke’s theory of homesteading as the origin of private property and its relation to the Protestant scholastics, see Karl Olivecrona, ‘Appropriation in the State of Nature: Locke on the Origin of Property’, Journal of the History of Ideas (April-June 1974), pp. 211–30. Also see Lawrence C. Becker, Property Rights: Philosophic Foundations (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977), pp. 33–48. For a more recent contribution on Locke’s property theory being consistent with free market capitalism, see Neil J. Mitchell, ‘John Locke and the Rise of Capitalism’, History of Political Economy, 18 (Summer 1986), pp. 291–305.
English mercantilists: late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
For a lengthy discussion of Sir Isaac Newton’s role at the Mint, see G. Findlay Shirras and J.H. Craig, ‘Sir Isaac Newton and the Currency’, Economic Journal, 55 (June-Sept. 1945), pp. 217–41.
For the libertarian impact of the satires of Jonathan Swift, see James A. Preu, The Dean and the Anarchist (Tallahassee, Fl.: Florida State University Press, 1959). On Swift’s Modest Proposal as a satire on Pettyism, see Louis A. Landa, ‘A Modest Proposal and Populousness’, in Essays in Eighteenth-Century English Literature (1942, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 39–48.
On the labour and employment theories in late seventeenth century England, see Theodore E. Gregory, ‘The Economics of Employment in England, 1680–1713’, in Gold, Unemployment, and Capitalism (1921, London: P.S. King & Sons, 1933), pp. 225–44. On the North brothers, see Letwin, Origins, pp. 196–220, 271–94.
For contemporary debate on the growth of the public-debt state in England in the first half of the eighteenth century, see P.G.M. Dickson, The Financial Revolution in England, pp. 15–33; on Child, Barbon, and the North brothers, see Letwin, Origins of Scientific Economics, pp. 3–81, 196–220, 271–94.
On John Law, an older but excellent critique is to be found in Charles Rist, History of Monetary and Credit Theory from John Law to the Present Day (1940, New York: M. Kelley, 1966), pp. 43–67. An illuminating study on Law and his influence, as against the hard-money tradition stemming from Turgot, is Joseph T. Salerno, ‘Two Traditions in Modern Monetary Theory: John Law and A.R.J. Turgot’, Journal des Économistes et des Etudes Humaines, 2, nos 2–3 (June-Sept. 1991), pp. 337–79. A provocative view that Law changed his mind from his magnum opus to his Mississippi scheme is in Antoin E. Murphy, ‘The Evolution of John Law’s Theories and Policies 1707–1715’, European Economic Review, 35, no. 5 (July 1991), pp. 1109–25.
Bishop Berkeley’s inflationist views are celebrated in Hutchison, Before Adam Smith, pp. 141–8; and in Salim Rashid, ‘Berkeley’s Querist and Its Influence’, Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 12 (Spring 1990), pp. 38–60.
The hard-money writers of eighteenth century England are discussed in Hutchison, Before Adam Smith, and in the important article of Thomas T. Sekine, ‘The Discovery of International Monetary Equilibrium by Vanderlint, Cantillon, Gervaise, and Hume’, Economia Internazionale, 26 No. 2 (May 1973), pp. 262–82. On Vanderlint and on Joseph Harris, also see Wu, Outline, pp. 64–5, 70–71.
Hutchison, Before Adam Smith, pp. 229–38, devotes considerable space to Dean Josiah Tucker, but at the cost of greatly overvaluing him; a more sober though slighter account is in Viner, Studies, passim. The only book-length study of Tucker is unfortunately padded and diffuse: George Shelton, Dean Tucker and Eighteenth-Century Economic and Political Thought (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1981).
Professor Salim Rashid has performed the signal service of resurrecting and stressing the importance to mid-eighteenth century English laissez-faire thought of Charles the Third Viscount Townshend, not to be confused with his more famous son and namesake, the author of the Townshend taxes on American imports. Salim Rashid, ‘Lord Townshend and the Influence of Moral Philosophy on Laissez Faire’, The Journal of Libertarian Studies, 8, no. 1 (Winter 1986), pp. 69–74.
Modern economics: Richard Cantillon: founding father
The year 1931 was a landmark in Cantillon studies, for it saw the first English translation of Richard Cantillon’s great Essai sur la nature du commerce en general, ed. and trans, by Henry Higgs (1931, New York: A.M. Kelley, 1964). The Higgs Cantillon contains the French text along with the English translation, as well as the 1881 article by W. Stanley Jevons rediscovering Cantillon. Also, in 1931, FA. von Hayek wrote a comprehensive introduction to the German edition of Cantillon, an introduction that also covers the substantial continental literature.
Until very recently, the only modern comprehensive overview of Cantillon’s Essai in English has been Joseph J. Spengler, ‘Richard Cantillon: First of the Moderns’, Journal of Political Economy, 62 (August-Oct. 1954), pp. 281–95, 406–24, reprinted in Joseph J. Spengler and William R. Allen (eds), Essays in Economic Thought: Aristotle to Marshall (Chicago: Rand, McNally Co., 1960), pp. 105–40. Also see the classic article by Jevons, ‘Richard Cantillon and the Nationality of Political Economy’, Contemporary Review (January 1881), partially reprinted in Henry W. Spiegel, (ed.), The Development of Economic Thought: Great Economists in Perspective (New York: Wiley, 1952), pp. 43–60.
The first biography of Cantillon has finally appeared: Antoin E. Murphy, Richard Cantillon: Entrepreneur and Economist (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1986). This will long remain the definitive biography of this fascinating figure. Murphy sets us straight on Cantillon’s confused and tangled genealogy, family, and date of birth, and for the first time presents vivid details of Cantillon’s colourful life, his relationship to John Law, and the overlooked connections between the Mississippi and South Sea bubbles, and he ends with an intriguing mystery story about Cantillon’s violent death.
On Cantillon’s economics, also see Anthony Brewer, Richard Cantillon: Pioneer of Economic Theory (London: Routledge, 1992). Robert Hebert provides a new look at a wholly neglected Cantillon contribution in Robert F. Hebert, ‘Richard Cantillon’s Early Contributions to Spatial Economies’, Economica, 48 (February 1981), pp. 71–7.
For the rest, analyses in English concentrate on Cantillon’s monetary theory, in particular his pioneering contribution to the theory of international monetary payments and the price-specie-flow mechanism. See in particular, Thomas T. Sekine, ‘The Discovery of International Monetary Equilibrium by Vanderlint, Cantillon, Gervaise, and Hume’, Economia Internazionale, 26, no. 2 (May 1973), pp. 262–82; and Chi-Yuen Wu, An Outline of International Price Theories (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1939). Also see Arthur Eli Monroe, Monetary Theory Before Adam Smith (1923, Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1965); Charles Rist, A History of Monetary and Credit Theory: From John Law to the Present Day (1940, New York: A.M. Kelley, 1966); and particularly Douglas Vickers, Studies in the Theory of Money, 1690–1776 (1959, New York: A.M. Kelley, 1968). Especially outstanding is the unpublished work of Joseph Thomas Salerno, ‘The Doctrinal Antecendents of the Monetary Approach to the Balance of Payments’ (doctoral dissertation, Rutgers University, 1980).
In August 1980, a Cantillon symposium was held in Pacific Grove, California, which generated a rich supply of Cantillon scholarship. Most of these valuable articles are published in the Journal of Libertarian Studies, 7 (Autumn 1985) issue. They include the following: an English translation of F.A. von Hayek’s ‘Richard Cantillon’, introduction of the 1931 edition by Michael Ó’Suilleabhain; Vincent Tarascio’s ‘Cantillon’s Essay: A Current Perspective’, which emphasized Cantillon’s insight on the self-regulatory nature of the market economy, his monetary theory, population theory, and stress on uncertainty; David O’Mahony’s ‘Richard Cantillon – A Man of His Time: A Comment on Tarascio’, who points out Cantillon’s pre-Austrian rather than pre-neoclassical theories of price, value and money; Robert F. Hebert, ‘Was Cantillon an Austrian Economist?’ which points to Cantillon’s Austrian approach to uncertainty, entrepreneurship, money and the market; and Roger W. Garrison, ‘A Comment on West’, who brilliantly demonstrates that Cantillon’s hesitancy about the free market economy in matters of space was more than matched by Smith’s criticism of market choices in matters of time. And finally, Antoin E. Murphy, ‘Richard Cantillon – Banker and Economist’, provides up-to-date information on this fascinating economist’s life.
Hébert’s subtle analysis of Cantillon as having a pre-Austrian theory of the entrepreneur is elaborated in Robert F. Hebert and Albert N. Link, The Entrepreneur: Mainstream Views and Radical Critiques (New York: Praeger Books, 1982), pp. 14–22. Also see Bert F Hoselitz, ‘The Early History of Entrepreneurial Theory’, in Spengler and Allen, Economic Thought, pp. 234–57.
Early mathematical economists
Daniel Bernoulli’s pioneering foray into mathematical economics has been translated into English by Louise Sommer as ‘Exposition of a New Theory on the Measurement of Risk’, Econometrica, 22 (Jan. 1954), pp. 23–36. Good summaries of the theory appear in Schumpeter, History, pp. 303–5, and Spiegel, Growth, pp. 143–4, but there are no satisfactory critiques; even the normally highly astute Emil Kauder is severely limited by his undue admiration for mathematical economics. See Emil Kauder, A History of Marginal Utility Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965), pp. 31–5. For a further critique of mathematical marginal utility theory, see Murray N. Rothbard, Toward a Reconstruction of Utility and Welfare Economics (1956, New York: Center for Libertarian Studies, Sept. 1977), pp. 9–12. Also see Harro F. Bernardelli, ‘The End of the Marginal Utility Theory?’ Economica (May 1938), pp. 192–212; Bernardelli, ‘A Reply to Mr. Samuelson’s Note’, Economica (Feb. 1939), pp. 88–9; and idem, ‘A Rehabilitation of The Classical Theory of Marginal Utility’, Economica (August 1952), pp. 254–68.
The physiocrats and laissez-faire
The best overall survey of the physiocrats and their movement is still Henry Higgs, The Physiocrats (1897, New York: The Langland Press, 1952), Valuable also are Joseph J. Spengler, ‘The Physiocrats and Say’s Law of Markets’, and Arthur I. Bloomfield, ‘The Foreign-Trade Doctrines of the Physiocrats’, reprinted in Spengler and Allen (eds), Essays, pp. 161–214, 215–33. Though written from a Marxist perspective, there are some useful insights in Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, The Origins of Physiocracy: Economic Revolution and Social Order in Eighteenth-Century France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1976). Translations from Quesnay as well as his own essays can be found in Ronald L. Meek, The Economics of Physiocracy: Essays and Translations (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963). A helpful study of the last of the physiocrats in James J. McLain, The Economic Writings of Du Pont de Nemours (Newark, Del.: University of Delaware Press, 1977).
A.R.J. Turgot
A collection of all of Turgot’s economic writings, newly translated and with an excellent introduction and annotations, is P.D. Groenewegen (ed.), The Economics of A.R.J. Turgot (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977). Groenewegen, the foremost modern authority on Turgot, offers an illuminating appraisal of his influence in economic thought in ‘Turgot’s Place in the History of Economic Thought: A Bicentenary Estimate’, History of Political Economy, 15 (Winter 1983), pp. 585–616. Turgot’s lack of influence on Adam Smith is established in Groenewegen, ‘Turgot and Adam Smith’, Scottish Journal of Political Economy, 16 (Nov. 1969), pp. 271–87.
For a detailed analysis and appreciation of Turgot’s theory of value and price, see Groenewegen, ‘A Reappraisal of Turgot’s Theory of Value, Exchange, and Price Determination’, History of Political Economy, 2 (Spring 1970), pp. 177–96. And on Turgot’s theory of capital and interest, see Groenewegen, ‘A Re-interpretation of Turgot’s Theory of Capital and Interest’, Economic Journal, 81 (June 1971), pp. 327–40. For Böhm-Bawerk’s appraisal of Turgot and a critique of it, see Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, Capital and Interest (South Holland, 111.: Libertarian Press, 1959), I, pp. 39^5; Frank A. Fetter, Capital, Interest, and Rent: Essays in the Theory of Distribution (ed. M. Rothbard, Kansas City: Sheed Andrews and McMeel, 1977), pp. 264–6; Groenewegen, ‘Re-interpretation’, pp. 327, 337–8. On Turgot’s theory of the entrepreneur, see Hebert and Link, The Entrepreneur, pp. 27–9. On Turgot’s life, see Douglas Dakin, Turgot and the Ancient Regime in France (London: Methuen & Co., 1939).
Ferdinando Galiani
On Galiani and Condillac, see the notable article by Emil Kauder, ‘Genesis of the Marginal Utility Theory’, Economic Journal (Sept. 1953), in Spengler and Allen (eds), Essays, pp. 277–87. There is no full English translation of either of Galiani’s works. There is a partial translation of sections on the theories of value and interest in Della Moneta in Arthur Eli Monroe (ed.), Early Economic Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1924), pp. 280–307. An illuminating discussion of Galiani’s value theory which unfortunately omits his admittedly less important monetary analysis, is that of Luigi Einaudi: ‘Einaudi on Galiani’, in Henry W. Spiegel (ed.), The Development of Economic Thought (New York: Wiley, 1952), pp. 61–82. That gap is made up by Filippo Cesarano, ‘Monetary Theory in Ferdinando Galiani’s Della moneta’, History of Political Economy, 81 (Autumn 1976), pp. 380–99.
For the life of Galiani in Paris, see Joseph Rossi, The Abbé Galiani In France (New York: Publications of the Institute of French Studies, 1950). Also on Galiani and Genovesi, see Franco Venturi, Italy and the Enlightenment (New York: New York University Press, 1972). On Genovesi, Condillac and the utility of exchange, see Oswald St Clair, A Key to Ricardo (1957, New York: A.M. Kelley, 1965). On Condillac, see Hutchison, Before Adam Smith, pp. 324–31, and Isabel F Knight, The Geometric Spirit: The Abbé de Condillac and the French Enlightenment (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968).
The Scottish Enlightenment
An illuminating social history of the Scottish Enlightenment and its relation to the moderate Presbyterian clergy is Anand C. Chitnis, The Scottish Enlightenment: A Social History (London: Croom Helm, 1976). A trenchant discussion of the moderates as apologists for the Presbyterian state Church Establishment is in Richard B. Sher, Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Moderate Literati of Edinburgh (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985).
On the doctrines and personal interrelationships of the Scottish Enlightenment political economists, see William Leslie Taylor, Francis Hutcheson and David Hume as Predecessors of Adam Smith (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1965). See also the summary in H.M. Robertson and W.L. Taylor, ‘Adam Smith’s Approach to the Theory of Value’, Economic Journal (1957), in Joseph J. Spengler and William R. Allen (eds), Essays in Economic Thought (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1960), p. 288ff. The founding father of this group is explored in W.L. Taylor, ‘Gershom Carmichael: A Neglected Figure in British Political Economy’, South African Journal of Economics, 23 (Sept. 1955), pp. 251–5.
For a refutation of the Hayekian view of Bernard Mandeville as exponent of laissez-faire, see Jacob Viner, The Long View and The Short (1953, Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1958), pp. 332–42. Von Hayek’s attempted rebuttal of Viner rests on von Hayek’s failure to comprehend the vital distinction between the ‘natural’ (the processes and results of voluntary actions), and the ‘artificial’ (government interventions in such processes), as well as on von Hayek’s enchantment with all actions whatsoever that have supposedly yielded ‘unintended’ results. FA. von Hayek, ‘Dr. Bernard Mandeville’, New Studies in Philosophy, Politics, Economics and the History of Ideas (1967, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 249–66. For an excellent article demonstrating the profound mercantilism and proto-Keynesianism of Mandeville, see Harry Landreth, ‘The Economic Thought of Bernard Mandeville’, History of Political Economy, 1 (1975), pp. 193–208; also see the illuminating article by Salim Rashid, ‘Mandeville’s Fable: Laissez-Faire or Libertinism?’ Eighteenth-Century Studies, 18 (Spring 1985), pp. 313–30. Landreth shows that, as in the case of other mercantilists, Mandeville was committed to full employment of a large population because he was devoted to maximizing production at low wages. The employment was to be ‘full’ because forced by the state.
On the influence of Suarez and the Spanish scholastics on Grotius, see José Ferrater Mora, ‘Suarez and Modern Philosophy’, Journal of the History of Ideas (Oct. 1953), pp. 528–47.
David Hume’s Writings on Economics, ed. E. Rotwein (Madison, Wise.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1970), provides all Hume’s essays on economics and a brief selection of his letters. An illuminating discussion of Hume’s neglect of cash balance effects in the balance of payment mechanism is in Sekine, ‘Discovery of International Monetary Equilibrium’, pp. 274–82. Also see Salerno, ‘Doctrinal Antecedents’, pp. 150–76. For Hume as inflationist, especially in his later History of England, see Constant Noble Stockton, ‘Economics and the Mechanism of Historical Progress in Hume’s History’, in D.W. Livingston and J.T. King (eds), Hume: A Re-Evaluation (New York: Fordham University Press, 1976), pp. 309–13.
Hume is generally considered the great debunker of natural law, but see A. Kenneth Hesselberg, ‘Hume, Natural Law and Justice’, Duquesne Review (Spring 1961), pp. 45–63, who maintains that Hume eventually slips in a natural law analysis through the back door.
In recent years, it has become fashionable to hold that Sir James Steuart was a sound Keynesian classical liberal, unjustly buried by the success of the Wealth of Nations. An excellent article demolishing this position is Gary M. Anderson and Robert D. Tollison, ‘Sir James Steuart as the Apotheosis of Mercantilism and His Relation to Adam Smith’, Southern Economic Journal, 51 (Oct. 1984), pp. 456–68. Anderson and Tollison point out that Steuart was an ardent believer in a totalitarian planned economy, with government regulating and cartellizing all economic activity. Steuart also helped originate the Marxian doctrine of inherent class conflict in society, as well as lauding and wishing to emulate the Spartan economy of totalitarian rule by an elite grounded in a system of slavery. Steuart’s An Inquiry into the Principles of Political Economy has been republished and edited with an introduction by Andrew S. Skinner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966).
The celebrated Adam Smith
The writings on Adam Smith stretch almost to infinity, and so we can only try to make a brief and judicious selection here. The definitive collection of all of Smith’s writings is now available in the handsome six-volume bicentennial Glasgow edition. The 1976 Glasgow edition of the Wealth of Nations, ed. by R.H. Campbell, A.S. Skinner and W.B. Todd, published by the Oxford University Press, has been reprinted in a two-volume soft-cover set by the Liberty Press (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1981). The Campbell-Skinner General Introduction presents the latest scholarship in the field. But the previous state-of-the-art Cannan edition should also be consulted, if only for the healthily critical approach that the great Cannan dares to take toward Adam Smith. (Smith, Wealth of Nations, ed. E. Cannan, New York: Modern Library, 1937.)
Still the most lucid and penetrating critique of Adam Smith’s confused theories of value and distribution can be found in Paul Douglas, ‘Smith’s Theory of Value and Distribution’, in J.M. Clark et al., Adam Smith, 1776–1926 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1928), pp. 78–115; reprinted in H.W. Spiegel (ed.), The Development of Economic Thought (New York: John Wiley, 1964), pp. 73–102. On the search for an invariable measure of value by Smith and Ricardo, see Richard H. Timberlake, Jr, ‘The Classical Search for an Invariable Measure of Value’, Quarterly Review of Economics and Business, 6 (Spring 1966), pp. 37–44. Edwin Cannan’s critique of the classical economics of Smith and Ricardo is subtle and important: Edwin Cannan, A History of the Theories of Production & Distribution in English Political Economy (3rd ed. 1917, London: Staples Press, 1953). Cannan’s adroit and implicit put-down can be seen in his sesquicentennial summation of Smith’s accomplishments: ‘Adam Smith as an Economist’, Economica, 6 (June 1926), pp. 123–34. See also the similar and equally subtle as well as witty put-down by the Scottish historian of economic thought, Alexander Gray, Adam Smith (London: The Historical Association, 1948).
Despite these dissenting voices, the hagiographic attitude towards Adam Smith remained generally unbroken until the demolition in the monumental work of Joseph Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1954), especially pages 181–94, 323–5, and 557–9. Also see the splendid article by Emil Kauder, ‘Genesis of the Marginal Utility Theory’, Economic Journal (Sept. 1953), pp. 638–50, reprinted in Spengler and Allen, Essays, pp. 277–87. Robertson and Taylor, in their comment on Kauder, are more favourable to Smith but fundamentally concede his criticisms: H.M. Robertson and W.L. Taylor, ‘Adam Smith’s Approach to the Theory of Value’, in Spengler and Allen, Essays, pp. 288–304.
Unfortunately, the clear-eyed attitude towards Smith engendered by Schumpeterian revisionism has been largely rolled back since the mid-1970s. Partly this was the consequence of the bicentennial volumes pouring out in admiration of Smith; partly it was due to the influential work of Samuel Hollander, The Economics of Adam Smith (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973). In the face of the evidence, Hollander absurdly attempts to torture Smith into the mould of a thoroughly consistent, formalistic proto-Walrasian modern general equilibrium theorist. The large Glasgow edition volume of essays, A. Skinner and T. Wilson (eds), Essays on Adam Smith (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1975), presents a number of articles in the new Hollanderian mould of hagiography.
However, it is gratifying to find T.W. Hutchison, in his more recent work, acknowledging the grave damage done by Smith in rejecting the entire subjective utility/scarcity tradition he had inherited, as well as Smith’s implanting into economics objective-value and labour-value theories. Unfortunately, Hutchison attributes this fateful change to ‘unhappy, tiresome, and awkward’ confusion on the part of Smith rather than to deeper differences and problems. Hutchison also trenchantly points to Smith’s unfortunate abandonment of the insight of previous economists that the division of labour is caused by human diversity, a proposition denied by what Hutchison realizes is the view ‘that might be expected... from a social engineer or egalitarian’, rather than from Smith as supposed individualist and libertarian. Terence Hutchison, Before Adam Smith, pp. 362–6, 370–81.
The standard life of Adam Smith is still John Rae’s Life of Adam Smith, especially the 1965 edition containing Jacob Viner’s searching introductory essay, ‘Guide to John Rae’s Life of Adam Smith’, (New York: A.M. Kelley, 1965). Also see C.R. Fay, Adam Smith and the Scotland of His Day (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956); and William Robert Scott, Adam Smith as Student and Professor (Glasgow: Jackson, Son & Co., 1937). The latest concise life of Smith is R.H. Campbell and A.S. Skinner, Adam Smith (London: Croom Helm, 1982). For Smith’s intellectual milieu, see William Leslie Taylor, Francis Hutcheson and David Hume as Predecessors of Adam Smith (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1965); and Anand Chitnis, The Scottish Enlightenment: A Social History (London: Croom Helm, 1976).
For Adam Smith as someone who failed abysmally to acknowledge the sources for his ideas, see Salim Rashid, ‘Adam Smith’s Acknowledgements: Neo-Plagiarism and the Wealth of Nations’, The Journal of Libertarian Studies, 9 (1990), pp. 1–24. On Smith’s unjust accusations of plagiarism against his friend, Adam Ferguson, see Ronald Hamowy, ‘Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, and the Division of Labour’, Economica, 35 (August 1968), pp. 249–59. For an illuminating critique of scholars applying special standards favourable to Adam Smith, see Salim Rashid, ‘Does a Famous Economist Deserve Special Standards? A Critical Note on Adam Smith Scholarship’, Bulletin of the History of Economics Society, 11 (Autumn 1989), pp. 190-209. On the slowness of the Wealth of Nations in achieving renown, see Salim Rashid, ‘Adam Smith’s Rise to Fame: A Reexamination’, The Eighteenth Century (Winter 1982), pp. 64–85.
For an illuminating article on Smith as an enthusiastic top customs collector, see Gary M. Anderson, William F. Shughart II, and Robert D. Tollison, ‘Adam Smith in the Customhouse’, Journal of Political Economy, 93 (August 1985), pp. 740–59.
On Adam Smith and his ignorance of the Industrial Revolution going on about him, see R. Koebner, ‘Adam Smith and the Industrial Revolution’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser. 11 (August 1959); and Charles P. Kindleberger, ‘The Historical Background: Adam Smith and the Industrial Revolution’, in T. Wilson and A.S. Skinner (eds), The Market and the State: Essays in Honor of Adam Smith (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1976), pp. 1–25. For an up-to-date critique of Smith on this issue, see Salim Rashid, ‘The Wealth of Nations and Historical Facts’, Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 14 (Autumn 1992), pp. 225–43. For an unconvincing defence of Smith see Ronald Max Hartwell, ‘Adam Smith and the Industrial Revolution’, in F. Glahe (ed.), Adam Smith and the Wealth of Nations (Boulder, Col.: Colorado Associated University Press, 1978), pp. 123–47.
The grave inner contradiction between Smith’s favourable and unfavourable views on the division of labour, the latter anticipating Marxian complaints about ‘alienation’, is admitted by one of Smith’s staunchest modern admirers, in Edwin G. West, ‘Adam Smith’s Two Views on the Division of Labour’, Economica, n.s. 31 (Feb. 1964), and idem, ‘Political Economy of Alienation’, Oxford Economic Papers, 21 (March 1969), pp. 1–23. Also see idem, ‘Adam Smith and Alienation’, in Skinner and Wilson (eds), Essays on Adam Smith, pp. 540–52. Among other writers pointing to Smith’s anticipation of Marxian wailing about ‘alienation’, see Nathan Rosenberg, ‘Adam Smith on the Division of Labour: Two Views or One?’, Economica, n.s. 32 (May 1965); and Jacob Viner’s Introduction to John Rae’s Life of Adam Smith (1965), p. 35.
On Smith’s bias against consumption, see Roger W. Garrison, ‘West’s Cantillon and Adam Smith: A Comment’, Journal of Libertarian Studies, 7 (Autumn 1985), pp. 291–2; Cannan, History of Theories, pp. 23–4; Ingrid Hahne Rima, Development of Economic Analysis (3rd ed., Homewood, Ill.: Richard D. Irwin, 1978), p. 79; Edwin G. West, Adam Smith (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1969), p. 173; Kauder, ‘Genesis’; and Gerhard W. Ditz, ‘The Calvinism in Adam Smith’ (unpublished MS, 1983). The major point of Nathan Rosenberg’s ‘Adam Smith on Profits – Paradox Lost and Regained’, Journal of Political Economy, 82 (Nov-Dec. 1977), pp. 1187–8, is that Smith holds high profits to be bad because they induce capitalists to indulge in luxurious consumption.
On Smith’s inexplicable failure to carry over Hume’s specie-flow-price analysis from his lectures into his Wealth of Nations, see the classic critique by Jacob Viner, Studies in the Theory of International Trade (New York: Harper & Bros, 1937), p. 87. A realistic assessment of Smith’s unsatisfactory theory of money is in Douglas Vickers, ‘Adam Smith and the Status of the Theory of Money’, surprisingly published in the hagiographical Skinner and Wilson, Essays, p. 484. For an unconvincing attempt to explain the deterioration in Smith’s monetary theory, see Frank Petrella, ‘Adam Smith’s Rejection of Hume’s Price-Specie-Flow Mechanism: A Minor Mystery Resolved’, Southern Economic Journal, 34 (Jan 1968), pp. 365–74. Robert V. Eagly tries, in Samuel Hollanderian fashion, to claim Smith’s consistency in really adopting the Humean view as a proto-Walrasian general equilibrium theorist. Robert V. Eagly, ‘Adam Smith and the Specie-Flow Doctrine’, The Scottish Journal of Political Economy, 17 (Feb. 1970), pp. 61–8. Also, for a critique of Smith’s argument on specie as a ‘dead stock’, see Charles Rist, History of Monetary and Credit Theory: From John Law to the Present Day (1940, New York: A.M. Kelley, 1966), p. 85. For a refutation of modern versions of this argument common to Keynesians and monetarists alike, see Roger W. Garrison, ‘The “Costs” of a Gold Standard’, in Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr (ed.), The Gold Standard: Perspectives in the Austrian School (1985, Auburn, Ala.: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1992), pp. 61–79.
On the ‘invisible hand’ as a metaphor, see William B. Grampp, ‘Adam Smith and the Economic Man’, Journal of Political Economy (August 1948), pp. 319–21. On the first use of the ‘invisible hand’ concept by the seventeenth century writer Joseph Glanville, and on Smith’s similar use of the concept in his philosophic essays, see Spengler, ‘Boisguilbert’s Economic Views’, p. 73.
On Adam Smith as a dubious partisan of laissez-faire, see the classic article by Jacob Viner, ‘Adam Smith and Laissez-faire’, in Clark et al., Adam Smith, 1776–1926, pp. 116–79. Also see Joseph M. Jadlow, ‘Adam Smith on Usury Laws’, Journal of Finance, 32 (Sept. 1977), pp. 1195–1200. Oddly, however, Jadlow sees a wise coping with ‘externalities’ instead of a Calvinist horror of consumption and speculative risk. See also the sensitive discussion in Ellen Frankel Paul, ‘Adam Smith: The Great Founder’, in Moral Revolution and Economic Science: The Demise of Laissez-Faire in Nineteenth Century British Political Economy (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979), pp. 9–44. For a critique of Smith’s alleged canons of taxation, see Murray N. Rothbard, Power and Market: Government and the Economy (1970, Kansas City, Mo.: Sheed Andrews and McMeel, 1977), pp. 137–8, 144–5.
The spread of the Smithian movement
On the spread of the Smithian movement in Scotland and the influence of Dugald Stewart, see Jacob H. Hollander, ‘The Dawn of a Science’, and especially, ‘The Founder of a School’, in J.M. Clark et al., Adam Smith, 1776–1926 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1928). On the founding of the Edinburgh Review, see Anand C. Chitnis, The Scottish Enlightenment; and on Francis Horner, see Frank W. Fetter, ‘Introduction’, F.W. Fetter (ed.), The Economic Writings of Francis Horner (London: London School of Economics, 1957). On the spread of Smithianism on the continent of Europe, see the still indispensable article by Melchior Palyi, ‘The Introduction of Adam Smith on the Continent’, in Clark, Adam Smith, pp. 180–233. On the spread of Smithian views into Germany, see Carl William Hasek, The Introduction of Adam Smith’s Doctrines Into Germany (New York: Columbia University Press, 1925). On Ludwig Heinrich von Jakob, see Donald G. Rohr, The Origins of Social Liberalism in Germany (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963). On the story of, and the problems with, the Stein-Hardenberg reforms in Prussia, see Walter M. Simon, The Failure of The Prussian Reform Movement, 1807–19 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1955). On the German cameralists, who resisted Smithian doctrine, see Lewis H. Haney, History of Economic Thought (4th ed., New York: Macmillan, 1949), pp. 148–65. For a detailed portrayal of the cameralists’ political views, see Albion W Small, The Cameralists (1909; New York: Burt Franklin, n.d.). On Johann Heinrich Gottlieb von Justi’s views of alienation of labour in the factories and under division of labour, and their influence through Sir James Denham Steuart upon G.W.F. Hegel, see Raymond Plant, Hegel (Bloomington, Ind.: University of Indiana Press, 1973). On the communism of Johann Joachim Becher, see Eli F. Heckscher, Mercantilism (2nd ed., New York: Macmillan, 1955). On Heinrich Friedrich Freiherr von Storch, see Schumpeter, History, pp. 502–3; and Peter Bernholz, ‘Inflation and Monetary Constitutions in Historical Perspective’, Kyklos, 36, no. 3 (1983), pp. 408–9.
On Semyon Desnitsky and his Smithian influence at the court of Catherine the Great, see A.H. Brown, ‘S.E. Desnitsky, Adam Smith, and the Nakaz of Catherine II’, Oxford Slavonic Papers, n.s. 7 (1974), pp. 42–59; and idem, ‘Adam Smith’s First Russian Followers’, in Skinner and Wilson (eds), Essays on Adam Smith, pp. 247–73.
Malthus and population
The writings on Malthus and on population are almost infinite; here we can only suggest any of the numerous reprints of Malthus’s first and sixth editions of his Essay on Population (see references in Spiegel, Growth, pp. 735–9, 828–9). In addition, there are excellent critiques of Malthus in Schumpeter, History, pp. 250–58, 578–84, and 889–91; and in Edwin Cannan, A History of the Theories of Production and Distribution in English Political Economy from 1776 to 1848 (3rd ed., London: Staples Press, 1953), pp. 103–114, 132–5. Also see the pungent article by Gertrude Himmelfarb, ‘The Specter of Malthus’, in her Victorian Minds (1968, Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1975), pp. 82–110; and the always witty and perceptive Alexander Gray, The Development of Economic Doctrine (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1931), pp. 155–68. It is remarkable that the only extant biography is the useful and extensive but far from deeply analytic Patricia James, Population Malthus: His Life and Times (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979).
