Mark Blaug

The first volume in the final section of the "Pioneers in Economics" series. This section of the series offers an assessment of significant economists of the 20th century, and this volume deals with Arthur Pigou.

Part of a series presenting critical appraisals of influential economists from the age of Aristotle to the present. The individuals examined have shaped both the theory and practice of modern economics. Each volume combines classic statements by economists with the most recent research.

Francois Quesnay is best known for the Tableau Economique, the proposition that only agriculture generates a positive 'net product' and that industry is 'sterile'. He recommended a 'single tax' on ground rent and invented the slogan 'laissez faire, laissez passe'. He was the first to found a school of economists called the 'physiocrats' which enjoyed an immense vogue in France for about a decade in the 1750s. The practical programme of the physiocrats was to eliminate the vestiges of medieval tolls and restrictions in the countryside, to rationalize the fiscal system, to amalgamate small-holdings into large-scale agricultural estates, to free the corn trade from all mercantilist restrictions - in short to emulate England. Placed in its historical context these were eminently reasonable views but the attempt to provide these reforms with a watertight theoretical argument produced some forced reasoning and slightly absurd conclusions.

Henry Thornton's Inquiry into the Nature and Effects of the Paper Credit of Great Britain (1802) is the repository of much of what is the best and most clear in modern monetary theory. However, it is only in recent years, largely through the efforts of Jacob Viner and Friedrich Hayek, that Thornton's work has been restored to its rightful place within monetary theory. Jeremy Bentham, was an extraordinary exponent of Utilitarianism and a founding father of administrative science, but he published very little on economics and what he did write was so dramatically ahead of its times that while it has proved stimulating to later generations it was virtually unknown in his own times. Similarly, it was Simonde de Sismondi and James Lauderdale, rather than Malthus, who were the true precursors of Keynesian thought. Their ideas and writings were thought incomprehensible and both men were attacked and ridiculed by contemporaries. However, modern economic theory has given them a new significance and coherence, making their writings relevant and comprehensible to economists. Here is a collection of the best of the articles published on these thinkers in the last two decades.

Ricardo's intellectual appeal, both amongst his contemporaries and more recently, rested on his remarkable gift for heroic abstractions: he seized hold of a wide range of significant problems with a simple analytical model and yielded, after a few elementary manipulations, dramatic conclusions of a distinctly practical nature. In short, precisely the art Keynes was to use so successfully. Although his reputation ebbed towards the end of the nineteenth century, he was still being acclaimed by economists as diverse as Marx and Marshall. Ironically, since Sraffa's work revived Ricardo's reputation, this most bourgeois of economists has been brought back into contemporary debate by economists seeking Marx's intellectual mentors. This selection of recent articles reflects the renewal of interest in Ricardo's work.

Mill, Rae, West and Joplin were, until recently, relegated to the footnotes of the history of economic thought. In particular, Rae's New Principles on the Subject of Political Economy was not reprinted until the 1960s and John Mill has been remembered more for his eldest son than for himself.However, as this volume demonstrates, these four journalists and pamphleteers were important in pre-empting and encouraging other economists, most especially David Ricardo. John Rae has been accredited with being a forerunner of the Austrian theory of capital. James Mill made the first declaration in English of Say's theory of markets and, quite possibly, Ricardo's Principle of Comparative Advantage. The currency and banking tracts written by Thomas Joplin in the 1820s and 1830s have been arduously mined by a variety of commentators as containing nuggets of later monetary doctrines, and Edward West stated the theory of differential rent before Ricardo, and did so in virtually the same form and language. This collection does much to rehabilitate these lesser known figures in the history of economic thought.

Between the death of Ricardo in 1823 and the publication of J.S. Mill's Principles of Political Economy (1848) there flourished a generation of minor but occasionally highly original English economists. Chief amongst these were Ramsay McCulloch, Nassau Senior and Robert Torrens. McCulloch was Ricardo's most zealous disciple and was perhaps more responsible than anyone for Ricardo's enormous influence, which he propagated through a series of newspaper articles and pamphlets. He was also the originator of much new and important research about the British Economy and his Discourse on the Rise of Political Economy (1824) was virtually the first attempt in any language to project a formal history of Economic Doctrines. Robert Torrens was to produce almost 100 books and pamphlets in a lifespan of 84 years. In his own time he was renowned for his work on banking and currency, but he is also notable for discovering the law of diminishing returns at the same time as Ricardo, Malthus and West. Nassau Senior, twice Drummond Professor of Political Economy at Oxford, made significant, if highly individualistic, contributions to the theories of value, rent, population, money and international trade. Throughout the 1830s he was active as a policy maker on behalf of the Whig Party and served on four Royal Commissions, including the Poor Laws 1834 and the Factory Acts 1837.This careful selection of articles brings home the central place that these thinkers occupy within English Classical Political Economy.

Jean-Baptiste Say is almost unread today yet he is famous as the originator of Say's law which later economists, most especially Keynes in the General Theory, have paid so much attention to. Yet, this reputation, based as it is upon the discovery of the concept of the entrepreneur as autonomous from the capitalist as well as the law, is misplaced. Say's main importance lies as a disseminator of English classical political economy on the continent and in his attempts to keep alive an emphasis on utility and demand in contrast to the English over emphasis on cost and supply. Nevertheless, he is also of interest for the theoretical discussions which he sparked amongst historians of economic thought. This book is a collection of essays on the work of Say.

Until comparatively recently, Adam Smith was known mainly as the author of a single book, The Wealth of Nations. Modern scholarship and the greater availability of his other work has thrown new light on Adam Smith suggesting that he was no mere economist but a system builder on a grand scale and, furthermore, a thinker thoroughly steeped in eighteenth century traditions. The breadth and complexity of Smith's thought is reflected in this present volume which surveys the contemporary debate, involving both economists and the wider scholarly community, through some 40 of the outstanding articles published over the last eight years.

David Hume is best known for his work on political philosophy. However, he wrote a series of essays on money, population and international trade which must rank among the major economic writings of the 18th century. Certainly they influenced Adam Smith and have a sparkling quality that still makes them worth reading today. His statement of the so-called 'specie-flow mechanism' constituted his answer to the mercantilist concern with the maintenance of a chronic surplus in the balance of payments. He also put forward what is now known as the 'theory of creeping inflation' and advocated the notion that political freedom flows from economic freedom. James Steuart was a British mercantilist, the last in a long line stretching back to the 16th century. He advocated the entire armoury of mercantilist policies: the regulation of foreign trade to induce an inflow of gold, the promotion of industry by inducing cheap raw material imports, protective duties on imported manufactured goods, encouragement of exports, particularly finished goods because they are labour-intensive, control of the size of population by emigration and immigration to keep wages low, all capped by a denial of Hume's argument that an inflow of gold will only raise prices and thus drive gold abroad.

Richard Cantillon was an Irish refugee who fled to France after the defeat of James II. As a business associate of John Law he sold stock on a rising market and made a fortune from the Mississippi Bubble. His one great book Essay on the Nature of Commerce in General circulated widely among French and English economic writers and was widely quoted and even plagiarised by amongst others Hume, Turgot, Mirabeau, Stewart and Adam Smith. Jacques Turgot was a leading physiocrat, an economic theorist whose Reflections on the Formation and Distribution of Riches (1770) was a major influence on Adam Smith, and an early example of the economist as policymaker. The Reflections is a remarkable book containing the concept of the division of labour, the distinction between the market price and the natural equilibrium price of commodities, and the stress on the volume of real savings as the prime determinant of an economy's rate of growth. Turgot was even more insistent than Adam Smith in propounding the notion that least government in economic matters is best government and left no doubt that the forces of the market could be relied on to drive an economy automatically to an equilibrium position.

The importance of Whewell, Lardner and Babbage to the history of economic thought is as dependent upon the retrospective reading of their work as it is upon their contemporary significance. However, their individual reactions to the industrial and technological revolutions of the early nineteenth century are also of particular interest to us.William Whewell was known in his own times as a historian and philosopher of science, however, more recently he has been hailed as one of the founders of British mathematical economics. Dionysius Lardner, Professor of Natural Philosophy and Astronomy at University College, London, was both an early railway economist and a precursor of modern theories of profit maximalization. Charles Babbage may legitimately be regarded as the father of the modern computer, yet his most popular book, On the Economics of Machinery and Manufacturers (1832), was an unprecedented study of what we would now call operational research and had a significant effect upon both John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx. These were the 'also ran' but they are no less important than the forerunners for understanding the development of economic thought in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Whether or not we reject the Marxist schema there is little doubt that Marx was a great economist. The three volumes of Capital, contain some pieces of remarkable economic analysis from which modern economists can still learn. However difficult he is to read, there are moments when, like Ricardo and Walras, he can revel in the abstract power of economic reasoning. This volume is made up of papers published since 1986 and, despite recent events in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, they demonstrate how friends and foes alike are coming to reassess earlier views of Marx. These commentaries made in the 1980s hold out the prospect that a 'new view' of Marx will eventually emerge.