Richard Cantillon: Pioneer of Economic Theory

ISBN-13: 9780415075770 / Angielski / Twarda / 1992 / 224 str.

Anthony Brewer;Brewer Anthony

Opis

Richard Cantillon was an 18th-century merchant. His only surviving work, the Essai sur la Nature du Commerce en General was an astonishing achievement - the first analysis of the economy as an interrelated whole. Simply to sketch such a theory would have been a major advance, but Cantillon worked out the implications of his model with a rigour unmatched for a century or more. Although it was not published until 20 years after his death, and never widely known, it was a formative, if unacknowledged, influence on classical economics. This book is a study of Cantillon's economics. In the first part, Anthony Brewer sets out Cantillon's theory concluding with an examination of his mercantilist views. Mercantilism has been regarded as irrational ever since Smith's attack on it, but Cantillon's views are shown to be a logical consequence of his pioneering analysis of the workings of the international economic system. The second part of the book sets Cantillon in the context of the development of economic thought in the 17th- and 18th-centuries, and shows that he took less from his predecessors than has been thought, and gave more to his successors than they were willing to acknowledge.

Recenzje

`The comprehensiveness of Brewer's coverage of Cantillon's Essai, and his very clear and illuminating discussion of Cantillon's relationships to his predecessors and his successors, will ensure that this book becomes, alongside Murphy's biography, one of the standard works on someone who must rank as one of the greatest economic theorists of all time.' - Roger E. Backhouse, THES, Jan '93

Spis treści

Chapter 1 Introduction; Part I Cantillon's Economics; Chapter 2 The Economic and Social Framework; Chapter 3 Population; Chapter 4 Incomes; Chapter 5 The Land Theory of Value; Chapter 6 Money, Prices, and the Trade Balance; Chapter 7 Banking and Exchange Rates; Chapter 8 Trade and Trade Policy; Part II Cantillon's Place in the History of Economics; Chapter 9 Cantillon and his Predecessors; Chapter 10 Cantillon and his Successors; Chapter 11 Conclusion;

O autorze

Anthony Brewer