Cantillon Far Ahead of his Time

Abstract

In writing this chapter I have been moved by the charisma of two men. No one who has come under the spell of Professor Lucas Beltrán can wonder at my joy in being asked to write in his honour. In choosing Richard Cantillon as my subject, I look back to the man who first perceived the need and possibility of our discipline as a distinct, coherent whole, and who saw its theme as the history-making operation of human nature. In years long after his, economics put on a very different mask. It saw itself as the science of a calculable, determinate world, and later still as a manipulable world. In this vision of itself, its Narcissism has denied the nature of man. At the end of the nineteenth century, only a very few, such as Philip Wicksteed, saw business as essentially conditioned by uncertainty, a lesson so long since taught by Cantillon.