Abstract
The field of eighteenth century economic thought is far more fertile than commonly believed. Even before Adam Smith’s monumental contribution in the last quarter of the century, peak performances in economic analysis had emerged in France (Boisguilbert, Vauban, Cantillon, Quesnay, Turgot), Italy (Galiani, Verri, Beccaria), Germany (Justi, Sonnenfels), and Spain (Campomanes, Jovellanos). A complete investigation of these and other contributions would convince even the most reluctant skeptic that economics was anything but a product of exclusively British manufacture.
One may say, if one disregards the influence of Stoic conceptions of a world order (revived during the Renaissance), that the eighteenth century conceptualized the economic (or social) universe. It made the hidden processes of the social order visible even as the seventeenth had become aware of those of the physical order and made them visible….
— J.J. Spengler [1984, p. 3]
Unless otherwise noted, all translations of French into English are my own. I would like to thank R. B. Eckelund, Jr., and P. D. Groenewegen for helpful comments on an earlier draft. Any errors that remain are stubbornly my own.
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Hébert, R.F. (1987). In Search of Economic Order: French Predecessors of Adam Smith. In: Todd Lowry, S. (eds) Pre-Classical Economic Thought. Recent Economic Thought Series, vol 10. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-3255-5_12
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