‘general principles of law and government’

Abstract

Adam Smith considered the history of Britain’s constitutional monarchy to have been a positive influence on the spread of opulence. Strictly, Cantillon’s and Turgot’s incomparably briefer and brilliantly original expositions of similar economics to Smith’s¹ failed to gain the appreciation of the French political class compared to the impact of Smith’s Wealth of Nations among British (and North American) legislators. Smith wrote to gain the attention of legislators. Cantillon and Turgot wrote for a far narrower audience (in Turgot’s case, he wrote for two Chinese Jesuit students, M. M. Ko and Yang)² and it was over a century before Cantillon’s and Turgot’s work was recognised by economists as original and significant contributions to economic science.³