Difficulty or Facility of Production

Abstract

The materialist view of the world characteristic of the writings of the classical economists was manifest not only in their concern with production and accumulation, but also in their theories of value. Petty and Cantillon, for example, both argued that the value of commodities is determined by the amounts of land and labour used in their production. Smith dropped land from the calculation, and argued that the value of commodities is determined by the quantity of labour used to bring them to market (at least in the early and rude state of society), though this material approach was somewhat blurred by reference to the ‘toil and trouble’ involved.