A Treatise on Political Economy
- Jean-Baptiste Say (author)
- Clement Cornell Biddle (editor)
- Charles Robert Prinsep (translator)
One of the most influential works on Political Economy in the 19thC. It set the stage for the development of the study of political economy in France and an early translation into English helped make it become the most used economics textbook in the United States.
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Key Quotes
Colonies, Slavery & Abolition
Indeed, this very exorbitance of profit shows, that the industry of the master is paid out of all proportion with that of the slave. To the consumer it makes no difference. One of the productive classes benefits by the depression of the rest; and that would be all, were it not that the vicious…
Property Rights
There are some truths so completely self-evident, that demonstration is quite superfluous. This is one of that number. For who will attempt to deny, that the certainty of enjoying the fruits of one’s land, capital and labour, is the most powerful inducement to render them productive? Or who is dull…
Economics
What, then, are we to think of the principles laid down by those writers, who have laboured to draw an essential distinction between public and private wealth; to show, that economy is the way to increase private fortune, but, on the contrary, that public wealth increases with the increase of…
Colonies, Slavery & Abolition
All these losses fall chiefly upon the class of home-consumers, a class of all others the most important in point of number, and deserving of attention on account of the wide diffusion of the evils of any vicious system affecting it, as well as the functions it performs in every part of the social…
Property Rights
The property a man has in his own industry, is violated, whenever he is forbidden the free exercise of his faculties and talents, except insomuch as they would interfere with the rights of third parties…. The industrious faculties are, of all kinds of property, the least questionable; being derived…
Free Trade
But personal interest is no longer a safe criterion, if individual interests are not left to counteract and control each other. If one individual, or one class, can call in the aid of authority to ward off the effects of competition, it acquires a privilege to the prejudice and at the cost of the…
Critical Responses
What to read next...
John Stuart Mill on Say’s LawRosolino Candela
The Reading Room
Candela explores some of the many misinterpretations of Say’s law in this post.
