1.11 Notes

1. We should also mention as prominent in the ideologue group the historian Constantin François Chasseboeuf, Comte de Volney (1757–1820).

2. Emmet Kennedy, Destutt De Tracy and the Origins of ‘Ideology’ (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1978), p. 199.

3. It might be noted that de Tracy's intermediary in the negotiations with Jefferson on the translation was their mutual friend, the last of the physiocrats, DuPont de Nemours, who had emigrated to Wilmington, Delaware in 1815 to found his famous gunpowder manufacturing dynasty.

4. Thus in a famous speech in February 1801, Napoleon denounced the ideologues as the most harmful class of men. They were ‘windbags and ideologues. They have always fought the existing authority’, he thundered. ‘Always distrusting authority, even when it was in their hands, they always refused to give it the independent force needed to resist revolutions’. See Kennedy, op. cit., note 2, pp. 80ff.

5. Or as Emmet Kennedy commented, ‘political theory could not be tolerated in a state where politics was not’. Ibid.

6. Ernest Teilhac, L'Oeuvre economique de Jean-Baptiste Say (Paris: Librairie Felix Alcan, 1927), pp. 24–6. Quoted and translated in Leonard P. Ligglio, ‘Charles Dunoyer and French Classical Liberalism’, Journal of Libertarian Studies, 1 (Summer 1977), pp. 156–7.

7. For a while, Rivadavia was also working on a translation of Bentham.

8. Storch's Cours, published in Russia in 1815, was reprinted in Paris in 1823, with notes appended by Say. Storch accused Say of theft in publishing the French edition without his consent, whereupon Say riposted that Storch lifted the bulk of the work from himself, de Tracy, Bentham, and Sismondi.

9. The sixth and last American edition of 1834, edited by Biddle, incorporated changes made in the final French edition of 1826.

10. J.A. Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1954), p. 491.

11. This distinction between certain theory and its application by an ‘enlightened understanding’ approximates von Mises's later distinction between conceptual theory (‘Begreiffen’) and understanding (‘Verstehen’).

12. Oswald St Clair, A Key to Ricardo (New York: A.M. Kelley, 1965), pp. 295–6.

13. In the first annotated biography of economics ever written, John R. McCulloch, along with James Mill, the leading British Ricardian, noted of Say that he was a lucid writer but stubbornly refused to accept all the great advances of Ricardo. The only creative insight McCulloch credited to Say was his law. John Ramsay McCulloch, The Literature of Political Economy (1845, London: London School of Economics, 1938), pp. 21–2.

14. Discussion of Say's law is made more complicated by the fact that Say, of course, did not set aside some particular passage or sentence and call it ‘my law’. The locus classicus of Say's law is generally held to be Book 1, Chapter XV of the Treatise, and it indeed has been anthologized as ‘the’ statement of the law. Treatise, pp. 132–40. Actually, there are important and relevant passages scattered throughout the Treatise, especially pp. 109–19, 287–8, and pp. 303^1.

Moreover, almost all of Say's Letters to Malthus, in particular p. 1–68, are taken up with defence of Say's law and his critique of Malthus's (and the Frenchman Simonde de Sismondi's) worry about general overproduction and complaint about alleged underconsumption. Historians of economic thought have often found Say's Letters superficial and erroneous, but in fact his being forced to give attention to the law carried him to the heart of the differences and led him to express his views in a lucid and pungent manner. See J.B. Say, Letters to Mr. Malthus (1821, New York: M. Kelley, 1967).

For an anthologizing of Book I, Chapter XV as the statement of Say's law, see Henry Hazlitt (ed.), The Critics of Keynesian Economics (1960, New Rochelle, New York: Arlington House, 1977), pp. 12–22.

15. But Schumpeter and other historians are grossly unfair in ridiculing one of Say's arguments against Malthus: that there cannot be overproduction because ‘to create a thing, the want of which does not exist, is to create a thing without value; this would not be production. Now from the moment it has a value, the producer can find means to exchange it for those articles he wants’. While this appears to eliminate the problem by defining it out of existence, there are two comments that may be made on Say's behalf. First, this is indeed a charming but unconvincing argument, but it is tangential, and does not vitiate the value of Say's law or its creator's crushing arguments on its behalf. In the heat of debate, Say, like many another intellectual combatant, sometimes used any argument that came to hand. But second, this point is not wholly valueless. For it focuses attention on a key question which Say raised but did not fully answer: why in the world did the producers make goods that, it turned out later, the consumers did not want to buy -at least at profitable prices? Needless to say, Say's opponents provided no satisfactory answer. For Schumpeter's attitude, see Schumpeter, op. cit„ note 10, pp. 619–20.

16. The vulgarization took two forms. Most of Say's emphasis on price adjustments was omitted, as was any hint of entrepreneurial failure in bidding up costs, or in the idea that specific classes of overproduction and underproduction might be the hallmark of recessions. Another item was the Mills's formulation that ‘commodities pay for commodities’ rather than all supplies of goods and services pay for each other. This was a legacy of Smith's stress that the only productive labour was that embodied in material objects, or commodities.

17. By leaving out three important sentences in his quotation from John Stuart Mill's summary of Say's law, Keynes omits any hint of the price system as equilibrating force. John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1936), p. 18. On this point, see Hazlitt, op. cit., note 14, p. 23.

18. Keynes also summed up Say's law as holding that ‘supply creates its own demand’ – a formulation followed by virtually all economists since Keynes, including Schumpeter, Mark Blaug, Thomas Sowell and Axel Leijonhufvud. As Professor Hutt writes, in correcting this distortion: ‘But the supply of plums does not create the demand for plums. And the word “creates” is injudicious. What the law really asserts is that the supply of plums constitutes demand for whatever the supplier is destined to acquire in exchange for the plums under barter, or with the money proceeds in a money economy’. W.H. Hutt, A Rehabilitation of Say's Law (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1974), p. 3 and 3n.

19. The quotation comes from a critique of the British national debt by the Scottish mathematician Robert Hamilton (1743–1829). This work was An Inquiry Concerning the Rise and Progress, the Redemption and Present State, and the Management of the National Debt of Great Britain and Ireland (Edinburgh, 1813, 3rd ed., 1818). Hamilton was born in Edinburgh and, after leaving college, worked as a banker. Shifting to academic pursuits, he became rector of the Academy of Perth in 1769. Ten years later he became professor of mathematics at the University of Aberdeen.