French Political Economy 1750-1850
ABSTRACT
This conference examined a number of French thinkers of political economy, including Montesquieu, Rousseau, Turgot, Say, Destutt De Tracy, Tocqueville, and Bastiat. Among the themes considered were morality and commerce, productive as opposed to unproductive labor, the distribution of wealth, and the unintended consequences of state intervention in the economy.
READING LIST
From Liberty Fund
Commerce, Culture, and Liberty
by Edited by Henry C. Clark
This collection of thirty-seven readings (from thirty-three writers) brings together some of the most significant pre–Adam Smith writings on the political and cultural dimensions of capitalism. To modern readers, these seventeenth- and eighteenth-century discussions of commerce and economic life in general are surprising because they are so closely integrated with…
Additional Readings
Bastiat, Frédéric. Selected Essays on Political Economy. Irvington-on-Hudson, New York: Foundation for Economic Education, 1964.
Destutt de Tracy, Antoine Louis Claude. A Treatise on Political Economy. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2011.
Forget, Evelyn L. The Social Economics of Jean-Baptiste Say. London: Routledge, 1999.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Luxury, Commerce and the Arts.” In Commerce, Culture, and Liberty: Readings on Capitalism Before Adam Smith, edited by Henry C. Clark, 392-402. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2003.
Lambert, Jean-François, “Luxury” In Commerce, Culture, and Liberty: Readings on Capitalism Before Adam Smith, edited by Henry C. Clark, 477-501. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2003.
Melon, Jean-François, “A Political Essay upon Commerce” In Commerce, Culture, and Liberty: Readings on Capitalism Before Adam Smith, edited by Henry C. Clark, 254-264. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2003.
Tocqueville, Alexis de. Alexis de Tocqueville's Memoir on Pauperism. Translated by Seymour Drescher. London: IEA Health and Welfare Unit, 1997.
Turgot, Anne-Robert. The Formation and Distribution of Wealth: Reflections on Capitalism. Edited by Kenneth Jupp. London: Othila Press, 1999.