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E. E. Slutsky on Sir William Petty: A Short Essay on his Economic Views—Kiev, 1914

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 June 2009

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Extract

This essay was originally read at the conference of the Society of Economists at the Kiev Institute of Commerce on November 14, 1913, to mark the 250th anniversary (in 1912) of the appearance of William Petty's first economic treatise. It was subsequently published in the Student Bulletin of the same institute (1914, Numbers 16, 17, 18).

Publishing this essay in the form of a separate pamphlet I, of course, acknowledge its extreme incompleteness in many respects, but think that the extreme poverty of Russian literature about such a wonderful economist justifies its worth.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the History of Economic Thought , Volume 27 , Issue 3 , September 2005 , pp. 309 - 319
Copyright
Copyright © The History of Economics Society 2005

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References

2 See The Economic Writings of Sir William Petty together with the Observations upon the Bills of Mortality more probably by Captain John Graunt. Edited by Hull, Charles Henry, Cambridge, 1899Google Scholar. In this work see Hull's Introduction, especially the section The Disputed Authorship, pp. XXXIX–LIV.

3 Political Arithmetik, loc. cit., Vol. I, p. 244Google Scholar. Quotation here and hereon after taken from Charles Hull's edition.

4 Justum pretium est quod secundum aestimationem fori istius temporis potest valere res vendita. (J. Nider—a writer at the beginning of the fourteenth century—in the work Compendiosas tractatus de contractions mercatorum.) Quotation from Orzhentskii, , Studies on Value from the Classicists and Canonists. Odessa, 1896, p. 209.Google Scholar

5 Sitautem equalitas nihil aliud, quam aestimatio mutua voluntaria bona fide facta. Nider, ibid. See Orzhentskii, , 1. cit. p. 208.Google Scholar

6 The Political Anatomy of Ireland, p. 183Google Scholar

7 Tractatus de commerciis et cambio (1618) § 1 qu. VII, par. 1, sub. n. 13.Google Scholar

8 Theorien űber den Mehrwert I B., S. 1–11.Google Scholar

9 Treatise of Taxes and Contributions, p. 68.Google Scholar

10 Graunt, , Natural and Political Observations etc. p. 377.Google Scholar

11 The Economic Writings of Sir William Petty, v. II, pp. 377–78. Hull's footnote.Google Scholar

12 It is noted in passing that the question of “the source of wealth” develops further in two directions. In the first one, a discussion of value, based on the identification of factors forming the material substrata of wealth is affiliated with factors which ‘create’ value, and the process of wealth creation is linked to the process of value ‘creation’; in the second, which occurred much later, the study of factors of production is developed. Petty's interpretative study in this second thought (later adapted by Locke and Cantillon) is far more modern than Cantillon's theory, having added a third factor—capital—to the existing two of land and labor. Compare Böhm-Bawerk, , Capital und Capitalzins, II Abt. 3 Aufl. 1909, S. 145Google Scholar and DrSchumpeter, Joseph, Theorie der wertschaftlichen Entwicklung, 1912, S. 25–26.Google Scholar

13 Treatise of Taxes, p. 50.Google Scholar

14 Treatise of Taxes, p. 44.Google Scholar

15 Ibid. p. 50. It is worth noting that Petty's view on the influence of the quantity of money is not clearly defined. Compare Ch. V, § 10 (further on in the sentence) where the quantity theory of money unnecessarily switches to that of labor.

16 In particular see Treatise on Taxes, Ch. XIV, § 18.

17 Treatise of Taxes, p. 44.Google Scholar

18 Ibid. p. 50.

19 Ibid. p. 44.

20 This expression is met in various places. See for example 1. cit. p. 50.

21 Ibid. p. 44.

22 Treatise of Taxes, p. 51Google Scholar onwards. Historical justice demands that we should in this instance acknowledge the opinions of Bodin who came to the idea of the necessity of statistical investigation of production by the state a long time before Petty. He defends his idea eloquently and has produced a whole program of works on this theme. See I. Bodini de republica libri sex, 1586, liber VI, cap. I, p. 621–629.

23 Treatise of Taxes, pp. 44–45.Google Scholar

24 The Political Anatomy of Ireland, pp. 181–182.Google Scholar

25 Loc. cit. p. 181. See original text and the commentary concerning it further on in the sentence.

26 It is worth noting that Petty uses a method which in principle does not differ from that of the Austrian school, applied in order to solve the question of what proportion of a complex product should be attributed to its component parts, and what proportion of the product's value should be ascribed to each of the factors contributing to the products creation (the so-called Zurechnung). It is only in Petty's work that it is suggested that production factors are imputed not for the subjective value of the product but for the product itself, as such it is. On the problem of imputation in the works of Aristotle, see Oskar Kraus, Die Aristotlische Werttheorie, Zeitschr. f die ges. Staatswiss. B. 61 (1905), S. 584–587.

27 Political Anatomy of Ireland, I. c., p. 181.Google Scholar

28 p. 181.

29 Treatise on Taxes, loc. cit. p. 48.Google Scholar

30 Treatise on Taxes, p. 47Google Scholar, Quantulumcunque concerning Money, vol. II, p. 446 (Qu. 28).Google Scholar

31 See von Böhm-Bawerk, E., Op. cit. I Abt. S. 27 and following.Google Scholar

32 Theorien über den Mehrwert, I S. 5 – “Sehr genial.”

33 Treatise on Taxes, p. 45.Google Scholar

34 Essays of Taxes, pp. 20, 52, 55, 87.Google Scholar

35 Ibid. p. 20. We note that ‘the law of a minimum wage’ in the sense of a ‘law of nature’ still does not exist for Petty.

36 See for example Essays on Taxes, Ch. VI.

37 Ibid. p. 60.

38 Quantulumcunque concerning money, ibid. Vol. II, p. 446.

39 Treatise of Taxes, p. 91Google Scholar. Compare The Politics of Aristotle, 1, 3, 8–9. (Zhebelev's translation.)Google Scholar

40 Quantulumcunque concerning Money, ibid. Vol. II, p. 446, Qu. 24.

41 Political Arithmetik, pp. 268–269.Google Scholar

42 The same must be said of the physiocrats. See for example Quesnay, , “Dialogue sur le commerce” in Daire's edition, Phisiocrates, 1846, I Partie, p. 171Google Scholar and after. Incidentally, the difference between the theoretical systems of the physiocrats and mercantilists is usually overstated. In actual fact we sometimes find significant concessions to mercantilist theory in the works of the physiocrats. For example, see Tosne, Le, “De l'intérêt social”, Daire, II, especially pp. 916–922Google Scholar, and compare Quesnay's comments on petites nations purement commerçantes (Septieme observation sur le tableau économique, Daire, I, pp. 76–77).