“esclave né de quiconque l’achète”. The multiple histories of economic texts

Abstract

Today doing history of economic thought can mean many things. Most fundamentally, they are the different questions, rather than the methods chosen to answer them, that give rise to varying examinations of the products of previous economists. As a classification, four kinds of questions are suggested. The answers to the various questions may sometimes complement and reinforce each other. But if they do not, this should not necessarily be a problem for continued dialogue. All one needs is an acknowledgment that different perspectives are not mutually exclusive.

Keywords:

• Methodology
• ESHET
• Turgot

JEL CODES:

• B10
• B40

Acknowledgements

I thank Annie Cot, Heinz Kurz and Annalisa Rosselli for their comments and suggestions. All remaining misconceptions are my own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Currently the painting is at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. For detailed information about this work see https://rkd.nl/en/explore/images/59101

2 No detailed discussion of the reasons for this development can be given here. There appears to be a variety of factors at play, including a general academic climate, at least in some countries, that is more receptive to non-mainstream economics teaching and research, as well as more specific institutional conditions, including the opportunities for publication available through established HET journals and the funding and supportive and open intellectual environments offered to young scholars by excellent academic centres (most prominently at Paris1, the University of Lausanne, and Duke University, but also at a number of other universities). For other studies of recent trends in the practice of history of economic thought see also Baccini (2020) and Desmarais-Tremblay and Svorenčík (2021).

3 Düppe and Weintraub (2019) provide a somewhat provocative selection of recent approaches to the writing of history of economic thought.

4 Cannan (1896, xi) notes that as early as 1773 Smith had instructed his then literary executor, David Hume, to dispose of most of his papers in the event of his death.

5 The last comprehensive scholarly edition of Turgot’s writings by Gustave Schelle, now more than a century old, made greater but still selective use of these papers.

6 I thank the Tsuda family for giving permission to use these images and professors Tamotsu Nishizawa and Tomomi Fukushima, of Teikyo University, Tokyo, for providing me with copies. Together with images of other documents that have gone missing, the full text of Valeurs et monnaies will be published online by the Archives Nationales.

7 The passage reads (Turgot’s rewritings in smaller font):

On peut reduire a ces trois considerations toutes celles

qui entrent dans la fixation de ce ce genre de valeur relative à l’homme

qui determinent la valeur que l’homme isolé attache

isolé ; et qui resul ce sont là les trois élémens qui concourent

aux differens objets de ses desirs. pour donner un

a la former. pour resultant la designer par un nom

nom a cette valeur formée de ces trois elemens et relative

qui luy soit propre,

a l’homme isolé, nous l’appellerons valeur estimative

8 For reflections of the editors see Potier and Tiran (2009).

9 Even though rational reconstructions of this kind run counter to the methodological sensibilities of some, they can be genuine heuristic tools for investigating questions about texts of the kind I consider in this section. As Aspromourgos (1997, 418) put it “by rational reconstruction is meant the application of formal models designed to accurately capture the intentions or ideas of an earlier author or text, while going beyond the actual analytical or formal execution of the writer. This is an interpretive method which may enable a clearer grasp of the logical coherence (or otherwise) and implications of a system - but runs the risk of losing contact with the text under examination.” The last qualification is of course important. The adoption of formal expressions frequently incline “the intentions or ideas of an earlier author,” whether on purpose or not, towards those of the student of the text. Rational reconstructions are, however, not unique in this respect: any re-interpretation of texts is to a greater or lesser extent subject to the same risk.

10 As a student in the 1980s, this was my impression when reading the first book by Knud Haakonssen (1981).

11 Genuine attempts to interpret the theories of earlier economists through the characteristics of the economy of their time and vice-versa are rare. Grenier (1996) is a fascinating, but in my opinion ultimately unconvincing, for example.

12 For Du Pont’s comments on Melon’s work see Ephémérides du citoyen 1769, vol. 1, part 1, pp. xiii–xiv. They came in the first of eight instalments of “A brief notice of the various modern Writings that have contributed in France to the formation of the Science of political economy.”

13 Boileau Satire IX (1668). Boileau’s poem continued in the same vein: « Il se soumet lui-même aux caprices d’autrui, Et ses écrits tout seuls doivent parler pour lui ». To be precise, Turgot in this informal letter, only imperfectly paraphrased Boileau’s lines, writing: « Tout homme qui imprime est fait pour être jugé: Il est esclave né de quiconque l’achète » (Schelle 1919, 500).

14 For this letter see https://wikirouge.net/texts/en/Letter_to_Friedrich_Engels,_July_6,_1863

15 Long-term historiography of the careers of economic texts and the ideas they contain remains possible. However, if we take seriously the processes whereby meanings are reshaped and reappropriated by subsequent “users”, then we do not so much present the history of, for example, circular flow analysis as a “strong and simple line of development” (Schumpeter 1954, 218), but more as that of a “non-rival” intellectual product open to alternative applications. For instance, as I argue in van den Berg (2019), an alternative creative use of Cantillon’s conceptions of circulation was made by Quesnay’s rival Forbonnais.

16 The distinctions between Keynes’s economics and assorted versions of Keynesian economics has of course often been discussed. Still worth reading are the short reflections by Grossman (1972) which reviewed Axel Leijonhufvud’s On Keynesian Economics and the Economics of Keynes. A comprehensive treatment of the most significant creative “users” of Keynes’s ideas is provided in the 21 chapters of part 7 of The Elgar Companion to John Maynard Keynes 2019 (Dimand and Hagemann 2019)

17 See Forder (2014).

18 Such shifts progressively undermine the reliability of unspoken assumptions that authors originally made about their readers’ background knowledge. Behavioural economists have belatedly rediscovered this phenomenon of discrepancies between the shared knowledge assumed by communicators and the actual conceptual framework of their audiences and called it the “curse of knowledge” (Camerer Loewenstein and Weber 1989).

19 These studies have been collected in the special issue on the international diffusion of Forbonnais’s ideas in the History of European Ideas of 2014 edited by Alimento.

20 Also see Roncaglia (1996).

21 https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/videos/how-and-how-not-to-do-economics