ABSTRACT
In the first half of the eighteenth century, it was France, rather than England, that had a school of theoretical economists; Quesnay and the Physiocrats conceived of political economy as the science that seeks the laws governing the distribution of wealth. While Adam Smith did not distinguish between economics as a science and economics as a branch of politics, his French disciple, Jean-Baptiste Say, used the deductive method to derive the laws that govern the production, distribution, and consumption of wealth. His method and logical arrangement of the subject matter of economics were probably introduced into England through James Mill, who studied the work of the Physiocrats and was also well acquainted with Say.1 Mill taught the deductive method to David Ricardo, whose work became the prototype for a school of thinkers who reasoned from premises that were accepted a priori or that had been previously arrived at by deduction to discover universal laws of production, exchange, and distribution.
