ABSTRACT
The idea of a stationary state is an integral part of the “economic imagination.” It is a particularly significant part of the world view of the classical economists from Adam Smith to John Stuart Mill. Any society must be progressing, stationary, or declining. Both the progressing state and the declining state, however, were thought of as self-limiting, in the sense that in each the rate of progress or of decline would diminish until it was zero and the stationary state was reached. On the whole, the classical economists certainly thought the progressive state was preferable to the others. Mill perhaps had a slightly rosier view of the stationary state than Adam Smith, who thought it would be “dull.” They would all have agreed with Adam Smith that the declining state was melancholy, but none of them believed for a moment that the progressive state could go on forever or even for very long, for they thought that all progressive states would come to an end in the stationary state. Indeed, Adam Smith thought there were many historical examples of stationary states—in his own day, for instance, China.
