ABSTRACT
Boisguilbert is now very much a neglected economist, particularly in the English speaking world. None of his economic work has so far been translated into English and many general histories of economics pass his work silently by. Only more specialist English histories seem to mention him as an important seventeenth-century economic writer (for example, Hébert, 1987, pp. 187-91; Hutchison, 1988, pp. 107-15). In the nineteenth century, Marx (1859, pp. 54-5) described Boisguilbert together with Sir William Petty as one of the founders of classical political economy, but his assessments of Boisguilbert as an economic writer are largely confined to this work and are not included, for example, in his Theories of Surplus Value (for a discussion, see Groenewegen, 1987, pp. 28-30). The definitive edition of Boisguilbert’s economic contributions published by the Institut National d’Etudes Démographiques (Boisguilbert, 1966) is, in the spirit of Marx, appropriately subtitled ‘La Naissance de l’Economie Politique’, but this claim, generally speaking, would be regarded in many Anglo-Saxon circles as typical French nationalistic bombast. An American scholar (Hazel Van Dyke Roberts, 1935) pioneered English work on Boisguilbert during the twentieth century, for which she was honoured at an international symposium on Boisguilbert in 1975 (Hecht, 1989). Since Van Dyke Roberts’ pioneering study, detailed work on Boisguilbert has appeared in Nagels (1970), Spengler (1984) and Faccarello (1986) to name the more important work not yet mentioned.
