ABSTRACT
In an important contribution to the discussion on mercantilism from 1952 William D.Grampp strongly emphasised the liberal elements in English eighteenth-century mercantilist thought.1 However, it is possible to turn Grampp’s argument around and also to highlight the strong mercantilist element in English liberal economics as it appeared from Adam Smith onwards. Hence, in a methodological essay T.W.Hutchison raises the question whether there really was ‘a Smithian revolution’ or not.2 He, as most other scholars, tends to answer this question affirmatively. And it is certainly correct that Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776) provided a pathbreaking analysis of a self-equilibrating economic system. In fact, according to Hutchison:
It was this powerfully fascinating idea and assumption of general beneficent self-adjustment and self-equilibration, not only microeconomic but monetary and macro-economic, which underlay the Smithian-classical orthodoxy.3
