ABSTRACT
Fortune has not altogether favoured Sir Thomas Smith (1513-77). While he held important posts, he never attained the high office commensurable with his exceptional talents, and only recently has it been convincingly demonstrated that he and not John Hales was the author of A Discourse of the Commonweal of This Realm of England.1 On the basis of this masterful treatment, he can be called the founder of the science of political economy, to become perhaps Britain’s outstanding contribution to social history.2
Nothing quite like the volume had appeared prior to Bodin in English or continental thought. The traditional economic concerns of scholasticism seem by comparison narrow and formalistic. Possible intellectual precedents had been established by Oresme, Carafa, Molinaeus, and the School of Salamanca, but the Discourse bears Smith’s own unique humanistic stamp.3
A few English economic pamphlets of the preceding hundred years may have shaped his ideas, as possibly did the unusual interest in economic affairs of previous English political thinkers like Fortescue, Dudley and More.4
