Trashing J.B. Say: the story of a mare’s nest: Robert W. Clower

J.B. Say (1767-1832) merits notice in the twenty-first century as the foremost early interpreter of Adam Smith, the first professor of political economy in France, the innovative and influential nineteenth-century author of textbooks that dominated academic teaching of ‘political economy’ through the first half of that century2 and, in my view, the best all round economist of the ‘classic’ generation that included Ricardo and Malthus. But Say is best known today for various twentieth-century propositions called ‘Say’s Law’ by Keynes, Lange, Patinkin and other notable moderns who, perhaps inadvertently, have made a mockery3 of their monumentally worthy and distinguished predecessor.