ABSTRACT
As a result of the eighteenth-century emphasis on natural market forces in economics and natural rights in political theory, the basic administrative tradition has been strangely ignored. Its literary genre, ubiquitous in antiquity, has come to be called “mirrors for princes.” This literary tradition persisted as a robust form through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, leaving its stamp on almost all political-economic tracts up to Adam Smith’s time. Its characteristic format was to couch an analytic or policy treatise in terms of advice or recommendations to a young prince or new monarch. The custom was institutionalized to the extent that almost all political or mercantilist tracts were dedicated to the king through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
