Introduction

‘Modern times’ date back, on the European continent, to the Renaissance. The eighteenth-century ‘Enlightenment’ brought to an epitome its main traits, mainly in both France and Scotland, paving the way for the ‘invention’ of political economy, ¹ the emergence of a science of modern material life, where the antique reality of state power (that, in France, Louis XIV – ‘the Sun King’ – had centralized long before the ‘Jacobin’ revolutionaries of 1789) confronted ‘civil society’ (the term coined by the Scot, Adam Ferguson). Within the latter, exchange processes would follow the ‘law’ of supply and demand – that is, only if the ‘police of grains’ (the police des grains who checked the prices at which grains, especially wheat, were sold on the markets of the kingdom) loosened its control and if goods became free to travel from one province to another. Regarding the first French ‘economists’, a special mention is due to the courtly physician of French King Louis XV, Dr Quesnay, the leader of the ‘Physiocratic School’, among whose heirs we may count Condorcet, Turgot, Condillac and Mirabeau. Regarding the Scottish founders of the ‘science’ of political economy, it is commonly accepted in the traditional history of economic thought that we use the word ‘science’ for the sake of formulas that first resembled the further developed ‘laws’ of natural sciences. If the epitome was found in Adam Smith's 1776 Wealth of Nations, one should not forget precursors or contemporaries, such as James Steuart, some of whom may be regarded in parts of their works as economists as well as philosophers: Hobbes, ² Locke and Hume. All that being well known, we recall it only to set the context of ‘modern times’ in matters of economic thought.