ABSTRACT
The most effective critic of “Say’s Law” is not Keynes but an obscure clerk employed by a French assurance society in the late eighteenth century. His inspiration is reputed to be derived from a copy of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations presented to him by the director of the society. The Law of Circulation is implicit in the following sentence in the exclerk’s neglected treatise: “No act of saving subtracts in the least from consumption, provided the thing saved be re-invested or restored to productive employment.” John Stuart Mill is the Defender of a Classical Faith which believes that the only law that matters is the Law of Competition. Malthus’s criticism is as applicable to the New Orthodoxy as to the Old, but the nice thing about his Principles of Political Economy is that it is full of helpful hints. The journey from Adam Smith to the present day seems to have run into the dead-end of single-gear economics.
