ABSTRACT
In the 240 years since Adam Smith published his The Wealth of Nations in 1776, many books and thousands of commentaries and articles have been published on the origin of classical economics and different aspects of Smith’s writings. Edgar A. J. Johnson in his book Predecessors of Smith: the Growth of British Economic Thought, surveys several authors whom he considers to be Smith’s most important forerunners. In his otherwise thorough investigation there are no discussion of the natural law tradition and its influence on British economic thought. There are literally thousands of articles discussing different features of Smith’s economic though. It is also reasonable to assume that many of these also discuss Smith’s predecessors and the major sources of his writings. Jeffrey Young argues against the popular view that Smith inherited a subjective theory of value and largely substituted for it a ‘cost of production’ theory of value.
