ABSTRACT
To foster the growth of national wealth, Petty and the other mercantilists tried to find out which production sectors or occupations were more productive of social wealth and which less. They also wanted to show that some occupations suffer an excessive number of labourers and declared the supernumeraries unproductive. The civil conditions of labour that the trade unions conquered with a two-century-long struggle must be reinstated and applied to all labourers. At the same time, the risk that protection of the organised workers might encourage illegal or precarious labour of non-protected workers must be avoided. The dynamic relations between increase in consumption and increase in productivity lie at the very core of the theory of unproductive labour. The economists of the Enlightenment were the first to find a positive connection between these two factors of growth, but–apart from Smith–a clear analysis of accumulation remained lacking.
