histofthought1

382 Economic thought before Adam Smith13.10 Notes1. Quoted in Henry Higgs, The Physiocrats (1897, New York: The Langland Press, 1952,p.62.2. See the paraphrase by Higgs, ibid., p. 45.3. Henry William Spiegel, The Growth (~l Economic Thought (2nd ed., Durham, NC: DukeUniversity Press, 1983), p. 192.4. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, The Origins (~l Physiocracy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,1976), p. 241.5. I absorbed this insight from Professor Joseph Dorfman's lectures on the history of economicthought at Columbia University. As far as I know, this view has never seen print.6. Foley provides the interesting speculation that Dr Quesnay's Tableau economique washeavily influenced by his erroneous conception of how blood circulates in the humanbody. V. Foley, 'The Origin of the Tableau Economique', History (~l Political Economy 5(Spring 1973), pp. 121-50.7. In Higgs, op. cit., note 1, pp. 149-50.8. As 'Specimen Theoriae Novae de Mensura Sortis', in Commentarii Academiae ScientiarumImperialis Petropolitanae, Tomus (1738), pp. 175-92. The article was translated by LouiseSommer as 'Exposition of a New Theory on the Measurement of Risk', Econometrica, 22(Jan. 1954), pp. 23ff.9. Schumpeter points out that Bernoulli noted that this assumption had been anticipated by adecade by the mathematician Cramer, who, however, had assumed that marginal utilitydiminished by a constant proportion, not of x but of the square root of x. One wondershow one is supposed to choose between either of these absurd assertions. The lesson isthat when genuine science is replaced by arbitrary assumptions, deuces become wild, andany assumption is as good or as bad as any other. lA. Schumpeter, History (~t' EconomicAnalysis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1954), p. 303.10. Emil Kauder notes the claim of Oskar Morgenstern that, while 'interindividual comparisonof utilities cannot be justified', yet 'we live in making continuously such comparisons... '. Of course we do, but that process has nothing to do with science, and thereforehas no place in economic theory, either in literary or mathematical form. Emil Kauder, AHistory (~lMarginal Utility (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965), p. 34n.II.With one isolated exception, the important nineteenth century German economist, FriedrichBenedikt Wilhelm von Herrmann (1795-1868), Staatswirtschaftliche Untersuchungen(1832).