"Richard Cantillon Project"

Economics Economics Questions
1

I used to edit for Wikipedia, to the point where I was able to get fourteen articles promoted to featured article status (most of them to do with obscure tanks, and a few others on battles of the Second World War, and one on a battle of the Second Persian Gulf War). I quit Wikipedia to focus on economics and political science (i.e. my majors), but I’ve wanted to write an article on economics and I think I have finally found a topic that I can do. At first, I wanted to clean up and expand on Wikipedia’s article on the Austrian Business Cycle Theory, but honestly the topic is so broad that I don’t think I am ready for it. So, I have settled on working on “Richard Cantillon”.

Richard Cantillon was not an Austrian, but he is respected by Austrian School economic historians (such as Murray Rothbard), and although the article is in very poor shape there is actually a lot of information available on him. It should be an interesting topic to research and write on.

I have a fairly decent amount of articles on him which I am slowly printing out and organizing in a binder (I hate reading on the computer, so I usually print out all my PDFs and put the pages in plastic protectors and then in a binder, organized by subject), but I will need more substantial sources. I will, of course, use Rothbard’s first volume of An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought, which is the piece that really got me interested in Richard Cantillon, in the first place. I will also heavily use Cantillon’s own Essai, although that will be more to cross-reference. I have two books on my Mises wishlist (I use that to organize books that I want to buy): Hayek’s The Trend of Economic Thinking and Holcombe’s (ed.) The Great Austrian Economists.

The three books not written by Cantillon himself (Rothbard’s, Hayek’s and Holcombe’s (ed.)) are great, but may come as biased (well, they will come off as biased). What are the best biographies on Cantillon? I have found two interesting books, but they are out of my budget: Richard Cantillon: Entrepreneur and Economist (~$100) and Richard Cantillon: Pioneer of Economic Theory (~$175). Anybody know of any other, more affordable, books?

2

I’ve read those, but probably there is little other information on his persona.

Hulsmann has a great article in the Literature section on a fine point (Law of differentiation of property, as he calls it), but that has to do with another of Cantillon’s theories: If population changes, then even if property was split equally among inhabitants by a dictator, in the end it can never remain that way.

Pioneer of Economic Theory goes through some of the theory, again, already gone over by others as in the other biography. About Cantillon himself, it says that that the theory sometimes mentioned that he faked his death to avoid lawsuits is not neccesarily incorrect. Of course, nobody knows because all his stuff burned down.

I guess its worth mentioning that Condillac decided to write his Commerce and Government, the first marginalist tract, after reading Cantillon (Condillac says so, as a footnote).

I can recommend Edwin Cannan’s 1927 A Review of Economic Theory. You can buy it for about $30, and its worth it. He contrasts Cantillon with many other’s including all of the English Classicals, Jevons, Marshall, but all in all by now, most of his then original comments, like that of Jevons, have become standard somewhat in literature.

3

"2008 “Military historian of the Year”

Nice work, mate.