Circulation of Blood and Money in Leviathan – Hobbes on the Economy of the Body

Eriksen, Christoffer Basse

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-52815-1_4

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 26 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…In order to tell this story, this paper highlights the neglected content of an entry in Diderot and D'Alembert's Encyclopédie. In this work, the intellectual centrepiece of the French Enlightenment, the relevant discussion is not found in the entry 'Circulation' (volume 3, pp.467-71), which 5 See e.g Eriksen (2017) for the use of the metaphor in the 17 th century and see n. 51 for some 18 th century examples. 6 Cf.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Circular reasoning. Forbonnais and the intricate history of circular flow analysis in the 1750s

Berg¹

2019

The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Circular Reasoning. Forbonnais and the intricate history of circular flow analysis in the 1750sRichard van den Berg IntroductionIn his essay 'Of Public Credit' of 1752 David Hume remarked upon a term that in the commercial literature of his time was both ubiquitous and obscure:There is a word, which is here in the mouth of every body, and which, I find, has also got abroad, and is much employed by foreign writers*, in imitation of the English; and that is CIRCULATION. This word serves as an account of every thing; and tho'I confess, that I have sought for its meaning in the present subject, ever since I was a school-boy, I have never yet been able to discover it.The 'foreign writers' Hume had in mind, he explained in a footnote, were 'Melon, Du Tot, Law'. 1 These influential authors had indeed frequently used the word 'circulation' in their works, as had British authors left unnamed by Hume, since the last decades of the 17 th century. 2 He was, however, also largely correct to say that those earlier authors rarely bothered to define the term or to develop clear conceptions of the precise economic circuits they imagined. 3 It was as if 'circulation' was understood as a word so common and all-encompassing that it was found scarcely necessary to define it. To illustrate this point, one looks in vain for entries on 'Circulation' in dictionaries specializing in the knowledge of trade that date from before the mid-century. The most important of these, Savary des Brûlons's Dictionnaire Universel de Commerce, first published in 1723, silently moved on from 'Cirage' to 'Cire' (Savary 1723, I, p.778). 4 1 This passage was omitted from editions of Hume's Political Discourses from 1770 onwards. Hence it did not feature in most modern editions (See Hume 1955, pp.92-3). In the French translations of 1754 (p. 147) and 1767 (p.186) the passage was included. 2 Melon (1736) used the term 'circulation' prominently especially in chapter 24 on English political arithmetic. Dutot (1738) also frequently emphasised the importance of the uninterrupted circulation of money. See for example, article vii (vol 2, pp.289-94). Historians have highlighted the widespread use of the term in the 18 th century since at least Monroe (1923, pp.272-89), Heckscher (1935, 2, pp. 217-21) and Viner (1937, pp.36-40).3 Some modern students who would disagree with this statement are Nagels (1970) and Benitez-Rochel and Robles-Teigeiro (2003) who have argued, in their own ways, that Boisguilbert developed a systematic analysis of circular flow. Murphy (1993) who has made a similar case for Law. These readings do, however, require significant reconstructive efforts from dispersed passages that gain significance mostly as 'anticipations' of the more developed and systematic reasoning of Cantillon or Quesnay. 4 The fact that Savary did at the same time use the term 'circulation' in a number of places underscores my point about its loose usage. See e.g. the entry ' Banque' pp. 240, 246, 252, 253, 254; the entry 'Billet', p. 342; and the entry 'Commerce de F...

show abstract

mentioning

confidence: 99%