the air, but constructs separate stories of the building, before it has laid the foundation. Without dwelling any longer on the physiocrats and omitting quite a number of Italian economists who in some more or less ingenious ideas came close to a correct analysis of the nature of commodity,[1] we pass at once to the first Briton who elaborated the general system of bourgeois economics. Sir James Steuart.[2] His idea of exchange value as well as all the abstract categories of political economy still seem to be with him in the process of differentiation from the material elements they represent and therefore appear quite vague and unsettled. In one place he determines real value by labor-time ("what a workman can perform in a day"), but immediately creates confusion by introducing the elements of wages and raw material.[3] In another place his struggle with the material substance of the subject he treats of is revealed even more
- ↑ See e. g. Galiani, "Della Moneta," in vol. 3 of Scrittori Classici italiani di Economia politica. (Published by Custodi). Parte Moderna, Milano, 1803. "La fatica, he says, è l'unica che dà valore alla cosa" ("only effort can give value to any thing"). The designation of labor as "fatica," strain, effort, is characteristic of the southerner.
- ↑ Steuart's work, "An Inquiry into the Principles of Political Economy, being an Essay on the Science of Domestic Policy in Free Nations," appeared first in London in two quarto volumes in the year 1767, ten years before Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations." I quote from the Dublin edition of 1770. (The references to pages are the same for the standard London edition of 1767, except where otherwise stated. Translator.)
- ↑ Steuart, l. c., vol. I., p. 181–183.
