This paper examines James Steuart’s explanation of the emergence of commercial nations. Unlike other Scottish thinkers of the time, Steuart argues that artifice is necessary for the rise of commercial societies. He uses the term “artificial” to refer to a devised process, one that is an alternative to the supposedly natural process arising from innate propensities. The system of trade and commerce is an “artifice” created by merchants to obtain benefits, and established by the sovereign for his ostentation and personal prestige, until it became generalized as a commercial nation. Steuart’s explanation of the emergence of commercial nations accounts for how individuals become dependent on and subordinate to the public market. This paper concludes that Steuart’s Political Œconomy promotes a science of the artificial that seeks to understand the functioning of non-natural mechanisms and to create instruments that the statesman adapts to the needs and objectives of individuals.

More than England and other states, the German principalities were, in the pre-industrial period, hampered by silver outflow and persistent pressures on the balance of payments, which led to idiosyncratic models and strategies of economic development usually but not entirely helpfully called “Cameralism.” It is less well understood how Cameralism, as a policy of order and development, and monetary theory went together. The present paper will sketch these working mechanisms as well as provide a few angles for new perspectives and future research. A first section after the brief introduction studies general issues of development in relation to balance-of-payment constraints (II), followed by the discourses on whether the domestic currency ought to remain stable in terms of intrinsic (silver) value (III), or whether it may be debased so as to raise domestic exports and competitiveness (IV). Both options were considered, at times and by varying actors, as valid strategies of promoting economic development, especially export-led growth, although most contemporaries viewed coin debasement as harmful to the economy. A fifth section discusses an alternative to the aforementioned strategies, that of raising effective monetary mass through increasing velocity. Since the Middle Ages and into the nineteenth century, the German economic tradition had a clear understanding of how velocity could be managed and the common weal stimulated by an increase in “vivacity” of circulation (V). In hindsight, it appears that we find here a powerful program towards promoting economic development and Europe’s rise towards capitalism. A conclusion will offer some thoughts for further research (VI).

The early 1620s trade crisis had a significant influence on the way public opinion in England regarded economic issues, and the pamphlets written during that period convey the impression that the supply of money was the undisputed primary concern of economic policy. However, monetary matters occupied a prominent position in the political agenda of England only during times of crisis, when the kingdom faced a perceived threat of demonetization. The paper argues that, during the first two decades of the seventeenth century, concern with a positive balance of trade was of only secondary importance, being normally overshadowed by a more fundamental goal: a well-ordered, stable, and properly managed trade. This opened the door for debates about the limits of free initiative and regulation in economic affairs, as evidenced most clearly by the debates about free trade and monopolies that permeated James I’s reign.

In a recent article Luca Fiorito and Cosma Orsi accused John R. Commons of anti-Semitism “within a broad and xenophobic framework.” They rested their indictment on three sources: an interview in which Mark Perlman spoke of his father, Selig; Commons’s report on immigration for the United States Industrial Commission; and Commons’s book Races and Immigrants. This comment, looking at the same sources, finds confusion about the meanings of anti-Semitism and xenophobia as they are applied to Commons.

Employing different meanings of classical concepts of saving, capital, investment, and money, and incorrectly attributing the assumption of full employment of labor and a world of certainty to classical analysis, John Maynard Keynes ([1936] 1974) faulted Say’s Law as irrelevant to the real world. Roy Grieve (2016) ignores previous clarifications of Keynes’s misrepresentations and misunderstandings of John Stuart Mill’s restatements of the law. He employs similar misrepresentations and misunderstandings of Mill’s explanations as Keynes did. His model of Mill’s analysis is incapable of explaining how variations in relative prices, the value of money, and interest rates coordinate production, consumption, and savings decisions in a monetary economy.