[Review of Letters to Thomas Robert Malthus on Political Economy and Stagnation of Commerce, by Jean Baptiste Say]

Hayek on Say’s Letters to Thomas Robert Malthus (1937)

Friedrich August von Hayek’s scholarly book review evaluates the 1936 reprint of Say’s letters chiefly as an instrument of access to a renewed economic controversy. Its qualified endorsement rests on a distinction between the work’s intellectual importance and the edition’s textual shortcomings.

Hayek first traces the letters from their French publication in 1820 to the English translation published in the Pamphleteer in 1821. The reprint follows that translation, retaining even its misprints while changing the pagination without recording the original page numbers. His attention to these details makes scholarly usability a central criterion of assessment:

The translation also lacks the table of contents and the useful, although occasionally slightly comic (e.g., "Apparence, trompe quelquefois, 5.") index of the French original.

Despite praising the volume’s neat production and reasonable price, Hayek finds the translation unsatisfactory and suggests that reprinting the French original might have been more useful. Yet renewed interest in the argument gives republication a clear justification:

But in view of the renewed interest in the subject of these letters and particularly in "Say's Law" expounded in them it is certainly welcome that this Classic of the literature of Economics should again be easily available in a convenient form.

The review thus moves from publication history and editorial fidelity to contemporary relevance. Hayek does not expound or defend Say’s Law here; he welcomes access to a primary text through which readers can investigate it. His closing assessment similarly separates Laski’s potentially disputable account of the controversy and its participants from the acknowledged value of his bibliographical references. The review’s governing concern is to facilitate informed judgment without treating either the translation or its new historical framing as authoritative.