Friedrich August von Hayek, Essai sur la nature du commerce en général (1932)

Hayek’s March 1932 book review assesses Henry Higgs’s edition and English translation of Richard Cantillon’s Essai. Moving from its troubled reception to the edition’s scholarly merits and textual limitations, Hayek argues that Cantillon deserves sustained attention chiefly for the continuing theoretical value of his analysis, rather than for historical priority alone.

The opening explains why Jevons’s rediscovery failed to secure lasting recognition. By linking Cantillon’s importance to the national origins of political economy, Jevons provoked defenders of the Physiocrats. Their philosophical appeal, Hayek suggests, also gave them an advantage among historians less interested in economic theory. Neglect thus reflects disciplinary preferences and national allegiances as well as the scarcity of accessible editions.

Hayek warmly praises Higgs’s research, which substantially extended Jevons’s findings, while wishing that the biographical material had been presented as a connected narrative rather than as a preserved article with supplementary discoveries. A more consequential reservation concerns the relationship between the edition’s two texts:

It is characteristic of the curious history of the Essai that neither of the two versions—the French and the English—which are printed in this volume, can truly be called the original.

The French text was probably Cantillon’s own translation of a lost English manuscript. Higgs’s English version combines retranslation from the French with passages preserved by Postlethwayt, who apparently possessed the English original. Hayek regrets that the edition does not identify these components more precisely and sometimes appears to adjust Postlethwayt’s wording toward the French. Readability and probable fidelity have been achieved at the expense of full textual transparency: serious researchers must still consult Postlethwayt’s original volumes. This remains a minor defect beside the achievement of making the Essai conveniently available.

The review’s central conceptual move separates a work’s theoretical worth from its place in a genealogy of influence:

Its truly scientific method of approach and the detached spirit of its analysis can still teach a great deal even to the modern student.

For Hayek, Cantillon belongs among the few works written before about 1870 that every economist should know. The recurrence of substantially similar concepts and conclusions across two centuries suggests that fundamental economic ideas need not depend upon the particular historical circumstances familiar to modern economists. This is a methodological claim about the durability of economic reasoning, although the review does not develop it through specific examples from Cantillon’s theory.

The attraction of this book for the theorist rests, however, almost entirely on its inherent merits and not on the rôle which it played in the history of Economics.

Hayek consequently treats conjectures about Cantillon’s wider influence, or what economics might have become had he been better known, as inconclusive. He notes the influence on Smith and Condillac, the possible connection with Malthus, and Roscher’s role in rediscovery, but distinguishes frequent citation from actual reading. The edition’s chief promise is to restore that direct encounter. A closing observation about the volume’s production and its portraits of Cantillon’s wife and daughter returns to the book as a material object; the substantive verdict remains an invitation to read Cantillon as a living theoretical resource.