A Course between Scylla and Charybdis?: Cantillon's Theory of Distribution and Value

Brewer's Study of Cantillon Anthony Brewer, introducing his study of Cantillon, recalls how favourably impressed he was as soon as he had read a page or two of the Essai (Essai sur la Nature du Commerce en Général, the only work by Cantillon we possess). Although written as early as around 1730, Cantillon's Essai is still extraordinarily fresh and thought-provoking. Brewer very soon, as he says, recognized “a real theorist, of a really quite modern kind… (a theorist) with a clear vision of the economy as an interrelated system and a strikingly consistent analysis of how the system worked” (Brewer, p. ix).