Essays on Some Unsettled Questions of Political Economy

Here is where economics became a science. Before John Stuart Mill's 1844 treatise, political economy was a sprawling, qualitative discourse on national wealth part history, part moral philosophy. Mill changed that. He defined the discipline as the science of production and distribution governed by the laws of human nature, and in doing so, settled the "unsettled questions" that had plagued Adam Smith's successors. The result was a concentrated volume of genuine theoretical breakthroughs: Mill articulated what would later be called Walras' law, refined the principles of international trade, and distinguished between the universal laws of economics and the contingent facts of particular societies. Even Karl Marx, no generous critic of bourgeois economists, admitted that "the few original ideas of Mill Junior are contained in this narrow little volume" rather than in his massive later work. These essays crackle with the intellectual energy of a discipline finding itself. For anyone curious about where modern economic thought comes from, this is the origin point.