On Classical Economics

What It Is

A book about the economists of roughly 1776 to 1848: Smith, Ricardo, Malthus, Say, Sismondi, John Stuart Mill, and the young Marx, who thought of himself as one of them. Yale University Press published it in 2006. It is intellectual history, and it makes no concessions to a reader who does not already care.

It is also the summation of Sowell's academic life. His doctorate was on Say's Law. His early books, Say's Law: An Historical Analysis (1972) and Classical Economics Reconsidered (1974), came out before he was known for anything else. This volume gathers that material, revises it, and adds chapters on Mill, on Marx, and on what the classical economists were actually doing when they did what now looks like bad economics.

Expect close reading of dead men's arguments. Sowell quotes the originals at length and cares a great deal about who was misrepresented and by whom.

Why It Matters

Almost everything educated people believe about classical economics is secondhand, and much of it comes from the opponents of the men being described. Sowell's method is to go back and read them. What he finds is that the great quarrel of the period is still, under other names, the quarrel macroeconomics is having now, and that the received account of who was right in it does not survive contact with the originals.

Underneath the scholarship sits the idea that made Sowell's later reputation. Economic doctrines are never neutral machinery. They arrive bundled with assumptions about what people can know, how they respond to incentives, and who is fit to decide on their behalf. A Conflict of Visions grew directly out of what he found here. Read this and you watch the tools being made.

He is also unusually fair to his opponents, giving them their strongest case, Marx included, which is what you would expect from a man who was a Marxist himself in his twenties and got over it without turning contemptuous.

Before You Read

This is the hardest book Sowell wrote, and hard in an unusual way. The prose is clean. The demand is that you already care about the difference between Ricardo's theory of rent and Malthus's. Ten to fifteen hours, and it does not want to be rushed.

Some economics helps; having read The Wealth of Nations helps more.

The chapters are freestanding essays and can be taken out of order. The Say's Law material is the spine of the book. The chapter on classical methodology is where Sowell stops describing and starts arguing, and it is the one to read twice.

Which Edition to Read

• On Classical Economics (Yale University Press, 2006) — recommended. The complete, final version of the argument, in hardcover, paperback and ebook. Everything Sowell had to say about the classical school, revised by a man in his seventies with nothing left to prove. The cost: it is a stitched-together book and the seams show. Material first published in the 1970s sits beside chapters written thirty years later, and the repetition between them was never fully edited out. It is also priced like the academic book it is. View on Amazon →
• Classical Economics Reconsidered (Princeton University Press, 1974). The short, sharp original: a slim survey of the school, its economics and its politics, still in print. The cost: it is superseded. The chapters on Mill and Marx that make the later book worth owning are not in it.
• Say's Law: An Historical Analysis (Princeton University Press, 1972). Two hundred pages on the single controversy at the centre of everything else Sowell wrote about the period, and the most thorough treatment of it in English. The cost: a monograph on one doctrine. If that doctrine does not already interest you, nothing here will change your mind.

Buy the Yale volume. It contains the best of the other two and finishes the thought. Go back to Say's Law only if the general-glut controversy grips you, which is likelier than you think.

Getting the Most From This Book

Read it as history, not as economics. Sowell is asking what these men meant in their own time and vocabulary, and the pleasure lies in watching a careful reader dismantle a caricature everyone had been happy to repeat. He builds his case out of the quotations, so a reader who skims the block quotes is skimming the evidence.

This is the book Sowell would have written if he had never had a newspaper column, and probably the one he would rather be judged by. Come to it after Basic Economics and A Conflict of Visions, not before.