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Conclusion One of the longest-running disagreements in the interpretative literature concerns who among these nine authors deserves to be considered a forerunner of laissez-faire liberalism and who was simply some variety of mercantilist . E. A. J. Johnson saw Mun and Misselden as liberals, but Sir Eric Roll moved them (along with Malynes and Petty) into the mercantilist column . Pierre Vilar put Child, Locke, North, and Davenant among the mercantilists and Barbon among the liberals, but Richard Wiles’s Barbon was a mercantilist while Vickers thought North a liberal. H. T. Dickinson’s Locke was a semiliberal and his Davenant a full-›edged one, while Beer cast Locke as a proto-Physiocrat.1 This disparity is more the result of an ongoing debate over the meaning and validity of the label mercantilism than of disagreements over how close a theorist has to be to a particular pole of this bipolar arrangement to be labeled one or the other. Was there ever anything we might call mercantilism ? Of all the analytic models applied to seventeenth-century economic literature, mercantilism is the least anachronistic in a strict sense. De‹ning “political oeconomy” as the “branch” of “the science of a statesman” concerned with providing “a plentiful revenue” for the people and the state, Adam Smith believed the “progress of opulence in different ages and nations” had created two different systems of political economy, the agricultural and the commercial (or mercantile).”2 The salient characteristics of the mercantile system were its de‹nition of wealth as gold and silver, its concentration on a positive balance of trade to the exclusion of the domestic economy (because it saw that domestic economy as not bringing gold/silver into the economy), its reliance on monopoly to accomplish that positive balance, and its sacri‹ce of the desires and needs of the domestic consumer to the requirements of the export-producer.3 Thus it was a set of government policies supported by the commercial exporter devolving from a false de‹nition of wealth. Having dismissed mercantilism as a set of de‹cient policies based on 247 incorrect assumptions, classical economists ignored it. Historians of economic thought, however, could not. Their interpretations branch off into two main schools—the statist and the wealth—each subject to considerable internal variation. Gustav Schmoller saw mercantilism as part of the historical process of political centralization, the transfer of power from local to national organs,4 while James Bonar saw it as growing out of (rather than along with) “the conditions of absolute monarchy,”5 and Eli Heckscher saw it as a form of raison d’état common to all European governments (‹nding its epitome in Colbert) from the beginning of the sixteenth to the end of the eighteenth centuries evolving out of a policy of provision.6 The works of these pioneers form what we might call the statist school; it sees mercantilism as the end product of economic policies pursued by governments for political ends. National variants become minor themes, the result of accidental differences in national political situation. Two recent examples might suf‹ce. In 1995, Murray Rothbard called mercantilism “the economic aspect of absolutism,” or “a comprehensive system of state building, state privilege, and what might be called ‘state monopoly’ capitalism.”7 The socalled theories (fallacious special interest pleading) follow rather than lead the ill-advised government policies.8 In 1998, Mark Perlman and Charles R. McCann Jr. de‹ned mercantilism as “an economic theory dedicated to the advancement of national power through the encouragement of collective antagonisms, or countervailing power centers” and promoting “autarky,” which grew out of a change in emphasis from the ‹fteenth to the sixteenth centuries “from a concern with the role of the state as political uni‹er to the role of the state as a coordinator, as an entity providing a sort of organizational framework for economic activity.”9 Its roots lie not in the “continuing theme” of “power relations” running through the literature but in the craft guilds and their function as “order-preserving collectives.”10 Mercantilism is the state as the ultimate guild. The alternative argument grows out of a challenge posed by Jacob Viner to Heckscher’s thesis. Viner believed the governments in question did not seek power to the exclusion of wealth or even wealth merely as a means to power, but, instead, saw power and plenty as interrelated and harmonious ultimate ends.11 The wealth argument (even though still about state policy) opened up the question...

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