Essai sur la nature du commerce en general

Experience about the nature of commerce

Translated to Russian by O.I. Ananin. – Moscow: Gaidar Institute Press; St. Petersburg: the Center for Economic Culture, 2024. – 464 p. – (Series "New Economic Thinking").

ISBN 978-5-93255-63-4

Richard Kantillon is the most mysterious figure in the history of economic thought, and his “Essai” is a book without which economic science would be different. Her ideas became the basis of the “Economic tables” of physiocrats, in many respects anticipated the theory of the population of Maltus, the classical theories of value and money, the theory of entrepreneurship and the spatial economy. “Cradle of political economy” was called it by W.S. Jevons, accidentally discovering a century and a half after writing. This publication is the first full translation of the “Essai” of the Cantillon into Russian. It was based on the first French edition of 1755 and the English translation of Higgs in 1931, as well as on the results of modern studies of Cantillon’s work, reflected in two reprints of “Essai” in 2015: the translation of A. Murphy and the unique variorum-publication of R. van den Berg. In addition to the text of the “Essai”, the tom publishes the translation of the Jevons of 1881, which returned the name of the author after centuries of oblivion, the article by Alexandra Eidelnant of 1927 is the only work of the Soviet period about Cantillon, as well as an introductory article on the personal fate of the author of “Essai” and an accompanying article about the place of Cantillon in the history of economic science. The publication of “Essai” is addressed to economists, science historians, all interested in the era of Enlightenment and the history of social thought.