Letter to the Editors: for a Clearer Understanding of David Hume’s Monetary Analysis That Prompted Adam Smith’s Criticisms of Him
Year: 2025
Type: letter
Abstract: 2025) draws upon Adam Smith's comment in hisLectures on Jurisprudence (LJ hereinafter) that David Hume "seems … to have gone a little into the notion that public opulence consists in money" (Smith [1762-63;1766] 1978, 253, p. 507; italics added) to make her claim that Smith considered Hume to have been a mercantilist.She ignores the comment by the editors of LJ that Smith there refers "probably to those places in [Hume's] essays where Hume argues against paper money … [in] 'Of Money' and … 'Of the Balance of Trade'" (1978, p. 507n28).She also misses the editorial summary in the Wealth of Nations (hereinafter WN) of Smith's subsequent discussion in LJ of the mercantilist writers who confused wealth with money, giving "occasion to the systems of Mun and Gee; of Mandeville who built upon them; and of Mr. Hume who endeavoured to refute them" (WN IV.i, 8, n.12, p. 432; see LJ, p. 576; italics added).She instead invokes John Maynard Keynes's (1936, p. 343n3) reference to Hume as "enough of a mercantilist" to support her interpretation of Smith's earlier comment.We should note that Keynes did not regard the label "mercantilist" a pejorative as Smith did.Rather, Keynes believed mercantilism to have "scientific truth" ([1936] 1974, p. 335) while "[t]he extraordinary achievement of the classical theory was to overcome the beliefs of the 'ordinary man' and, at the same time, to be wrong" (p.350).Keynes ([1936] 1974, pp.333-371) was looking for respectable names in economics as allies for his embrace of mercantilism.Seeing Hume argue in "Of Money" that the increased quantity of money increases output and employment in the short run led to his remark that "Hume … had a foot and a half in the classical world.For Hume began the practice among economists of stressing the importance of the equilibrium [long run] position as compared with the ever-shifting transition towards it, though he was still enough of a
Author: James C.W. Ahiakpor
Institution: California State University, East Bay
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4415271052