"Theocritus and Homer bored him;
If true delight you would afford him
You'd give him Adam Smith to read.
A deep economist, indeed,
He talked about the wealth of nations;
The state relied, his friends were told,
Upon its staples, not on gold --
This subject filled his conversations.
His father listened, frowned and groaned,
And mortgaged all the land he owned."(Alexander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin, 1833: 1.VII)
"I hope that in your work you will thunder them, and crush them, and pound them, and reduce them to dust and ashes! They are, indeed, the set of men the most chimerical and most arrogant that now exist, since the annihilation of the Sorbonne."
(David Hume on the Physiocrats, in Letter to Morellet, July 10, 1769)
"[A]lthough Adam Smith's great work professed to deal with the causes of the wealth of nations,...from the point of view of the history of theoretical economics, the central achievement of his book was his demonstration of the mode in which the division of labour tended to be kept in equilibrium by the mechanism of relative prices -- a demonstration which...is in harmony with the most refined apparatus of the modern School of Lausanne. The theory of value and distribution was really the central core of the analysis of the Classics, try as they might to conceal their objects under other names."
(Lionel C. Robbins, Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science, 1932: p.68-9).
All rights reserved, Gonçalo L. Fonseca
