ABSTRACT
WHETHER we call Adam Smith or François Quesnay the “father of political economy,” the science is younger than Columbia University. Discussions of various economic problems, it is true, can be traced back to classical antiquity. But a science cannot be said to exist before a considerable body of knowledge has been systematically organized. It was four years after the chartering of King’s College that Quesnay published his Tableau économique, exhibiting the circulation of wealth in a nation of farmers, manufacturers, merchants, and sovereign, thus supplying a framework into which a host of problems could be fitted. It was twenty-one years after our charter was granted that Adam Smith organized economics as a discussion of the relations between individual initiative in making a living and national wealth.
