J.B. Say deserves to be remembered, especially by Austrian economists, as a pivotal figure in the history of economic thought. Yet, one finds him discussed very briefly, if at all. In fact, even Austrians have devoted little attention to Say’s contributions.3

Mainstream history-of-thought texts usually mention Say only briefly, and then only in connection with his law of markets, thereby implicitly trivializing much of his work. One of the exceptions is A History of Economic Thought by Eric Roll.4 Roll treats Say with notable respect, but, unfortunately, partly because he misinterprets Say as an ancestor of modern general- equilibrium, positivistic, neoclassical economists.

In all fairness, one could argue that this lack of both attention and appreciation might be traced, at least in part, to Say himself. After all, Say did explicitly represent his work as being mainly an elaboration and popularization of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations for the benefit of continental European readers. Taking Say at his word, many economists seem never to have bothered to investigate more closely. Upon close reading of Say’s principal work, A Treatise on Political Economy,5 one will find that, although Say frequently praises Smith, he also departs from Smithian doctrine on a number of important points. In fact, Say even sharply criticizes Adam Smith on more than one occasion. Rather than thinking of Say as a slight variation on Smith, it is much more accurate to recognize that these two men represent two meandering, but generally divergent, paths embedded within classical economics.

Smith leads one to David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill, Alfred Marshall, Irving Fisher, John Maynard Keynes, and Milton Friedman. Say leads from A.R.J. Turgot and Richard Cantillon to Nassau Senior, Frank A. Fetter, Carl Menger, Ludwig von Mises, and Murray Rothbard. The reader should keep in mind, however, that these two paths, or progressions, have often been circuitous and nonlinear. That is to say, J.B. Say was in a number of ways truly a precursor of the Austrian School, but one must not leap to the conclusion that he was a full-fledged Austrian who was simply ahead of his time. One should not read Say and expect, at all points, to find Mises.

It is true that Say either overlooked or misunderstood certain points of theory dear to the hearts of Austrian economists. He does not believe that market exchanges represent utility gains for both buyer and seller; he does not see the relationship between interest rates and time preference; he offers no theory of business cycles. On the other hand, he is cognizant of the limitations of statistical investigations; he is very much in favor of commodity money and free banking; he knows that entrepreneurs and the accumulation of capital are essential to economic advancement; he correctly identifies both government regulation and taxation as threats to prosperity, indeed, even as threats to civil society itself.

Jean-Baptiste Say has much to offer any reader, whether Austrian or not, whether an economist or not. He saw many important truths with clarity, and wrote of them with passion and lucidity. Say once called economics “this beautiful, and above all, useful science.”71 He left economics both more beautiful and more useful than he had found it.