A lovely set of Jean-Baptiste Say’s series of acclaimed lectures delivered at the Conservatoire des Artes et Métiers in which he added theoretical refinement, detail and weight to the Traité d’économie politique (1803) - uncut and almost entirely unopened in the original wrappers, complete with the often-lacking seventh supplementary volume of miscellaneous pieces and correspondence published posthumously in 1833.
‘Jean-Baptiste Say’s Cours complet d’économie politique pratique was designed to place economic abstractions within the reach of everyone’ and teemed with practical illustrations of how trade restrictions increased the cost of items such as Jamaican rum, ploughs, bed sheets or curtains. Another notable feature of the Cours complet was the confirmation of Say’s reappraisal of the British model since his condemnation of Britain’s colonial and economic policies in De l’Angleterre et des Anglais (1815). The book reproduced nearly in extension Say’s 1824 article in defence of British rule in India. The print run of the first four volumes of the Cours complet was 2,300, and the first volume sold 700 copies in three months. These figures were respectable. But Say was disappointed, and it is noteworthy that a second edition had to wait until 1840. Despite the lucidity of Say’s prose, the price - nearly 40 francs for the six volumes - and the length - nearly 3,000 pages - limited its impact as an instrument of popularization’ (David Todd, Free Trade and its Enemies in France, 1814-1851, Cambridge 2015).
Though Say ranks with Sismondi and Cournot in the originality of his contributions to economics, his reputation has suffered from his being put down primarily as an exponent of Adam Smith. Schumpeter, who calls his work ‘the most important of the links in the chain that leads from Cantillon and Turgot to Walras’, offers convincing arguments to prove that Say does indeed belong to the French tradition.
