Richard Cantillon


Cantillon, Richard

 

Born 1680; died 1734. Banker, economist, and demographer. One of the first to study the capitalist mode of production.

An Irishman by origin, Cantillon was a businessman in Great Britain and France. His book Essay on the Nature of Commerce was published posthumously in French in 1755. Cantillon was the first to try to depict the circulation of industrial capital in the form of a diagram (this was done later by F. Quesnay in a more developed and logically consistent form). Many propositions developed by Cantillon (such as the differentiation between profit and entrepreneurial income, the analysis of the effect of currency devaluation on commerce, and the relationship between the amount of money in circulation and the mass of goods) were subsequently accepted in bourgeois political economy.

REFERENCE

Eidel’nant, A. B. “Kantil’on i ego mesto v teorii vosproizvodstva (K istorii Ekonomicheskoi tablitsy Kene).” Vestnik Komakakademii, 1927, book 23, PP. 120–48.