Revisiting Cantillon's Admirable Theory of Distribution and Value: A Misinterpretation Corrected

Abstract

Abstract The question at issue in this article is whether Richard Cantillon, notwithstanding his high reputation as an analyst of economic phenomena, failed to construct a tenable theory of value. That is a not uncommon allegation or implication found in the current literature. Several assessments of Cantillon's work do him a disservice by saddling him with a crude and unsatisfactory theory of value—specifically a “land-embodied” explanation of relative commodity values. That may at present be described as the dominant reading. While it is true that not all interpreters of Cantillon take the land-embodied line, it is nevertheless high time that the misrepresentation of Cantillon as the proponent of a land theory of value be called into question. This serious error needs to be highlighted and a proper understanding of Richard Cantillon's remarkably insightful analysis of distribution and value brought more firmly into mainstream thinking. This article wishes to establish that Cantillon was offering not—as alleged—a crude land-embodied explanation of relative values but, on the contrary, a viable cost-of-production treatment, set firmly in the contemporary social context (an approach that would be further developed by Smith and Marx as appropriate to later economic and social conditions).