CANARD, Nicolas François.

£3,750 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Principes d'economie politique, ouvrage couronné par l'Institut national, dans sa séance du 15 Nivôse an IX (5 Janvier 1801); et depuis revu, corrigé et augmenté par l'Auteur. First edition, written by one of the first authors to use mathematical techniques in economics, "crowned" by the French Academy in 1801. Even if this was "faute de mieux" as Blanqui says (reported in Coquelin & Guillaumin), this gave it a certain status, and since Canard (c.1750-1833) was not a professional economist, this status seems to have initiated a tradition of resentment against him, starting with the Says, and extending through Cournot and Walras (who both failed to be honoured by the Academy) to Schumpeter. Despite this, Canard exerted some influence on French economists, including Cournot himself ("c'était là mon point de départ") and Sismondi. Outside France, where the effect of institutional squabbles might have been less, his influence was greater. The work went through three editions in German, and was also translated into Spanish (1804) and Italian (1809).Canard believed "that everything, which has exchangeable value, derives its value from the quantity of labour employed upon it. As there are different qualities of labour, however, Canard does not think that the quantity of labour, which could ideally serve as a measure of the exchangeable value, could in fact serve to determine the price. For this reason, he argues, one must fall back to the market to discover the determinants of price

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