THUNEN, Johann Heinrich von.

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Le salaire naturel et son rapport au taux de l'intérêt. First edition in French of the second part of the German economist's magnum opus, originally published in German in 1850. Thünen (1783-1850), who specialized in agricultural economics, published the first volume of Der Isolirte Staat (The Isolated State) in 1826. There, he explored methods of maximizing agricultural production in a hypothetically isolated city, while exploring the question of functional income distribution. Schumpeter wrote that "if we judge [Thünen and Ricardo] exclusively by the amount of ability of the purely theoretical kind that went into their work, then, I think, Thünen should be placed above Ricardo or indeed above any economist of the period, with the possible exception of Cournot" (p. 465), while it has been noted that the British government used his analysis of grain production in its own deliberations on the corn laws.

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