Commerce & Government

This text covers such topics as value, money, agriculture, domestic and foreign trade, war, labor, interest rates, luxuries, and the various government policies that affect these subjects.The theme that unites these disparate subjects is liberty. As Condillac writes near the end of the work, the means to eradicate all the abuses and injustices of government is "to give trade full, complete and permanent freedom." In their preface to the 1997 edition, Shelagh and Walter Eltis wrote, "English language readers . . . will find . . . that the case for competitive market economics has rarely been presented more powerfully." Etienne Bonnot, Abbe de Condillac (1714-1780) was one of eighteenth-century France's preeminent philosophers of the Enlightenment, who had wide-ranging influence beyond metaphysics and epistemology to political thought and economics. He was a leading advocate in France of the ideas of John Locke, Bishop George Berkeley, and David Hume. Shelagh Eltis is a historian and graduate of Somerville College, Oxford, U.K. Walter Eltis is an Emeritus Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford, and Visiting Professor of Economics at the University of Reading, U.K.