The Common Sense of Political Economy

About this book

The Common Sense of Political Economy is a book of profound importance in its time that came to be lost in the shuffle. It is as mighty and significant as Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations or Ludwig von Mises's Human Action, and like these books, it is not just a dusty old tome but one that speaks directly to the great issues of our time. Laissez Faire Books is the publisher of this new edition, the first modern edition with American spellings, correct graph placements, cleaned up citations, and perfect navigation. Our edition also includes a great introduction by Professor Peter Boettke of George Mason University, who puts the book in the context of the history of ideas and explains its modern relevance. The author is Philip Wicksteed (1844–1927), and his enthusiasm, even love, for the topic itself is obvious on every page. He is like a tour guide in a great castle who turns on lights in room after room and proceeds to explain everything in the room with precision and excitement. The reader can detect this in his prose. Why does he put the phrase "common sense" in the title? There are two meanings. He sought to bring a certain unity to the opinions and debates within economics at the time. The principle of marginal utility had been written about and taught for several decades. Once you get the principle, the functioning of the world becomes clearer to you. What was previously mysterious now seems rather obvious. What had previously baffled you now seems perfectly clear. The marginalist way of thinking becomes, in the most colloquial use of the phrase, "common sense." If you stick with Wicksteed's argument from the beginning to the end, your thinking will be permanently affected. You will see marginal utility all around, in every economic action. It will provide new ways of thinking of prices and resources and human behavior. You will have an impenetrable edifice against the fallacy of thinking of the value of whole classes of goods and services and instead see value a