Background
Say was born on January 5, 1767, in Lyon, France, to a Protestant merchant family.
Say was born on January 5, 1767, in Lyon, France, to a Protestant merchant family.
Say was intended to follow a commercial career, and in 1785 was sent, with his brother Horace, to complete his education in England. He lodged for a time in Croydon, and afterwards (following a return visit to France) in Fulham.
Say was intended to follow a commercial career, and was sent, with his brother Horace, to England: here he lived first in Croydon, in the house of a merchant, to whom he acted as clerk, and afterwards in London, where he was in the service of another employer. When, on the death of the latter, he returned to France, he was employed in the office of a life assurance company directed by Étienne Clavière. At the suggestion of his employer he read Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. Thereupon he decided to become an economist, abandoning business to write economic articles for a republican periodical, La Décade philosophique, of which he was editor. Say's first literary attempt was a pamphlet on the liberty of the press, published in 1789. He later worked under Mirabeau on the Courrier de Provence.
From 1794 to 1800 Say edited a periodical entitled La Décade philosophique, litteraire, et politique, in which he expounded the doctrines of Adam Smith. He had by this time established his reputation as a publicist, and, when the consular government was established in 1799, he was selected as one of the hundred members of the tribunate, resigning the direction of the Decade.
He became a successful textile manufacturer in the north of France, where he introduced the new cotton-spinning methods copied from England. After Napoleon's fall, Say returned to Paris and instituted a series of public lectures on political economy at the Athénée. In 1819 he was appointed the first incumbent of the chair in industrial economy at the Museum of Arts and Crafts, and in 1830 he became the first professor of political economy at the Collège de France.
In his major work, A Treatise on Political Economy (1803), Say improved upon Smith's Wealth of Nations in form and content. His tripartite division of the classical doctrine into production, distribution, and consumption set a precedent which was followed in standard treatises for more than a century.
Controversy over "Say's law" continues to this day, especially since it was attacked by John Maynard Keynes. After his death on November 15, 1832, his son Horace and his grandson Léon, who were also economists, helped propagate this ultraliberal doctrine, which dominated French economics throughout the 19th century.
Though Say became a deist, he retained the deep-rooted sense of moral earnestness he inherited from the martyrs of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.
Say was an apostle of economic liberalism, utterly opposed to government intervention in business and to all socialistic schemes. In his teaching, as in his voluminous writings, his aim was to lay a new moral foundation of society by revealing economics as a science of laws of nature which cannot be violated without bad effect.
Say gave precision to the concept of the entrepreneur, whom Smith had failed to distinguish from the capitalist investor. Viewing the entrepreneur as buyer and coordinator of the services of land, labor, and capital, Say envisaged production essentially as a market phenomenon. This led him to his famous "law of markets," according to which production, by generating income flows without any leakage into monetary hoards, automatically assured effective demand for aggregate output. Siding with James Mill and David Ricardo, but against Thomas Malthus, he held that general gluts were impossible. His aim was to lay a new moral foundation of society by revealing economics as a science of laws of nature which cannot be violated without bad effect.
Quotations:
"There is no security of property, where a despotic authority can possess itself of the property of the subject against his consent. Neither is there such security, where the consent is merely nominal and delusive."
"The property a man has in his own industry, is violated, whenever he is forbidden the free exercise of his faculties or talents, except insomuch as they would interfere with the rights of third parties."
In 1826, he was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
In 1793 Say married Mlle Deloche, daughter of a former lawyer. He lost his wife in January 1830 and from that time his health constantly declined.