Fifteen years after the Global Financial Crisis: Recessions and Business Cycles in the History of Economic Thought

The Ontology of the Market at the Origins of the Political Economy: Sir William Petty and Pierre le Pesant de Boisguilbert

Dimos George, Department of Economic Science, Faculty of Political and Economic Science, National & Kapodistrian University of Athens

The Market, the field where agents coexist and interact with each other in order to accomplish their own economic interests through the process of buy and sell, is governed by strict economic rules which are based also on strict methodological assumptions like perfect information, atomistic interests etc. Is the above sentence true? In fact, we are not able to adjudicate to this question by certainty because there is a deficit in academic discussion concerning the nature of the market. What the Market actually is? Is it solely constituted by economic relations or there are also socio-political elements playing a (crucial) role? To these questions the present paper hopes to contribute its best effort by studying the works of Sir William Petty and Pierre le Pesant de Boisguilbert.

Area: Young Scholar Seminar

Keywords: Ontology of the Market; Origins of the Political Economy; Petty; Boisguilbert

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