Nature and labour: theoretical approaches and metaphors of wealth before Adam Smith

Stefano Fiori

The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 2019, vol. 26, issue 6, 1153-1186

Abstract: In the seventeenth century and the early decades of the eighteenth, there occurred a conceptual reversal regarding the relationship between land and labour as agents of production of wealth. Authors of the seventeenth century attributed to labour – as “form” and “father” – a fundamental role in producing wealth, and they considered land as “matter” and “mother”, while Physiocrats attributed reproductive capacity only to land, and viewed labour as either mere support of nature or “sterile” transformative activity. These conceptions about the formation of wealth emerged not only from theoretical analyses but also from metaphors which had an important role in providing preliminary conceptual frameworks.

Date: 2019
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DOI: 10.1080/09672567.2019.1682024

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