Jean-Baptiste Say as an Enlightenment Character

This article summarizes the life and some of the ideas of the French classical economist Jean-Baptiste Say (1767-1832), as described in my recent biography of him. . Before becoming an economist, Say was the editor of a literary and political journal in the seventeen-nineties, which truly was an Enlightenment organ. After falling out with Napoleon he earned his living as the owner of a cotton spinning mill. As a true liberal, he had a difficult time even after Waterloo, and despite the success of his economics textbook got his first chair in economics only in 1819, at the age of fifty-two.