Template-Type: ReDIF-Article 1.0
Author-Name: Cosimo Perrotta
Author-Email: cosimoperrotta@gmail.com
Title: The four 18th century streams on productive labour
Abstract: This article first recalls our previous research on the original approach on productive labour, which goes from Petty to 
	Genovesi (1767). That approach, being mainly empirical, divided jobs into more or less productive. The other most 
	important approaches came later: Quesnay founded productive labour on surplus, Condillac on utility, Smith on exchange 
	value. All of them gave the concept a more rigorous, but also more rigid shape: jobs were divided into productive or 
	unproductive once and for all. Moreover social utility and productive nature of labour became separated qualities. 
	Smith’s concern was to fight the waste of the aristocrats, which fed unproductive labour and subtracted resources from 
	investment and productive labour. But for Smith public services and intellectual labour are unproductive because their 
	product is not material. So, he puts the seeds of the dissolution of his own theory. The following decades witness a 
	confrontation between the physiocratic and the Smithian approach. In the end the latter prevails, but its inconsistencies 
	emerge.
Keywords: Productive/unproductive labour; Productive/unproductive consumption; Development; Enlightenment.
Journal: Iberian Journal of the History of Economic Thought
Pages: 1-13
Volume: 1
Issue: 2
Year: 2014
Month: December
DOI: 10.5209/rev_IJHE.2014.v1.n2.47726

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Handle: RePEc:ucm:ijohet:v:1:y:2014:i:2:p:01-13