Engels asks,
“But why is Hume given such an exaggerated position in Kritische Geschichte? Simply because this “serious and subtle thinker” has the honour of enacting the Dühring of the eighteenth century. Hume serves as proof that
“the creation of this whole branch of science” (economics) “is the achievement of a more enlightened philosophy”,
and similarly Hume as a precursor is the best guarantee that this whole branch of science will find its immediately foreseeable close, in that phenomenal man who has transformed the merely “more enlightened” philosophy into the absolutely luminous philosophy of reality, and with whom, just as with Hume, and what is
“ unprecedented on German soil … the cultivation of philosophy in the narrow sense of the word is combined with scientific endeavours in economics”.
Accordingly we find Hume, who in any case is respectable as an economist, inflated into an economic star of the first magnitude, whose importance could hitherto be denied only by the same envy which has hitherto so obstinately hushed up Herr Dühring's achievements, which are “authoritative for the epoch”.” (p 309-10)
Engels turns, then, to the Physiocrats, the Tableau Economique, and Duhrings treatment of it.
He writes,
“The Physiocratic school, as everyone knows, left us a riddle in the form of Quesnay’s Tableau économique on which all critics and historians of political economy have so far broken their teeth in vain. This Tableau, which was intended to bring out clearly the Physiocrats’ conception of the production and circulation of a country's total wealth, has remained pretty obscure for succeeding economists.” (p 310)
The Tableau was seen as a significant development by Marx, which shaped his own analysis of the integration of the process of production and circulation of commodities, money and capital, in Capital II and III, and his schemas of reproduction, rates of turnover and so on. It can be seen as an early form of input-output table.
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