Collected Works of William Petty

Considered by Marx to be the 'founder of Classical political economy', and by his contemporaries John Aubrey, Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn, to be one of the most outstanding men of his time, Sir William Petty (1623-1687) was at various times, Professor of Anatomy at Oxford, Chair of 'Music' at Gresham College, and an active member in the founding of the Royal Society.

He was even, for a year or so, secretary to Thomas Hobbes, whose theory of knowledge and political philosophy deeply influenced him.

He was undoubtedly the outstanding economist of the seventeenth century.

Petty's first and major publication on economics was the Treatise of Taxes and Contributions (1662), a work full of influential methodological and theoretical ideas.

Many of his other works appeared posthumously as they were not intended for publication so much as for circulation within the corridors of power to advance his own career.

Nevertheless, Petty's influence on economic developments was considerable, anticipating as he did many of the ideas of Adam Smith by a hundred years, and establishing the science of demography and statistics. The set collects together all of Petty's published writings in economics, an extensive selection of his correspondence and papers on more diverse subjects, his best-known and authoritative biography by Fitzmaurice, as well as a new selection of the most important secondary critical writing on his work.

The collection has been selected and edited with a new introduction by Terence Hutchison, whose many books include Before Adam Smith, the Emergence of Political Economy 1662-1776 (1988), and The Philosophy and Politics of Economics (1981).