ΤΟ THE STUDY OF POLITICAL ECONOMY. BY DR. LUIGI COSSA, PROFESSOR OF POLITICAL ECONOMY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF PAVIA. TRANSLATED FROM THE SECOND ITALIAN EDITION. WITH A PREFACE BY W. STANLEY JEVONS, F.R.S. London: MACMILLAN AND CO. 1880. PREFACE ΤΟ THE ENGLISH TRANSLATION. To a reader fairly acquainted with the English Literature of Political Economy it will be evident why this translation of an Italian text-book has been undertaken. The sufficient reason is that no introduction to the study of Economics at all approaching in character to Professor Cossa's Guida allo Studio dell' Economia Politica is to be found in the English tongue. This work presents, in a compendious form, not only a general view of the bounds, divisions, and relations of the science, marked by great impartiality and breadth of treatment, but it also furnishes us with an historical sketch of the science, such as must be wholly new to English readers. Every economist would grant that we have in English the works of the father of the science, Adam Smith, and of not a few successors or predecessors who have made the science almost an English science. But this fact, joined perhaps with the common want of linguistic |