The followers of Adam Smith have tackled this twofold theory from precisely the wrong approach. Before Marx nobody concerned himself with the important beginnings of an exact exposition of the problem in Smith's second book, while most of his followers jealously preserved Smith's radically wrong analysis of prices, accepting it, like Ricardo, without question, or else, like Say, elaborating it into a trite doctrine. Where Smith raised fruitful doubts and stimulating contradictions, Say flaunted the opinionated presumption of a commonplace mind. Smith's observation that the capital of one person may be the revenue of another induced Say to proclaim every distinction between capital and income on the social scale to be absurd. The absurdity, however, that income should completely absorb the total value of annual production which is thus consumed completely, assumes in Say's treatment the character of an absolutely valid dogma. If society annually consumes its own total product completely, social reproduction without any means of production whatever must become an annual repetition of the Miracle of the Creation. In this state the problem of reproduction remained up to the time of Karl Marx. FOOTNOTES: [60] 'Quesnay's _Tableau Économique_ shows ... how the result of national production in a certain year, amounting to some definite value, is distributed by means of the circulation in such a way, that ... reproduction can take place.... The innumerable individual acts of circulation are at once viewed in their characteristic social mass movement--the circulation between great social classes distinguished by their economic function' (_Capital_, vol. ii, p. 414). [61] Cf. _Analyse du Tableau Économique_, in _Journal de l'Agriculture, du Commerce et des Finances_, by Dupont (1766), pp. 305 ff. in Oncken's edition of _OEuvres de F. Quesnay_. Quesnay remarks explicitly that circulation as he describes it is based upon two conditions: unhampered trade, and a system of taxation applying only to rent: 'Yet these facts have indispensable conditions; that the freedom of commerce sustains the sale of products at a good price, ... and moreover, that the farmer need not pay any other direct or indirect charges but this income, part of which, say two sevenths, must form the revenue of the Sovereign' (op. cit., p. 311). [62] Adam Smith, _An Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations_ (ed. MacCulloch, Edinburgh London, 1828), vol. i, pp. 86-8. [63] Op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 17-18. [64] Ibid., pp. 18-19. [65] Ibid., p. 23. [66] As to the concept of 'national capital' specific to Rodbertus, see below, Section II. [67] J. B. Say, _A Treatise on Political Economy_ (transl. by C. R. Prinsep, vol. ii, London, 1821); pp. 75-7.