After Quesnay, some classical economists, Adam Smith and Ricardo in particular, came fairly close to this point of view. Ricardo's contribution, his precise elaboration of the theory of value, has even been frequently confused with that of Marx. On the basis of his own theory of value, Ricardo saw that Smith's method of resolving the price of all commodities into _v + s_--a theory which wrought so much havoc in the analysis of reproduction--is wrong; but he was not much interested in Smith's mistake, nor indeed very enthusiastic about the problem of reproduction as a whole. His analysis, in fact, represents a certain decline after that of Adam Smith, just as Smith had partly retrogressed as against the Physiocrats. If Ricardo expounded the fundamental value categories of bourgeois economy--wages, surplus value and capital--much more precisely and consistently than his predecessors, he also treated them more rigidly. Adam Smith had shown infinitely more understanding for the living connections, the broad movements of the whole. In consequence he did not mind giving two, or, as in the case of the problem of value, even three or four different answers to the same question. Though he contradicts himself quite cheerfully in the various parts of his analysis, these very contradictions are ever stimulating him to renewed effort, they make him approach the problem as a whole from an ever different point of view, and so to grasp its dynamics. Ultimately, it was the limitation of their bourgeois mentalities which doomed both Smith and Ricardo to failure. A proper understanding of the fundamental categories of capitalist production, of value and surplus value as living dynamics of the social process demands the understanding of this process in its historical development and of the categories themselves as historically conditioned forms of the general relations of labour. This means that only a socialist can really solve the problem of the reproduction of capital. Between the _Tableau Économique_ and the diagram of reproduction in the second volume of _Capital_ there lies the prosperity and decline of bourgeois economics, both in time and in substance. FOOTNOTES: [90] In his seventh note to the _Tableau Économique_, following up his arguments against the mercantilist theory of money as identical with wealth, Quesnay says: 'The bulk of money in a nation cannot increase unless this reproduction itself increases; otherwise, an increase in the bulk of money would inevitably be prejudicial to the annual production of wealth.... Therefore we must not judge the opulence of states on the basis of a greater or smaller quantity of money: thus a stock of money, equal to the income of the landowners, is deemed much more than enough for an agricultural nation where the circulation proceeds in a regular manner, and where commerce takes place in confidence and full liberty' (_Analyse du Tableau Économique_, ed. Oncken, pp. 324-5).