Читать книгу A Treatise on Political Economy - Antoine Louis Claude Destutt De Tracy - Страница 28

Of the change of place, or of Commercial Industry.

The isolated man might manufacture but could not trade.

For commerce and society are one and the same thing.

It alone animates industry.

It unites in the first place inhabitants of the same canton. Then the different cantons of the same country, and finally different nations.

The greatest advantage of external commerce, the only one meriting attention, is its giving a greater development to that which is internal.

Merchants, properly so called, facilitate commerce, but it exists before them and without them.

They give a new value to things by effecting a change of place, as manufacturers do by a change of form.

It is from this increase of value that they derive their profits.

Commercial industry presents the same phenomena as manufacturing industry; in it are likewise theory, application and execution. Men of science, entrepreneurs and workmen; these are compensated in like manner; they have analogous functions and interests, &c. &c.