John Law

John Law (1671-1729) left a remarkable legacy of economic concepts from a time when economic conceptualization was very much at an embryonic stage. Yet he is best known-and generally dismissed-today as a rake, duellist, and gambler. This intellectual biography offers a new approach to Law, one that shows him to have been a significant economic theorist with a vision that he attempted to implement as policy in early-eighteenth-century Europe. Law's style, marked by a clarity and use of modern terminology, stands out starkly against the turgid prose of many of his contemporaries. His vision of a monetary and financial system was certainly one of a later age, for Law believed in an economy of banknotes and credit where specie had no role to play. Ultimately Law failed as a policy-maker, in part because of the entrenchment of the financiers and their aristocratic backers and in part because of theoretical flaws in his vision. His struggle for power took place against the background of Europe's first major stock boom and collapse. The collapse of the Mississippi System, which he had conceived, and the South Sea Bubble led to a lasting impression of Law as a failure. It is this impression that Antoin Murphy seeks to dispel.

At the summit of his power, John Law was the most famous man in Europe. Born in Scotland in 1671, he was convicted of murder in London and, after his escape from prison, fled Scotland for the mainland when Union with England brought with it a warrant for his arrest. On the continent he lurched from one money-making scheme to the next - selling insurance against losing lottery tickets in Holland, advising the Duke of Savoy - amassing a fortune of some £80,000. But for his next trick he had grander ambitions. When Louis XIV died, leaving a thoroughly bankrupt France to his five-year-old heir, Law gained the ear of the Regent, Philippe D'Orleans. In the years that followed, Law's financial wizardry transformed the fortunes of France, enriching speculators and investors across the continent, and he was made Controller-General of Finances, effectively becoming the French Prime Minister. But the fall from grace that was to follow was every bit as spectacular as his meteoric rise. John Law, by a biographer of Adam Smith and the author of Frozen Desire and Capital of the Mind, dramatises the life of one of the most inventive financiers in history, a man who was born before his time and in whose day the word millionaire came to be coined.

At the summit of his power, John Law was the most famous man in Europe. Born in Scotland in 1671, he was convicted of murder in London and, after his escape from prison, fled Scotland for the mainland when Union with England brought with it a warrant for his arrest. On the continent he lurched from one money-making scheme to the next - selling insurance against losing lottery tickets in Holland, advising the Duke of Savoy - amassing a fortune of some £80,000. But for his next trick he had grander ambitions. When Louis XIV died, leaving a thoroughly bankrupt France to his five-year-old heir, Law gained the ear of the Regent, Philippe D'Orleans. In the years that followed, Law's financial wizardry transformed the fortunes of France, enriching speculators and investors across the continent, and he was made Controller-General of Finances, effectively becoming the French Prime Minister. But the fall from grace that was to follow was every bit as spectacular as his meteoric rise. John Law, by a biographer of Adam Smith and the author of Frozen Desire and Capital of the Mind, dramatises the life of one of the most inventive financiers in history, a man who was born before his time and in whose day the word millionaire came to be coined.

This book is a biography of John Law, a Scottish economist who distinguished money, a means of exchange, from national wealth dependent on trade. He served as Controller General of Finances under the Duke of Orleans, who was regent for the juvenile Louis XV of France. In 1716, Law set up a private Banque Générale in France, which effectively made it the nation's first central bank.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1864.