“In its natural state, matter ... is always destitute of value.” McCulloch, “A Discourse on the Rise, Progress, Peculiar Objects, and Importance of Political Economy,” 2nd edition, Edinburgh, 1825, pg. 48. It is evident how even a McCulloch stands above the fetishism of German “thinkers”, who declare “matter” and half a dozen other foreign things to be elements of value. Cf. e. g. L. Stein, l. c. v. I., p. 110.
Berkeley, The Querist, London, 1750.
Thomas Cooper, Lectures on the Elements of Political Economy, London, 1831, p. 99.
F. List could never grasp the difference between labor as a source of use-value and labor as the creator of certain social form of wealth or exchange value, because comprehension was altogether foreign to his practical mind; he therefore saw in the modern English economists mere plagiarists of Moses, the Egyptian.
It can be readily understood what kind of “service” is rendered by the category “service” to economists of the type of J. B. Say and F. Bastiat, whose pondering sagacity, as Malthus has justly remarked, always abstracts from the specially definite forms of economic relations.