Before Adam Smith economic thinking was closely connected with law and practical politics. The law dealt with property and practical politics was about people. So economic thinking could be said to be concerned with Money and Work.

Kings and priests spoke for their right to collect surplus production, Mercantilists spoke for the merchants and Physiocrats for the landowners. Then came Adam Smith and Classical Economics.

Since then the Historical School have spoken for the status quo, Classical Liberals for profits and capitalism and the followers of Marx for wages and socialism. A small linguistically isolated country like Sweden makes an interesting example.

In medieval times influences on Swedish Economic Thought came from Christian and Humanistic thinking in Southern Europe...transformed via German Hanseatic Towns and Denmark to suit a peasant economy with a weak feudal system. In the 16th century German Technology and Mercantilist Thinking were imported to suit the War Economy of the autocratic Vasa kings.

In the 17th century the Dutch took over from the Germans as chief ideologists when the small Swedish super-power tried to develop its trade. In the first half of the 18th century English Mercantile Thinking was imported to suit Swedish Merchants and the Mines, Mills and Factory Owners. In the second half of the 18th century a distorted version of the teachings of the French Physiocrats reached Sweden.

During the first part of the 19th century English and French influences...Smith, Say, Bastiat...competed for dominance when Economic Liberalism penetrated a country that lagged behind Europe in Capitalist Development by half a century. In the 1870s the German Language regained a leading position through schools of thought on both left and right of the political spectrum...interpreted to suit a relatively more rural, peaceful, democratic and pragmatic tradition.

In the 18th century scholars were fluent linguists who built extensive friendships and patronage networks throughout Europe and America and published their work in universal languages such as Latin while seeing it as one of their duties as a scholar to translate from this universal languages into the vernacular.

So when we are looking at the 18th century and the economic academic environment into which Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations was launched, we find that everywhere there were scholars rooted in the practical economic traditions of their own town, province or country, but learned in other traditions and in continuous touch with the intellectual currents of their age.

The world-famous botanist Carl Linnaeus is typical of this universality of learning. Abroad Linnaeus is regarded as one of the few really well-known Swedes...a scientist of genius who inherited the general mood of optimism and belief in progress of the 18th century. But in Sweden Linnaeus is Swedish to a high degree. Perhaps only Carl-Michael Bellman and Carl Larsson have influenced the psyche of Swedish daily life as profoundly as Carl Linnaeus.

This trio mean to the Swede what Shakespeare, Newton and William Morris mean to the English. The feeling for nature, the sense of discovery inspired by the Swedish countryside and the clear literary style originated in Linnaeus' genius. They were not there before Linnaeus. But 250 years on they permeate the entire Swedish population.

Linnaeus campaigned vigorously for Practical Economics. With a sentiment that would not be out of place in Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe Linnaeus wrote in his Oeconomica Naturae that it was the duty of human beings to extract natural resources 'otherwise God would not have deposited them in the earth'. What's more...this would have made a patriot such as Edmund Burke blush...'the natural resources of Sweden were superior to those of any other country'.

Linnaeus argued for new professorships to be established in Economics, Botany and Natural History as a means of preventing the penetration of the new secular Prussian Economics into the Swedish Universities. He lost the battle with the highly political appointment of Anders Berch as Professor of Economics at Uppsala University in 1741.

Linnaeus fought back on two fronts. He undertook Economic Journeys into the Swedish Provinces on behalf of the government...to Gotland, Öland and Dalarna. Ten years after Berch's appointment Linnaean Professors were appointed to newly established Linnaean Chairs in Economics, Botany and Natural History...Åbo in 1747 and Lund in 1750.

The writings of Swedish economists can be understood by ordinary people and deep ecology is the philosophy underlying much modern Swedish Economic Thought. It is no accident that ecology has pushed further into practical politics in Sweden than elsewhere. Linneaus was a first rate political economist and he had his foot in the door 250 years ago.

Linnaeus' confrontations with Berch and his Prussian Economics at Uppsala University were the first skirmishes in a war that has raged now through three centuries and has engulfed the whole world. Only now as this war of ideas at the heart of economics enters its fourth century, do we find Linnaeus' ideas once again in the ascendancy. Our age is finally catching up with Linnaeus. After three hundred years of Anders Berch's School of Quantity & Dead Matter...econometrics...Linnaeus is making a comeback as the Founder of a School of Quality & Living Beings.