SAY, JEAN BAPTISTE 2), French economist, was born at Lyons, on Jan. 5, 1767, of a Protestant family, who had fled from France after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, but had returned in the 18th century. Intending to follow a com mercial career, Say first entered the house of an English mer chant, and was later employed in the office of a life assurance com pany in France. His attention having been called to The Wealth of Nations, however, he began to study economics, and in 1789 published his first pamphlet. In 5803 he published his principal work Traite d'economie politique. His views being displeasing to Napoleon, he was dismissed from the post of tribune, to which he had been elected in 1799. He built a spinning mill, and de voted himself to the industry and to the revision of his book, of which the second edition appeared in 1814. In the same year he was sent by the French Government to study the economic con ditions of Great Britain. The results of his observations ap peared in a tract, De l'Angleterre et des Anglais, and in the cor rected edition of the Traite (1817). A chair of industrial economy was founded for him in 1819 at the Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers. In 1831 he was made professor of political economy at the College de France, and in 1828-30 he published his Cours complet d'economie politique pratique. At the revolution of 1830
he was named a member of the council-general of the department of the Seine, but found it necessary to resign. He died at Paris On Nov. 15, 1832.
Say's writings occupy vols. ix.—xii. of Guillaumin's Collection des principaux economistes. Among them are Olbie, oft essai sur les moyens de reformer les moeurs d'une nation (1800) Catechisme d'economie politique (1815) ; Petit Volume contenant quelques apercus des hommes et de la societe, lettres a Malthus sur differens sujets d'economie poli tique (182o) ; Epitome des principes de l'economie politique (1831) . A volume of Mélanges et correspondance was published posthumously by his son-in-law, Chas. Comte, author of the Traite de legislation.
The last edition of the Traite d'economie politique which appeared during the life of the author was the 5th (1826) ; the 6th, with the author's final corrections, was edited by the eldest son, Horace Emile Say, himself known as an economist, in 1846. The work was translated into English by C. R. Prinsep (1821), and into German, by C. Ed. Morstadt (1818 and 1830). See also A. Liesse, Jean Baptiste Say (Paris, I901).