completely received so long as the bond of connection between
man and man is assumed to be that of family or clan connection.
The rule only triumphs when the primitive community is in
ruins. What are the causes which have generalized a Rule of the
Market until it has been supposed to express an original and
fundamental tendency of human nature, it is impossible to state
fully, so multifarious have they been. Everything which has
helped to convert a society into a collection of individuals
from being an assemblage of families has helped to add to the
truth of the assertion made of human nature by the Political
Economists.[196]

The extension of the relations of the market place to practically all
aspects of life having to do with livelihood has been the outcome of the
industrial revolution and the growth of Great Society. Standardization
of commodities, of prices, and of wages, the impersonal nature of
business relations, the "cash-nexus" and the credit basis of all human
relations has greatly extended the external competitive forms of
interaction. Money, with its abstract standards of value, is not only a
medium of exchange, but at the same time symbol par excellence of the
economic nature of modern competitive society.

The literature describing change from the familial communism, typical of
primitive society, to the competitive economy of modern capitalistic
society is indicated in the bibliography.

b) The history of competition as a concept in political economy goes
back to the Physiocrats. This French school of economists, laying stress
upon the food supply as the basis and the measure of the wealth of the
nation, demanded the abolition of restrictions upon agricultural
production and commerce. The Physiocrats based their theories upon the
natural rights of individuals to liberty.

The miserable state of the nation seemed to demand a _volte
face_. Taxes were many and indirect. Let them be single and
direct. Liberty of enterprise was shackled. Let it be free.
State-regulation was excessive. _Laissez-faire!_ Their economic
plea for liberty is buttressed by an appeal to Nature, greater
than kings or ministers, and by an assertion of the natural,
inherent rights of man to be unimpeded in his freedom except so
far as he infringes upon that of others.[197]

While the Physiocrats emphasized the beneficent effects of freedom in