a historian and political economist, who is best known for his works on French and Italian history, and his economic ideas. As an economist, Sismondi represented a humanitarian protest against the dominant orthodoxy of his time. In his 1803 book, he followed Adam Smith; but in his principal subsequent economic work, Nouveaux principes d'économie politique (1819), he insisted on the fact that economic science studied the means of increasing wealth too much, and the use of wealth for producing happiness, too little. For the science of economics, his most important contribution was probably his discovery of economic cycles.
