So wrote Friedrich List to the publisher J.G. Cotta in 1822, offering to translate Louis Say's Considerations sur l'industrie et la législation, a book which presented a series of readable summaries of recent economic treatises. Nothing came of this particular proposal to translate Say; but the project of rendering economic principles accessible to a wider popular audience was one which List later made his own. Unlike Louis Say, however, he eschewed straightforward summary of the principles advanced by contemporary economic writers. Instead, he developed a systematic critique of economic orthodoxies, a critique that turned on his contention that the intellectual legacy of Adam Smith was marked by an artificial divorce of politics from economics. As a consequence, he suggested, political distinctions and national interests failed to find a place in a doctrinal system that assumed a world ruled by general, universally valid economic laws. The ‘School’, as he dubbed the heirs of Adam Smith, therefore practised a Cosmopolitical Economy, rather than a true Political Economy which recognised the exigencies of national interests and political forces.