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Richard Cantillon is considered by many to be the first economic theorist. His contributions span such diverse topics as methodology, value and price theory, population, money, international trade, business cycles, the circular-flow model of the economy, and the price-specie-flow mechanism. His only known book, Essai sur la Nature du Commerce en Général (hereafter, the Essai), may represent one of the single largest steps forward in the social sciences. Many attempts have been made to classify Richard Cantillon into a well-defined school of thought and he has been claimed as a forerunner by many schools of economic thought, but for purposes of categorization, he is most often placed with the mercantilists. Cantillon lived and wrote before the Physiocrats. He was involved in John Law's Mississippi Bubble, one of the grandest attempts to actualize the mercantilist dream of increasing the supply of money, and he was involved in the merchant trade and merchant banking business, so it would be natural to consider him a mercantilist writer. Those who have classified him as a mercantilist, however, base their categorization mainly on excerpts from the Essai where Cantillon seems to display sympathy with mercantilist policy objectives in such areas as international trade, monetary policy, and economic development.

In his "History of economic analysis" Joseph A. Schumpeter emphasized the role of the sequence "Petty—Cantillon—Quesnay". Recent research has showed that it was Cantillon, whose contribution within this sequence was crucial. The article is devoted to the scientific legacy of the author of the "Essay on the nature of trade in general" — the first systemic treatise on economic theory in history; as well as to the impact it had on the subsequent development of economic thought. The topics under discussion include issues of method, ontological assumptions and ideological setting, theories of social reproduction, value and circulation of money, entrepreneurship, population and spatial development. It is argued that Cantillon's blueprint of theoretical economics provided a pattern for the formation of classical political economy and partly retained this role in the post-classic period. Cantillon's theoretical legacy can serve as a source of relevant lessons for theoretical economists and organizers of economic research until today.