This paper intends to clarify and evaluate the notion of the natural which
constitutes the basis for explanation and justification of a market-based
society in classical political economy. This notion is primarily detected in
such concepts as natural price, natural wage and differential rent. The
notion of the natural which is implicated in these concepts is characterized
by the following features: the role of self-interest and instincts on the level of
agency, the working of processes of competition and procreation under the
constraint of diminishing fertility of land, the inevitability and beneficence of
social outcome of these processes. The basic contention of this paper is that
the classical notion of the natural is based on what may be dubbed the
universally natural and the capitalistically natural which are not easily
integrable.