physiocrat

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François Quesnay, engraving by J.G. Wille after a portrait by J. Chevallier.

Courtesy of the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris

physiocrat, any of a school of economists founded in 18th-century France and characterized chiefly by a belief that government policy should not interfere with the operation of natural economic laws and that land is the source of all wealth. It is generally regarded as the first scientific school of economics.

Physiocracy etymologically denoted the “rule of nature,” and the physiocrats envisaged a society in which natural economic and moral laws would have full play and in which positive law would be in harmony with natural law. They also pictured a predominantly agricultural society and therefore attacked mercantilism not only for its mass of economic regulations but also for its emphasis on manufactures and foreign trade. Whereas mercantilists held that each nation must regulate trade and manufacture to increase its wealth and power, the physiocrats contended that labour and commerce should be freed from all restraint. Again, whereas mercantilists claimed that coin and bullion were the essence of wealth, the physiocrats asserted that wealth consisted solely of the products of the soil.

The origin of these ideas may be traced in numerous works, in France and in Britain, from the end of the 17th century, but the so-called physiocratic school was founded by François Quesnay, court physician to Madame de Pompadour and later to Louis XV. His first publications were in the field of medicine. His knowledge of the circulation of the blood and his belief in the creative healing power of nature influenced his later economic analyses. Also, despite a long residence at Versailles, Quesnay remained a countryman at heart, and his economic ideas were coloured by his early studies of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. His crowning work and the one that set forth his views schematically was the Tableau économique (1758; “Economic Picture”), which, by deftly chosen data, demonstrated the economic relation between a workshop and a farm and purported to prove that the farm alone added to a nation’s wealth.

By the early 1750s, Quesnay’s rooms at Versailles had become the meeting place of persons interested in economic and administrative problems. His first important disciple was Victor Riqueti, Marquis de Mirabeau, who wrote Explication du Tableau économique (1759; “Explication of the Economic Picture”), Théorie de l’impôt (1760; “Theory of Taxation”), and Philosophie rurale (1763; “Rural Philosophy”), all elaborations of Quesnay’s theories. In 1763 the young Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours came to Quesnay’s notice, and it is this event that marks the real beginning of the physiocratic school, which was joined, among others, by P.P. le Mercier de la Rivière (1719–92), G.F. le Trosne (1728–80), the abbé Nicolas Baudeau (1730–92), and the abbé P.J.A. Roubaud (1730–91). The school was popularized by du Pont, who published a collection of Quesnay’s writings under the title La Physiocratie; ou, constitution naturelle du gouvernement le plus avantageux au genre humain (1767; “Physiocracy; or, The Natural Constitution of the Government Most Advantageous to Humankind”), from which the school took its name. (The followers, however, preferred to be known as économistes. The term physiocrats became current only in the 19th century.) Also influential in popularizing the school were Roubaud, who edited the Gazette du commerce, and Baudeau, who controlled the journal Ephémérides du citoyen.

By 1768 the physiocratic school was in decline. In 1774, however, shortly before Quesnay died, the hopes of both school and party were raised by the appointment of Jacques Turgot as comptroller general. Turgot himself was not a physiocrat, but he had affinities with the school, and the physiocrats rallied around him. Eventually, accused of putting the government into the hands of theorists, Turgot was dismissed in 1776, and the leading physiocrats were exiled.

Given their assumptions and the social system that they desired, the physiocrats were logical and systematic. What they did was to rationalize medieval economic ideals, employing to that end the more modern philosophical and scientific methods. Hence in their writings there is a strange blend of conservative and revolutionary thought and, to the modern mind, some inconsistencies. They asserted in a general way that prices were determined by cost of production and by supply and demand, but they assumed that there was a constant fair price (bon prix) that obtained under a regime of free trade. On the other hand, they claimed that government should fix the rate of interest. Again, they glorified tillage and lauded the cultivators but assigned the net product (produit net) to the landlords. No wonder, then, that the physiocrats have been variously regarded as levelers, as liberals, and as feudal reactionaries. Their system did not survive for long. Their free-trade theories were, however, embodied in the Anglo-French commercial treaty of 1786 and in the Revolutionary decree of August 29, 1789, freeing the grain trade. The land tax established by the Revolutionary Constituent Assembly on December 1, 1790, also followed physiocratic precepts, but the issue of assignats, or paper money, in April 1790 ignored completely their theory of wealth. Indeed, this last theory soon ceased to hold respect. It had already been attacked by Adam Smith and was soon to be demolished by David Ricardo. Of greater importance than the conclusions of the physiocrats was their scientific method, which ironically in other hands and in different circumstances was destructive of physiocratic doctrines.