Aims of the lecture

• 1. To demonstrate the emergence in France during the first half of the eighteenth century of arguments over trade and regulation in relation to issues of food supply that moved away from comparisons of the “strength of a nation” and introduced arguments about the existence of a “natural order” in economic life.

• 2. To outline the early history of physiocracy through discussion of Quesnay’s Tableau Économique and the associated Maximes, and show how these economic principles transformed in the course of the 1760s into a more general argument concerning natural order and good government.

• 3. To demonstrate that arguments about “free trade” in the early eighteenth century were related primarily to grain markets, but that by the 1780s these had transformed into general arguments about economic deregulation.

• 4. To show that the criticisms of the “physiocratic System” made at the time were uniform, limited and general, that its direct influence quickly waned, but that Quesnay’s Tableau in the 1860s became an inspiration for Marx, and thence indirectly for both Soviet planning and early input–output models of the economy.

Bibliography

There are some older translations of physiocratic writings into English but they are not entirely reliable, belonging to a now-dated tradition that linked them to Marx and Marxist debates of the later nineteenth century: Ronald L. Meek, The Economics of Physiocracy (London: Allen & Unwin, 1962); Marguerite Kuczynski and Ronald L. Meek (eds), Quesnay’s Tableau Économique (London: Macmillan, 1972).

There is a good modern edition of Quesnay’s writings: François Quesnay, (Euvres économiques complètes et autres textes, two volumes, Christine Théré, Loïc Charles and Jean-Claude Perrot (eds) (Paris: Institut National d’Études Démographiques, 2005).

In addition, the writings of Quesnay and many others can be found online at http://gallica.bnf.fr (accessed 26 October 2017).

The best general introduction available in English is Arnaud Orain and Philippe Steiner, “François Quesnay (1694–1774) and Physiocracy”, in Gilbert Faccarello and Heinz Kurz (eds), Handbook on the History of Economic Analysis, Volume I: Great Economists since Petty and Boisguilbert (Cheltenham: Elgar, 2016), 28–39.