The later eighteenth century saw the emergence of systematic economic analysis of a sort which was to provide the core of economics for the next century. This analysis was, in the main, conducted in the course of attacking practical problems and prescribing measures of policy. Programmes of economic policy were nothing new: what was new was their number, range and connection with a general view of the working of the economy, and with organised thought as opposed to intuition. There were economic writers of intelligence and penetration earlier in the century— Cantillon and Montesquieu for example—but in quality and range the works of the later decades of the eighteenth century are without precedent.

In France, to take the most conspicuous examples, there was Quesnay's Tableau économique (1758) and the large volume of physiocratic writing, and Turgot's Réflexions sur la formation et la distribution des richesses (written in 1766); in Spain, Campomanes, Discurso sobre el fomento de la industria popular (1774), and in Italy, Genovesi's Lezioni di economia civile (1765), and Economia nazionale (1774) by Ortes.

The development of this body of economic thought was due partly to internal developments, to a cumulative increase in intellectual capacity to analyse economic problems, and partly to the appearance of problems of a complexity which required to be dealt with in an analytical fashion. These two influences interacted; intellectual habits predisposed men to frame explanations in general terms at the same time as the problems of practical administration required to be treated in this way.