Question

To what extent were Quesnay and Turgot precursors to Smith? Be sure to discuss the main similarities and differences between their work and Smith’s. (Essay question)

Answer 1

Writers like A.R.J. Turgot, the Marquis de Condorcet and Francois Quesnay are not household names, unlike Adam Smith or David Ricardo. But they are important. According to one late-19th century historian, the physiocrats (who called themselves the "économistes") created "the first strictly scientific system of economics".

Physiocracy was a theory of wealth. The physiocrats, led by Quesnay, believed that the wealth of nations was derived solely from the value of agriculture. Quesnay’s understanding of value-added was rather primitive—he could not see, for example, how manufacturing could create wealth. Farmers, on the other hand, could. As Karl Marx explains in "Das Kapital", "the Physiocrats insist that only agricultural labour is productive, since that alone, they say, yields a surplus-value".

The Physiocrats were a group of eighteenth-century social philosophers whose theories have been as grievously misinterpreted as the thought of any group in history. They lived through that period of intellectual, social and moral ferment known as the "Intel- lectual Revolution," an age when Lockean psychology and the New tonian scientific method were struggling to replace Cartesian rationalism. It was a confusing age intellectually, and cons quently it is not surprising to find in the Physiocrats mixed, but not integrated, elements of Cartesian rationalism, Lockean empiricism, Newtonian science and deistic optimism. These newer modes of thought were grafted onto the older tradition, which seems to have survived in France longer and with greater strength than historians have been accustomed to admit." The Physiocrats are almost always treated, then, as having written the first chapter in con temporary economic thought rather than the last chapter in earlier modern thought; they have been dealt with incorrectly simply as

There seems agreement on this point today.

1 No one has done anything either to challenge or to make invalid the eharge made in 1931 by Norman J. Ware when he observed: "There is no body of economic theory more misunderstood than that of the Physiocrats" ("The Physiocrats: A Study in Economie Rationalization, The Ameri can Economic Review, XII, 607).

Students of physiocracy have failed to realize that in such an age of transition one almost always finds such mixed, and often conflicting, elements. They tend to identify physiocracy with one or the other of the prevailing systems. Charles Bourthoumieux, for example, insists : "Sans doute ils ont une méthode presque pure ment déductive et a prioristique" (Le mythe de l'ordre naturel en économie politique depuis Onespan [Paris, 1935), 31). On the other hand, John Arthur Mourant claims: "All the Physiocrats are insistent upon the need of a scientific method based on observation and experimentation" (The Physiocratic Conception of Natural Law [dissertation submitted to Chicago University in 1940, printed in 1943] 18).

3 The historian today who is insistent on the gradualness of change is surprised to find only two or three commentators on physiocracy who have seen in the system any elements surviving from preceding ages. Louis de Loménie, Les Mirabeau:

Nouvelles études sur la société française au XVIII° siècle (Paris, 1879), is the out standing exception in the nineteenth century. In more recent times Max Beer, An Inquiry Into Physiocracy (London, 1939), offers what he considers the first new in interpretation of physiocracy since Adam Smith. Beer shows the close similarity be tween medieval economic thought and that of the Physiocrats, and he attempts to establish a causal relationship to explain that similarity.