Francois Quesnay

12 Key excerpts on "Francois Quesnay"

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  The Classical Theory of Economic Growth

  • W. Eltis(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  1 Quesnay's Tableau Economique Francois Quesnay's achievement is one of the most remarkable in the history of economics. He published his first article on an economic problem in 1756 when he was 62 years old, and in the following twelve years he produced a series of influential articles and successive versions of his famous Tableau Economique. He also became the centre of the first school of economists, the Physiocrats or Econo- mistes of pre-revolutionary France. The Tableau has two multipliers, one of them almost Keynesian, and Leontief has said that he was following Quesnay when he constructed his input-output table of the United States economy in 1941. 1 Marx, who according to Schumpeter derived his fundamental conception of the economic process as a whole from Quesnay.f called it 'an extremely brilliant conception, incontestably the most brilliant for which political economy had up to then been responsible,:' and in 1935 Schumpeter himself described Quesnay as one of the four greatest economists of all time. 4 Born the son of a farmer, Quesnay first achieved distinction as a surgeon, becoming Secretary of the French Association of Surgeons, a member of the French Academy of Sciences, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of London. In addition he became one of four consultant doctors to King Louis XV, with an entresol at Versailles, where he was also Madame de Pompadour's private physician." His first economic publications were two articles, 'Fermiers' (1756) and 'Grains' (1757), which Diderot and D'Alembert published in the Encyclopedia. These provide a more detailed account of the agricul- ture of the time than the work of any other great classical economist, and they set out the foundations of Quesnay's theory of the working of economies, and the policies needed to ensure France's recovery 1 2 The Classical Theory of Economic Growth from expensive wars and rural depopulation. The first edition of the Tableau followed a year later.

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  The Evolution of Economic Thought

  • Stanley Brue, R. Grant, Stanley Brue, Randy Grant(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  The physiocrats extolled the capitalistic farmer as the key figure in French economic development but were wrong on two counts. First, industrialists and laborers became the most important figures in the economic growth of the country, whereas the relative importance of agriculture declined. Second, the small peasant farmer rather than the large farm entrepreneur became typical in France. Had the land remained in the hands of the nobility, a tax on land ownership would have curbed luxury consumption. But when the small peasants got the land after the Revolution, they would have borne the bulk of the tax burden. Nevertheless, the physiocrats made several lasting contributions to economics. First, by examining society as a whole and analyzing the laws that governed the circulation of wealth and goods, they founded economics as a social science. We will discover that Quesnay ’ s economic table is a precursor to two items found in modern economics texts: the economic flow diagram and national income account-ing. Second, the law of diminishing returns — usually credited to Malthus and Ricardo — actually was stated earlier by the physiocrat Turgot. Third, the physio-crats originated the analysis of tax shifting and incidence that today is an important part of applied microeconomics. Finally, by advocating laissez-faire, the physiocrats turned the attention of economists to the question of the proper role of govern-ment in the economy. FRANÇOIS QUESNAY François Quesnay (1694 – 1774), the son of a landed proprietor, was the founder and leader of the physiocratic school. Trained to be a physician, he made a fortune through his skill in medicine and surgery. Quesnay rose to be the court physician of Louis XV and Madame de Pompadour. In 1750 he met Gournay and soon became more interested in economics than in medicine. Quesnay and his cohorts hoped to transform the king into an “ enlightened despot ” as the instrument of peaceful reform.

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  The Labour Theory of Value

  • Peter C. Dooley(Author)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  5 François Quesnay A brief life of François Quesnay The early life of François Quesnay (1694–1774) has been differently reported by various authorities. Auguste Oncken (1965 [1888]) published biographical sketches of Quesnay by Mirabeau, Fouchy, Madame du Hausset and others. He noted that Lord Crawford thought Quesnay was born in the village of Ecquivilly, in the Isle de France, the son of a labourer. The consensus follows the version of the count d’Albon, who claimed that Quesnay was born in Méré near Montfort-Lamaury, the son of an advocate. His father was also apparently the proprietor of a small estate. All the authorities agree that Quesnay spent his early years in rural France. Legend has it that he never attended school and did not learn to read until age eleven, about which time, or shortly thereafter, he became a voracious reader. He mastered Latin and Greek and read Plato, Aristotle and Cicero, which gave him the economic and philosophic foundations that the modern world inherited from classical antiquity. 1 While still a teenager, Quesnay began studying to be a surgeon, which was still a sort of barber and distinct from the profession of medicine. He established his practice of surgery in Mantes, where he moved with his wife. Success brought him recognition and eventually appointment as secretary to the Parisian Academy of Surgery. From surgery, he turned to medicine and acquired his doctorate, which opened a broader field of study and practice. He became an expert on the circulation of the blood and published on the practice of bleeding. The circulation of the blood may have suggested to him the circulation of money and commodities in the economy. 2 The title of his book, Essai physique sur l’économie animale (1736), implied a similar analogy to economics. He also published books on gangrene and fevers. It is, perhaps, no coincidence that Sir William Petty and John Locke were also physicians

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  The Natural Origins of Economics

  • Margaret Schabas(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • University of Chicago Press

    (Publisher)

  The Physiocrats journal, the Éphémérides du Citoyen, gained a strong following un-til it was discontinued in 1772 owing to government intervention. By the late 1770 s, the school no longer existed. Quesnay died in 177  , and the bread riots preceding the Revolution did nothing to win converts to his policy of the bon prix. Attacks on his policy of a single tax by such diverse figures as Voltaire, Galiani, and Bonnot de Mably also contributed to the swift demise of Phys-iocracy. 4 Quesnay started life as a surgeon and was most inspired by the teachings of the medical school at the University of Leiden. His philosophical mentors were Hermann Boerhaave and Stephen Hales, but he was also influenced by French Economics in the Enlightenment 45 the iatrophysical tradition of Giovanni Borelli and Descartes (see Christensen 199  ; and Banzhaf 2000 ). Because he was responsible for a breakthrough in the process of bloodletting and achieved some success in curing smallpox, Quesnay was stationed at Versailles as médécin consultant du roi. He was also made a member of the Royal Academy and the Académie des Sciences, al-though he made little use of these a ffi liations. Commentators have portrayed Quesnay as more a practitioner blessed with brilliant insights than a full-fledged scholar. Nevertheless, his system drew directly on concepts in me-chanical philosophy and human physiology, thus suggesting a reasonable command of natural philosophy (see Banzhaf 2000 ). Quesnay’s early writings, notably his Essai phisique sur l’oeconomie ani-male ( 1736 ), explicitly addressed the “Author of Nature” and his set of univer-sal laws. Quesnay accepted the central elements of Cartesian mechanics but found the ether problematic. Ether was thought to be made of microscopic particles, but, because it was the source of vitality for all animal bodies, it could not be the seat of its own motion.

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  A History of Economic Thought in France

  Political Economy in the Age of Enlightenment

  • Gilbert Faccarello, Claire Silvant, Gilbert Faccarello, Claire Silvant(Authors)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  5 François Quesnay and Physiocracy

  Thierry Demals and Philippe Steiner

  DOI: 10.4324/9780429202414-5

  The current of thought called physiocracy is closely tied to the name of François Quesnay (1694–1774), a former surgeon, then physician, who turned self-taught economist in the middle of the eighteenth century. However, physiocracy cannot be limited to Quesnay himself since many authors gathered around him from the 1750s and into the 1760s: this group of devotees and disciples developed the economic and political ideas that were at the core of the physiocratic movement, in France and in many other European countries. At that time, these authors were known as the “économistes” or the “philosophes économistes”.

  1. Setting the stage

  The classical account of this movement can still be found in Georges Weulersse’s series of books, covering the movement’s history from the first papers written by Quesnay in the Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, to the first phase of the French Revolution (Weulersse 1910 , 1950 , 1959 , 1985 ). However, in this chapter, we focus on a shorter period of time: the two initial stages of the development of the school to which Loïc Charles and Christine Théré have recently drawn attention (2008, 2011, 2019).

  During the first stage, Quesnay was the key character in the sense that he personally encouraged other people to spread his own ideas, since as a member of the royal Court in Versailles – he was the personal physician of Madame de Pompadour, the favourite of King Louis XV – he thought it much better to publish his ideas under the name of other people. Quesnay created a “writing workshop” in which he explained his economic thinking to the members of his group and carefully supervised their writings. At this time, the group was small: Victor Riqueti (1715–1789), marquis de Mirabeau, Pierre Samuel Du Pont (1739–1817) and Louis-Paul Abeille (1719–1807); together with some contributors who were relatively minor, but important with regard to specific topics, such as husbandry (Henry Pattullo, 1725–1784) or calculation (Charles de Butré, 1724–1805). Pierre-Paul Le Mercier de la Rivière (1719–1801) joined this workshop after coming back from his Intendance in the French West Indies. During this first period, intellectual activity was limited and only a few texts were produced, mainly theoretical works: besides Quesnay’s own works on the various versions of the Tableau Économique (1758–60), the workshop produced Mirabeau’s books (Théorie de l’impôt, 1760, and Philosophie rurale, 1763 with an important contribution by Quesnay); Du Pont’s essay on the international grain trade (De l’importation et de l’exportation des grains, 1764); and Le Mercier de la Rivière’s book (L’ordre naturel et essentiel des sociétés politiques

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  French Predecessors of Malthus

  • Joseph J. Spengler(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter V Quesnay and the Physiocrats

  MEMBERS of the physiocratic school, whose doctrines were ascendant in the third quarter of the eighteenth century, were pre-eminent among French writers who emphasized the basic importance of agriculture, and the need of rehabilitating the French agriculture.1 Their economic doctrines have been described, on the one hand, as embodying the first unified, closed, and logical system of economic theory,2 the first complete doctrine of competition,3 an effective counterblast to mercantilist pecuniary doctrines,4 and the eighteenth-century emphasis upon the need to augment production;5 on the other hand, as constituting a rationalization, conscious or unconscious, of a set of commercial and fiscal policies especially suited to serve the interests of the rising bureaucratic and bourgeois landowning class.6

  I

  Whether or not the physiocrats developed their doctrines to protect the interests of landholding classes,7 the physiocratic population doctrines, in especial those of Quesnay,8 are understandable only in light of their conception of the nature of production and of the role of agriculture in mid-eighteenth-century France. Of the various possible types of useful and necessary economic activity, the physiocrats held only agriculture and fishing to be capable of yielding a net product, or net return above all operating expenses.9 Agriculture, the physiocrats believed, was the primary industry of France and the sole industry on which the economy of any large country could be founded;10 but they were convinced that it was in an exceedingly depressed state and was suffering in particular from a deficiency of capital and from a consequent dearth of labor.11 Quesnay supposed, as Landry infers,12 that the failure of the relatively high yield on capital invested in agriculture to attract enough capital to reduce this rate to parity with the rate of return obtainable in other industries was due to the lack of access of agriculture to the sources of capital.13 Therefore, he favored all conditions (consistent with competition)14 that tended to reduce the cost of production, especially in agriculture, or to elevate the demand for grain and increase its exchange value (e.g., freedom of trade in grain, in-as much as France, in his opinion, produced a surplus; the diversion of the income of the wealthy to the purchase of agricultural products; and the augmentation of the effective demand of the masses for provisions); for the increased sale value of agricultural products would swell the gross and net revenue of agriculture, increase the supply of capital available for investment in agriculture, and thus stimulate its development. In consequence of the increase in the gross and net revenue of agriculture, the demand for nonagricultural products would increase and bring about the very population growth which an agricultural surplus, such as then existed in France, was unable per se to bring about.15

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  Post-Keynesian Macroeconomics

  Essays in Honour of Ingrid Rima

  • Mathew Forstater, Gary Mongiovi, Steven Pressman(Authors)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  Part I Historical antecedents

  Passage contains an image

  2 François Quesnay

  The first Post Keynesian?*

  Steven Pressman

  Introduction

  The Presidential address that is given each year at the US History of Economics Society conference has focused frequently on the place of the history of economic thought in contemporary economics. These talks generally have bemoaned the fact that the history of thought has disappeared from the economics curriculum at both the undergraduate and the graduate levels. But they also have pointed out how the history of thought can contribute to contemporary economics, and thereby enhance its prestige in the profession. One potential contribution, identified in many Presidential addresses, is the ability to trace contemporary ideas back in history to important (or not so important) figures (see, for example, Walker, 1988; Vaughn, 1993; Moss, 1995).

  This chapter takes such an approach. It argues François Quesnay should be regarded as an important precursor of Post Keynesian economics. The case for this conclusion is quite straightforward. The Post Keynesian and the Physiocratic visions of how economies operate is remarkably similar; and on most important issues the economic model of Quesnay, the Tableau Économique, and the Post Keynesian macroeconomic model, are isomorphic.

  In what follows I examine three key areas in which Post Keynesian economics and Quesnayan economics overlap. Each is a central tenet of Post Keynesian economic analysis and each is a defining characteristic that distinguishes Post Keynesian macroeconomics from neoclassical macroeconomics. I argue that these three fundamental Post Keynesian ideas also appear in the economics of Quesnay and the Tableau Économique

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  Revolutionary Commerce

  Globalization and the French Monarchy

  • Paul Cheney(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Harvard University Press

    (Publisher)

  141 c h a p t e r 5 Physiocracy and the Politics of History B eginning in the 1750s, the French, according to Voltaire, began to “philosophize about grain,” and surely the most widely known and influential among these new philosophers of grain was court physi-cian to Louis XV, François Quesnay. After publishing a series of articles, including “FERMIERS” (1756) and “GRAINS” (1757), in Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie, Quesnay began to assemble a circle of disci-ples around him at Versailles who helped to clarify and publicize the master’s new doctrine. By 1758, with the publication of Quesnay’s Tableau Economique, the Physiocrats, or économistes as they were mainly known, advertised a bold, complete break with all previous ways of thinking about the economy. Their claim to novelty was not solely a function of their belief that the soil was the best guarantee of France’s prosperity; in the late seventeenth century, writers critical of Louis XIV, such as Sébas-tien Le Prestre Marquis de Vauban and Boisguillbert, had urged a re-newed emphasis on agriculture, and in the next century a group of im-provers known as the agronomes took this observation as the premise for a program of research and publicity about improved farming tech-niques. Instead, the Physiocrats insisted that it was their method that set them apart, because they were able to establish scientifically what had hitherto been a matter of mere conjecture and hence put key elements of 142 R e volu t ion a r y C om m e r c e their economic doctrine beyond dispute. Most salient among these doc-trines was, first, an insistence that only agriculture produced value; all other forms of economic activity, including manufacturing and trade, therefore, were derived from and should remain subordinate to this fun-damental activity.

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  Physicians and Political Economy

  Six Studies of the Work of Doctor Economists

  • Peter Groenewegen(Author)
  • 2001(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Quesnay, François (1983 [1756]) ‘Farmers’, trans. with an introduction by Peter Groenewegen, in P. Groenewegen, Reprints of Economic Classics, Ser. 2, No. 2, Sydney: Department of Economics, University of Sydney.

  Romance, M. G. H. de, Marquis des Mesmon (1888 [1775]) ‘Eloge de François Quesnay’, in A. Oncken (ed.), Oeuvres Économiques et Philosophiques de François Quesnay, reissued, New York, Burt Franklin, 73–114.

  Roth, Georges (ed.) (1955) Denis Diderot, Correspondence 1713–1757, Paris: Editions de minuit.

  Schumpeter, J. A. (1954) History of Economic Analysis, London: Allen and Unwin.

  Smith, Adam (1976 [1776]) An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

  Sournia, Jean-Charles (1994) ‘François Quesnay, chirurgien de 1718 à 1744’, Tricentinaire de naissance de François Quesnay, Versailles, June.

  Sutter, Jean (1958) ‘Quesnay et la médécine’,in François Quesnay et la Physiocratie,

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  Britain, Europe and EMU

  • W. Eltis(Author)
  • 2000(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  2 A similar situation prevailed in the market for meat in many cities. It was a central tenet of François Quesnay, the founder of the physiocratic school of économistes, that the market for food must be freed. This had also been the opinion of Jacques Vincent de Gournay, Intendant du Commerce from 1751 to 1758, who had created a school of young economists who sought to free markets and is the widely credited original author of advocacy of ‘laissez faire et laissez passer’. There was indeed a group of officials, economic writers and even government censors, 3 who regarded the freeing of food markets as a necessary and desirable reform. The advantage they perceived, and which the physiocrats sought to demonstrate through calculations based on Quesnay’s tableau, was that if farmers could sell their products in free markets, they would obtain higher prices for their food, especially if they were no longer obliged to sell to monopolistic companies. Farming would thereby become more profitable, and this would enable and encourage agri- cultural expansion. An expansion of food production would then enlarge agriculture’s economic surplus, the ultimate source of taxa- tion. 4 Higher tax revenues were desperately needed to solve the French government’s financial problems where debts proliferated and revenues fell far short of expenditures. Those who stood to lose from the freeing of agricultural markets included all those who benefited from the monopoly privileges which proliferated, while the reform of government finances would under- mine those who ran the ramshackle system of taxes and borrowing which Louis XVI had inherited. Turgot’s appointment as Controller-General of Finances initially appeared a new dawn to those who favoured reform.

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  Rethinking the Atlantic World

  Europe and America in the Age of Democratic Revolutions

  • Manuela Albertone, Antonino De Francesco, A. De Francesco(Authors)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  148 Marcel Dorigny the eighteenth century. The approach proposed here will be to analyse not only the texts of some of the major authors of the school, such as Mirabeau, Baudeau and Dupont de Nemours, but also some of the later, more marginal contributors, such as Turgot and Herrenschwand. The case of Condorcet, widely studied by others, will be left aside, but not without reminding the reader that his work on this subject summarized, practically all by itself, the quintessential doctrine of the school from its origins, even if he may have later distanced himself from this heritage. Three points of view will be examined. First, the condemnation of slavery as a violation of human rights and a danger for the colonies; second, the condemnation of slavery as an archaic form of labour; and third, how to end the system of slavery, which, despite the fact that it was continually condemned, was still a vigorous institution. A violation of human rights and a danger for the colonies If the Physiocrats were first and foremost economists, in the quasi- modern sense of the term, they were not detached from the overall analysis of human societies, which they conceived of as profoundly coherent and as subject to the independent laws of political regimes and the habits of the past, including its errors. Thus, before it was criti- cized from the perspective of economic usefulness, slavery was described in terms of the violence which fundamentally underlined it. Even before the birth of the Physiocratie, as formulated by Quesnay in 1758, Mirabeau had clearly condemned slavery on moral grounds, not only as it had been practised since the beginning of time, but especially the way it was practised by the Europeans in their colonies.

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  Philosophy of Mathematics and Economics

  • Thomas A. Boylan, Paschal F. O'Gorman(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  It was only later, with the extensive incorporation of mathematics into the economic academy in the twentieth century and to the fact that Cournot was arguably the writer that exerted the most profound in fl uence on Walras, that his contribution to the mathematisation of economics was duly acknowledged. The ‘ precursors ’ as represented by Isnard, Dupuit, Canard and Cournot within the accepted historiographic narrative were critical to maintaining the commitment to the values of Newtonian rational mechanics and the larger cultural ethos of the Enlightenment during the course of the nineteenth century even in the face of the formidable opposition which emerged against the project of mathematising the socio-economic realm. The French contribution, which we have concentrated on here for justi fi ed reasons of its centrality and sub-stantive contributions, could be said to have culminated in the work of Léon Walras (1834 – 1910) and his formulation of a mathematical theory of general equilibrium and its subsequent in fl uence in the twentieth century. In this Walras was ‘ standing on the shoulders of giants ’ , from his absorption and commitment to Newtonian rational mechanics as the normative paradigm for the analysis of the socio-economic system to the various insights provided by his ‘ precursors ’ , in particular Cournot. Mention must also be made of Walras ’ s successor at the University of Lausanne, Vilfredo Pareto (1848 – 1923), a Frenchman by birth but raised in Italy. Pareto, like Walras, was also imbued with the commitment to the mechanical framework as the correct framework to further the analysis of the socio-economic domain and in particular to ground it in a theory of equilibrium using methods and techniques of the physico-mathematical sciences.

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