Abstract
Few aspects of the history of economic analysis enjoy such a clear-cut and unquestioned interpretation as physiocracy.1 The major elements chosen for praise are usually Quesnay’s concept of net product, his study of the physical characteristics of capital — the different types of advances — and the presentation of a general description of the economy as a model of reproduction. Most of these features were remarked upon by Marx in the Theories of Surplus Value (see Marx, 1963, vol. I, pp. 308–10, and the rest of ch. 6), and in a chapter which he wrote for Engels’ Anti-Dühring (see Engels, 1878, pp. 268–77). More recently, the physiocrats have been praised for being ‘the first to proclaim the doctrine of free-trade’ (Marshall, 1890, p. 625), for having anticipated a general equilibrium system (see Schumpeter, 1954, p. 242) and, above all, for the first use in economics of a rough input-output table (see Phillips, 1955, pp. 137–8; Leontief, 1951, p. 9; Maital, 1972, p. 505).
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Notes and References
Schmalz’s Economie Politique, ouvrage traduit de l’allemand par Henry Jouffroy, vol. 1, Paris 1826 (see ibid., pp. 308, 484). On Marx’s study of the Analyse see Kuczynski, 1976, vol. II, pp. 73–5.
In Meek, 1962, The Economics of Physiocracy, pp. 364–98.
Among the authors who have taken this approach to Physiocracy one must include Meek, with his essay ‘Ideas, events and environment — the case of the French Physiocrats’, in Eagly, 1968.
A great stimulus to the study of physiocracy was also provided by publication, in 1955, of Phillips’ article ‘The Tableau Economique as a Simple Leontief Model’.
See for instance Walsh and Gram, 1980, Classical and Neo-classical Theories of General Equilibrium; and Sraffa, 1960, pp. 93–5.
See Bénard, 1958, pp. 110–11. In the Theories of Surplus Value Marx characterises Quesnay as the first economist who ‘transferred the inquiry into the origin of surplus-value from the sphere of circulation into the sphere of direct production’ (Marx, 1963, vol. I, p. 45). On the question of Quesnay’s emphasis on the process of production of commodities see also Molinier 1958a, p. 48; Zangheri, 1966, pp. xxi, xxix.
According to this view the Tableau Economique resembles the corn economy of d Ricardo’s Essay on Profits (see Ricardo 1815, pp. 1ff.). The full title is An Essay on the Influence of a low Price of Com on the Profits of Stocks.
Professor Meek has provided a long and detailed analysis of the concept of ‘mode of subsistence’ in eighteenth-century literature (see Meek, 1976, Ch. I).
On the question of Quesnay’s attitude to natural right, see also the chapter entitled ‘La liberté’ in Essay physique sur l’oeconomie animale (1736, in Oncken, 1888, pp. 47ff.) and Part III of De l’immortalité de l’ âme (ibid., pp. 758ff.).
In the Analyse du Gouvernement des Incas du Pérou Quesnay says that the Tableau describes ‘a proper order of government’ (I.N.E.D., 1958, vol. II, p. 915).
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© 1987 Giovanni Vaggi
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Vaggi, G. (1987). A Reinterpretation of Physiocracy. In: The Economics of François Quesnay. Studies in Political Economy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-09096-9_1
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