The Physiocrats and the World of the Enlightenment

Offers a framework for understanding physiocratic theory and the development of modern economics.

Liana Vardi (Author)

9781107681408, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 2 January 2014

324 pages, 5 b/w illus.
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.9 cm, 0.48 kg

'In this important and original study, Liana Vardi goes beyond the economic and political theories of the Physiocrats to probe the group's underlying philosophical, epistemological, and 'aesthetic' assumptions. With remarkable erudition, she examines and integrates virtually all of the writings of the principal theorists of the school - even those writings with little or no bearing on economic doctrine. She thus offers fascinating reflections on how their intellectual and life experiences influenced their understanding of the eighteenth-century world in which they lived.' Timothy Tackett, University of California, Irvine

Physiocrats believed that wealth came exclusively from the land, that nature was fecund and man could harness its reproductive forces. Capital investments in agriculture and hard work would create profits that circulated to other sectors and supported all social institutions. Physiocracy, which originated in late eighteenth-century France, is therefore widely considered a forerunner of modern economic theory. This book places the Physiocrats in context by inscribing economic theory within broader Enlightenment culture. Liana Vardi discusses three theorists - Francois Quesnay; Victor Riquetti, marquis de Mirabeau; and Pierre Samuel Du Pont de Nemours - and shows how their understanding of mental processes, science, politics and the arts influenced their individual approach to economic writing. The difficulty in explaining the doctrine, combined with the expectation that the public would be persuaded by its arguments, mired physiocracy in endless contradictions. This work offers a framework for understanding physiocratic theory and its complicated relation to modern economics.

1. Art, craft, and court
2. The ways of the mind
3. The ways of the heart
4. A delicate balance
5. Representative assemblies
6. The journalist
7. The education of princes
8. Changing the world.

Subject Areas: Economic history [KCZ], History of ideas [JFCX], European history [HBJD]