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Leighton Library has 1764 edition of "Philosophie rurale ou Économie générale et politique de l'agriculture" by FrVictor de Riqueti, marquis de Mirabeau & François Quesnay
Added at 07:53 on 04 June 2025
The Leighton Library has a 1764 edition of "Philosophie rurale ou Économie générale et politique de l'agriculture" by French economist and educator Victor de Riqueti, marquis de Mirabeau, and French economist and physician François Quesnay (born #OnThisDay 4 June 1694).
This included Quesnay’s “Tableau économique” which he’d published previously, which contained the first schematic account, a zig-zag diagram, of the intertwined processes of production, distribution, and disposition of the riches of an entire nation, a circular flow diagram of the economy that showed who produced what and who spent what, in an attempt to understand and explain the causes of growth. He defined three classes: landowners, farmers, and others (who he called “sterile” classes, consuming everything they produce, and leaving no surplus for the next period).
Quesnay believed that only the agricultural sector could produce a surplus that could then be used to produce more the next year, and therefore help growth in industry and manufacturing. Mirabeau had compared the importance of the Quesnay’s Tableau to that of the discovery of fire and the wheel, and many years later Karl Marx called it the “most brilliant idea” of political economy up until then.
Quesnay conceived the process of production as a circular flow. He was the leading figure of the Physiocrats (considered to be the first school of economic thinking) who believed that an economy’s power derived from its agricultural sector. They wanted the government of Louis XV of France to reduce taxes on French agriculture, getting rid of tolls and other regulations that prevented trade within France.
