The Physiocrats Six Lectures on the French Économistes of the 18th Century Henry Higgs Batoche Books Kitchener 2001 First Edition: The Macmillan Company, 1897 This Edition: Batoche Books Limited 52 Eby Street South Kitchener, Ontario N2G 3L1 Canada email: [email protected] ISBN: 1-55273-064-6 Contents Preface ............................................................................................... 5 I: Rise of the School. .......................................................................... 6 II: The School and Its Doctrines. ..................................................... 17 III: The School and Its Doctrines (contd.) ....................................... 29 IV: Activities of the School. ............................................................. 43 V: Opponents of the School. ............................................................ 55 VI: Influence of the School. ............................................................. 66 Appendix .......................................................................................... 77 Authorities ....................................................................................... 80 Notes ................................................................................................ 82 Preface This little volume consists of lectures delivered before the London School of Economics in May and June of the present year. Impossible though it was found to give a truly adequate account of the Physiocrats in these six lectures, it has been thought that they may perhaps furnish a useful introduction to a subject upon which no book has yet been written in the English language, though its study has, during the last seven years, been deemed worthy to engage the active attention of many leading econo- mists on the Continent of Europe. In Switzerland, Professor Oncken of Berne, and Professor Stern of Zurich; in Germany, Professor Knies of Heidelberg, and Professor Hasbach of Kiel; in France, M. Schelle; in Austria, Dr. Bauer of Brunn, and Dr. Feilbogen of Vienna, are the most noteworthy recent contributors to our knowledge of this important chapter of economic theory. More hesitation would have been felt in publishing these lectures if M. de Lavergne’s charming essays on the French econo- mists of the eighteenth century had been translated into English. But the materials brought to light since 1870 by the researches of Professor Oncken, and the brilliant discoveries of Dr. Bauer, would have made it necessary to bring his work up to date, while it is evident that in choos- ing the subjects for his cabinet of cameos Lavergne was influenced rather by the fact that two of them (the Abbé de St. Pierre and the Marquis de Chastellux) were once, like himself, members of the French Academy, than by their intrinsic importance as economists, while they cannot, in any case, be ranked among the Physiocrats. The French writer’s ex- ample has been followed in the effort to make the lectures interesting. To this end gleanings of research and minuter points of difference among authorities have been deliberately sacrificed where they appeared to be of secondary importance. For the same reason critical and doctrinal 6/Henry Higgs comment has been restricted within the narrowest limits. The reader who desires fuller information will turn to the monographs mentioned in the lectures, and, above all, it is hoped, to the original works of the Physiocrats themselves. HAMPSTEAD, LONDON, 1896. I: Rise of the School. The Physiocrats have been the subjects of so many and such divergent appreciations by historians, philosophers, economists, and students of political science, that hardly a single general proposition of importance has been advanced with regard to them by one writer which has not been contradicted by another. To de Tocqueville they were doctrinaire advo- cates of absolute equality. To Rousseau they were the supporters of an odious, if “legal,” despotism. To Professor Cohn they are, in their main proposals, “thoroughly socialistic.” To Louis Blanc they were tainted with a bourgeois individualism. To Linguet their mystic jargon was charlatanical nonsense, not to be understood even by themselves. To Voltaire it was so clear as to be made easily comprehensible (and ridicu- lous) to the meanest intelligence. To Taine, as to many others, they made powerfully for revolution. To Carlyle, who speaks ironically of “victo- rious analysis” and scornfully of “rose-pink sentimentalism,” they seem to have been a mere literary ripple on the surface of the great flood. Rossi praised them for conceiving a vast synthesis of social organisation; certain writers, like Mably, have blamed them for a narrow material- ism; while there are judges who pronounce them markedly deistic. To Proudhon their system of taxation was a rare Utopia; to others they lack an ideal of any kind. They were to de Loménie a bundle of contradic- tions— at once monarchical and democratic, half-socialist and highly conservative. To Adam Smith their “system, with all its imperfections, is perhaps the nearest approximation to the truth that has yet been pub- lished upon the subject of political economy, and is, upon that account, well worth the consideration of every man who wishes to examine with attention the principles of that very important science.” To many com- pilers of little text-books, who know better than Adam Smith, they are merely people who lived in the dark ages before 1776, and held some absurd opinions about land. To some they appear to have had a transi- tory success followed by complete and lasting reaction. To Léon Say their principles, after suffering reverses in the eighteenth century, have dominated the nineteenth. Of many serious writers these, anxious for The Physiocrates/7 precedent, have appealed to their authority in support of their own views; those, striving after originality, have been eager to prove that the point which they seek to emphasise was really missed by the Physiocrats; and the great majority of authors have been content to follow the well-worn phrases of one predecessor or another without direct reference” to the writings of the old economists themselves. Probably no man alive has read the whole published works of, say, the Marquis of Mirabeau—to mention only a single member of the school. And happily no one is obliged to do so. When we have once mastered their doctrines we are dispensed from following the prolix repetitions and tedious amplifica- tions which make up nine-tenths of their literary activity. Yet this mas- tery is essential to a due acquaintance with the history of economic theory. For the Physiocrats were the first scientific school of political economy. The Mercantilists, it is true, come first in order of time, but they are not in any proper sense of the term “a school” at all. There is no per- sonal link between the different writers who, for more than a century, support what is called “the mercantile system”—an indiscriminate phrase covering proposals so different that their authors can only be said to have had a common tendency and not a common doctrine any more than a common acquaintance. But in the Physiocrats we see an alliance of persons, a community of ideas, an acknowledged authority, and a com- bination in purpose, which banded them into a society apart. To this personal tie, Turgot, the great lover of individual liberty in thought and deed, took grave objection. “It is the sectarian spirit,” he says, “which arouses against useful truths enemies and persecutions. When an iso- lated person modestly proposes what he believes to be the truth, he is listened to if he is right, and forgotten if he is wrong. But when even learned men have once formed themselves into a body, and say we, and think they can impose laws upon public opinion, then public opinion revolts against them, and with justice, for it ought to receive laws from truth alone and not from any authority. Every society soon sees its badge worn by the stupid, the crack-brained, and the ignorant, proud in joining themselves to it to give themselves airs. These people are guilty of stu- pidities and absurdities, and then their excited opponents fail not to im- pute folly to all their colleagues.” Turgot refused to wear their intellec- tual badge, but, as we shall see, he shared many of their ideas. The Physiocrats were not merely a school of economic thought; they were a school of political action. Kings and princes were among 8/Henry Higgs their pupils. The great French Revolution itself was influenced by their writings. And the force of their work is still not wholly spent. But before the origin and significance of their writings can be appreciated it is necessary briefly to sketch the circumstances of their time in relation to which their ideas must be considered. The economic and financial condition of France at the beginning of the eighteenth century was truly pitiable. In spite of her great natural resources, the variety of her favourable climates, the fertility of her well-watered soil, and the thrift, industry, and intelligence of her people, the efforts of able ministers like Mazarin and Colbert to increase her national wealth had been rendered nugatory by the senseless politics of the Great Monarch. Costly campaigns abroad, ruinous extravagance at home, left the kingdom at his death, in 1715, with a debt of 3460 million francs, of which over 3300 had been contracted since the death of Colbert in 1683. His murderous wars, reducing the birth-rate, increasing the mortality, and “an act of religious