The Physiocrats and the World of the Enlightenment
Abstract
The 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. The Physiocrats and the World of the Enlightenment 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.
... However, the Spanish Crown never attempted to take the "protoliberal" reforms applied to collective properties in Spain (1750-1790) to the Andes, given the treasury's enormous dependency on communal fiscal loyalty and to avoid more rural unrest (Jacobsen 1997). In the meantime, the French Revolution helped to spread new ideas around land and property, particularly those of the physiocrats regarding the under-or misuse of communal lands (Vardi 2012). In Spain, these ideas translated into the 1813 decree of the Cortes de Cádiz (the Spanish Assembly during French occupation), which ordered to reduce all vacant and crown lands to private property. ...
This article develops a historicising and comparative perspective on the transformation, formalisation, and negotiation of collective land rights in the Andean Highlands. It discusses and compares the trajectories of two highland areas situated across the Bolivian-Chilean border within the context of globally and nationally shifting frontiers of market and state integration since the late 19th century. The case studies demonstrate a striking divergence in the context of the breakthrough of liberal land legislation in Latin America. Communities in the Bolivian province of Carangas were able to resist privatising pressures, while communities of the Arica highlands, once annexed and incorporated in Chile after the War of the Pacific, adjusted to a more homogeneous regime that left little room for communal land relations. Despite the stark contrasts, this article questions simplistic dichotomic framings of the unchallenged “survival” of communal land rights in Bolivia versus complete “disappearance” of communal arrangements in Chile. Empirical archival and ethnographic data point to the social reconfigurations and creative strategies through which the community as a collective legal entity and daily practice transformed. The article sheds light on the causes and longer-term implications of these regional trajectories within the context of a globalising land regime.
... Writers from Cobbett to Orwell, took a wide view of culture, not just its pinnacles, and the importance of basic economic needs for all to establish their imagination. Mirabeau (1750's) [154] emphasised that the newly minted term civilisation was not about superficial politeness or civility but had a moral dimension and should allow all to flourish -and be judged in a local context, rather than "civilising missions" used to emphasise the superiority and justice of their own empire. Food was key to-"humanization" and should not be supplied just to avoid more revolts "bellum servile. ...
Pellagra is caused by a diet with little meat or milk and a reliance on maize. Pellagrins suffer from poor cognitive and social skills. Pellagra was cured with nicotinamide (vitamin B3) but before that pellagrins were considered inferior and dangerous degenerates and were known as the “Butterfly Caste” after the characteristic sunburn rash. Quests for meat drove the diaspora “out of Africa” with meat sharing being the social norm. After the domestication of animals “meat elites” across classes, castes, sexes and continents emerged. Nomads migrating to northern Europe created mixed pastoralist-farmer populations whose fermentation cultures and genetic innovations allowed lactose tolerance. Skin lightened as sunlight, needed to synthesise vitamin D. and sunburn was rare. Conquests encouraged their view that they were a superior race rather than that they were blessed with a superior diet. Ruling classes on a high meat diet combined forces with cereal dependant workers (with higher fertility) whilst the “lumpenproletariat” were economic vegetarians. Social contracts broke down with rebellions, but slaves, oppressed sharecroppers and refugees bore and bear the brunt of (subclinical)pellagra often in ex-colonial subjects—to whom dietary reparations could bridge international inequality gaps.
... Concepts on the "Biopower and Biopolitical" uses of diet can be dated back to Aristotle and Plato and elaborated on by Foucault and followers. Omnivorous diets for all as a prerequisite tailwind for firing on all body and brain cylinders neverthelessis rarely heralded (even by neurologists or psychiatrists) and even then the links between the "Grand Transitions" involving demographics, economics and epidemiology and the "Mega-threats" of pandemics and climate change are rarely made at a diet-metabolic level [1][2][3][4][5][6][7]. ...
North-South variation in the supply of meat has always been present. Sharing of meat was the rule but in the multi-centric Neolithic revolution when domestication of animals and plants co-evolved class differences became pronounced-aristocrats and inferior proletariats and “lesser breeds and lower orders” started to form. The distribution of natural domesticates was uneven with the near-east and a temperate band across Europe well off compared with Africa and the Americas. The Columbian exchange changed this as meat became abundant in the New World who then exported to Europe. Wars, expropriations and genocides were over the meat supply and acquiring pastureland or water. Colonial plantation profits paid for meat imports from “settler colonies” indigenous or poor peoples on low meat pro-pellagrous diets were considered inferior whatever their colour and had poorer health and life expectancy. Attempts to correct hunger in the resultant ramshackle “Third world” concentrated on calories fuelling population booms and busts and delaying demographic, epidemiological and economic transitions. High meat variances are narrowing in China and Asia but need help elsewhere in the South. Dangers of not developing with a safe and sufficient meat supply include the emergence of zoonoses and mass migration. Reparations, rehabilitation and rejuvenation should concentrate on reconstituting a meat commons giving us a shot at redemption and survival.
... The physiocrats of the 18th century, for example, focused on land as the primary and, indeed, only source of value (Hubacek and Bergh, 2006). Their concept of economic productivity was inseparable from the available natural elements of sun, soil, water, etc., largely considered part of a divine power, that allowed life to flourish (Vardi, 2012). Man produced nothing, but was capable of actively utilizing the already existing wealth provided by nature in the form of food, fuel, fiber, water and minerals to secure basic needs, and manufacture commodities using surplus. ...
This thesis builds upon the emerging field of "ecological macroeconomics" to study how dominant development patterns are constituted by and reproduce global inequalities and environmental degradation. Chapter 2 reviews and categorizes the available literature in ecological macroeconomics, noting its contributions to studying economy-environment dynamics. Chapter 3 critically assesses the ecological macroeconomics framework. It is argued that the field can better analyze environmental challenges by considering nature as inherently political: human-nature relations are regulated through social conflicts in ways that benefit some groups over others. This approach is applied in chapter 4, which uses a "Core-Periphery" (balance-ofpayments constrained growth) model to explore how global environmental inequalities are produced by 'green' sustainability initiatives. The increasing efficiency within a high-income Core region is shown to depend on displacing carbon-intensive activities to the low-income Periphery. Chapter 5 then extends the analysis to understand financialization, presented here as a global dynamic of environmental (re- )organization that supports accumulation in the Core at the expense of social and environmental stability in the Periphery. This dynamic is permitted by the subordination of Peripheral countries within the organization of global monetary, productive and environmental relations. Chapter 6 summarizes and concludes. The evidence presented throughout the thesis signal that for ecological macroeconomics to address contemporary challenges, it must adopt a political view of nature
... Notes Académiques de l'Académie d'agriculture de France Academic Notes from the French Academy of Agriculture (N3AF) Acte de colloque theories: kameralists in Germany, much concerned with economy and finances, illustrados, the liberal agrarians in Spain, physiocrats in France who gained a wide audience across Europe and America between 1755 and 1770 (Steiner, 1998;Vardi, 2012). The physiocrats' theory was also philosophical and put forward the idea of a "natural order", which enjoined governments to respect liberty and property. ...
When did Science and Agriculture begin to be linked together? This paper posits that scientific research was first involved in agricultural progress in the eighteenth century when a new context increased the value of agriculture which, beyond its source of vital supplies to the population, became also the main source of wealth for a nation. Hence governments asked for scientific methods to solve agricultural problems and encouraged the creation of agricultural societies aiming at the dissemination of achievements. At the beginning members of agricultural societies were mainly noble landowners; progressively scientists who were also members of academies of sciences were enrolled. Agricultural societies first thought about changing agrarian structures as the way to progress. After the French Revolution that achieved reforms, their works were dedicated to improving tools efficiency and soil fertility. It was the time of experiments by landowners who also tried to disseminate their results. In the 1840s, chemistry gradually subjected agronomy to its authority. From that time on, agricultural academies could claim to be a relay in disseminating scientific research.
... The physiocrats of the 18th century, for example, focused on land as the primary and, indeed, only source of value (Hubacek and Bergh, 2006). Their concept of economic productivity was inseparable from the available natural elements of sun, soil, water, etc., largely considered part of a divine power, that allowed life to flourish (Vardi, 2012). Man produced nothing, but was capable of actively utilizing the already existing wealth provided by nature in the form of food, fuel, fiber, water and minerals to secure basic needs, and manufacture commodities using surplus. ...
Cette thèse s’appuie sur le domaine émergent de la « macroéconomie écologique » pour étudier la manière dont les modèles dominants de développement sont la source d’inégalités mondiales et de dégrada- tion de l’environnement tout autant qu’ils en résultent. Le chapitre 2 propose une revue de la littérature sur la macroéconomie écolo- gique, et répertorie cinq thématiques à travers lesquelles elle contri- bue à la compréhension des dynamiques économie-environnement. Le chapitre 3 procède ensuite à une évaluation critique du cadre de la macroéconomie écologique, fondée sur l’idée qu’une analyse ri- goureuse des défis environnementaux requiert d’appréhender la na- ture comme intrinsèquement politique et organisée par des conflits sociaux. Cette approche est mise en pratique dans le chapitre 4, qui utilise un modèle « Centre-Périphérie » (croissance contrainte par la balance des paiements) pour étudier la manière dont les inégalités environnementales mondiales peuvent être renforcées par la transi- tion vers une économie « verte ». En particulier, l’augmentation de l’efficacité énergétique et environnementale au « Centre » (pays à re- venu élevé) dépend de la délocalisation des activités à forte intensité de carbone dans la Périphérie (pays à revenu faible). Le chapitre 5 élargit l’analyse en abordant la thématique de la financiarisation via le cadre théorique de cette thèse. La financiarisation peut alors être comprise comme une dynamique mondiale de (ré)organisation envi- ronnementale, soutenant l’accumulation dans le Centre au détriment de la stabilité sociale et environnementale dans la Périphérie. Cette dynamique est permise par la subordination des pays de la Périphérie dans l’organisation des relations monétaires, productives et environ- nementales mondiales. Le chapitre 6 résume et conclut. Les éléments présentés tout au long de la thèse signalent que pour être en mesure de relever les défis actuels, la macroéconomie écologique se doit de développer une vision politique de la nature.
... Зародження ідей транзитивності, або наявності в історичній площині проміжних та перехідних етапів (станів), виокремлюється вже у ХVІІІ ст. в роботах А. Тюрго, А. Фергюсона, M. Кондорсе [590]. ...
Монографію присвячено теоретичним, методологічним та прикладним засадам функціонування та розвитку національної туристичної системи (НТС). На основі узагальнення ґенези НТС визначено її як соціально-економічну систему, сформовано концептуальні засади та доведено транзитивність її розвитку. Розкрито детермінанти формування національної туристичної системи та запропоновано методологічний базис управління нею. Науково обґрунтовано глобальне портфоліо НТС, визначено важелі конкурентоспроможності, інвестиційної привабливості, запропоновано портфель параметрів для оцінки її результативності. На основі методології форсайту обґрунтовано структурні пріоритети розвитку національної туристичної системи, надано праксеологічні рекомендації щодо інклюзивного зростання та імплементації краудфандингових технологій у процес розвитку НТС. Призначено для науковців, викладачів, керівників і працівників туристичної сфери та тих, хто цікавиться питаннями розвитку туризму, а також дослідників, які вивчають науковий потенціал національної туристичної системи.
... At the same time, however, they were engaged in fierce debates with opposing views of economy, state, and society. In these debates, the theory of value was mobilized as a weapon of social change, which is why it was called political economy (Varney 2012;Farber 2006). ...
Of all the domains of Marxian political economy, nature is by far the most vexing. Is nature an economic input as in the notion of natural resources; is it the object of labor in the process of production; or is something broader, as in the idea of land and the territory upon which capitalism develops? Such questions rest on a conception of extra-human nature, but some have argued that because people are part of nature, then resources, labor and conditions of production include the social integument of built environments, levels of education, and the work of families. But does this go far enough? Perhaps capitalism should be thought of as a " life process " that unfolds within the web of life? This essay grows out of this long conversation around the relations of nature and capital, and it takes shape out of our conviction that political economy has too often taken a back seat to larger musings in which philosophy has been foregrounded and economic theory treated as derivative rather than requiring addition argumentation. This tendency has at times discouraged a clear analytical reckoning with the fundamentals of Marxian theory such as capital accumulation, the labor process, commodity circulation and the theory of value. Our purpose here is to elaborate a model of capital-in-nature outlined in Capitalism in the Web of Life, but which remains preliminary.
... 58 Like his friend Bertin, Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot (1727-1781) was a notable physiocratic supporter. 59 He once addressed a long list of questions about China to two Chinese Christians who, having resided in France for some ten years, were about to leave for China in January 1765. The first and also largest group of the questions deal with wealth, land, and agriculture, which, as John Finlay argues, partly reflect Turgot's consideration of European economic models of 'agriculture as the ultimate source of wealth'. ...
The French Jesuit missionary Pierre-Martial Cibot stood conspicuous in Sino-European exchange of natural knowledge. However, his exploratory research on Chinese fungi, which is significant to the body of mycological knowledge, remains largely undiscussed and needs to be reappraised in the cross-cultural and historical context. Drawing on Cibot’s 1770s writings on Chinese fungi, this article provides a microhistorical treatment of their intricate interactions with late 18th- and 19th-century scientific scholarship. Cibot was arguably the author who wrote the first scientific treatise in China on local fungal species. His Christian faith and European epistemic base occasioned tensions with the acculturation of nature in China, which, together with his concerns with European natural history, agriculture and medicine, led to his critical appropriation of Chinese fungus lore. The writings were not published without change. Cibot's findings about Chinese fungi, mingled with confusion, also circulated unevenly in the European world. Nevertheless, they inspired new scientific studies, engaged with practical concerns, and even aided humanities research. Cibot's efforts highlight the agency of a multitude of border-crossing actors beyond European scientific centres, and invite a broader historical framework for understanding the making of modern mycology as a global enterprise.
... 74 Between 1783 and 1789, Saint-Domingue nearly doubled its production and yielded almost 50 percent of the 68 Ibid. See also Vardi (2012). 69 Cheney (2017), p. 43. ...
This paper critically engages with the recent literature on capitalism and slavery through the lens of Saint-Domingue. The first section examines some of the socio-economic dynamics in 16th- to 18th-century France. This is followed by an examination of Saint-Domingue’s allocation of tropical commodities, including the island’s role in the emerging world economy. There then follows a comprehensive definition of capitalism and a short outline of historical capitalisms in Europe. The centerpiece of the article scrutinizes non-capitalist, semi-capitalist, early industrial and transitional features, in short, the hybrid socio-economic formation of this French slave plantation colony. Finally, a basic economic classification of modern plantation slave labour is proposed.
... Extra amylases (to digest starches), and lactase persistence and milk, bread and beer fermentation produce are subsequent genetic and cultural co-evolutions. This period was culturally, with the origins of science and music [66] and metabolically affluent with the sort of joined-up thinking that later influenced the physiocrats [67][68][69]. The advent of cooking and life of yeasts added to this metabolic thread -now lost and needing a new social contract [70][71][72][73]. ...
We evolved from herbivores to a meat eating "commons" in hunter-gatherer days and then to a non-egalitarian meat power struggle between classes and countries. Egalitarian-ism, trans-egalitarianism and extremes of inequality and hierarchy revolve around the fair-unfair distribution of meat surpluses and ownership of the means of meat production. Poor people on poor diets with too few micronutrients may explain many inequalities of human capital, height and health and divergent development of individuals and nations. Learning from past successes and collapses from switching trophic levels the lesson is that meat moderation toward the top of Engel's curves, not calorie-centrism, is the best recipe for countries and classes. Improved health with longer lives and higher crystallised intelligence comes with an ample supply of micro-nutrients from animal products namely iron, zinc, vitamin A, vitamin B12 and other methyl-donors (such as choline), and nicotinamide (vitamin B3). We concentrate on nicotinamide whose deficits cause the degenerative condition pellagra that manifests as poor emotional and degenerative cognitive states with stunted lives and complex antisocial and dysbiotic effects caused by and causing poverty.
... Income flowed from one sector to other. Based on Quesnay's analysis, it was argued that a "natural state" of the economy emerged when these income flows were in a state of "balance" (Vardi, 2012). There was balance of from one sector to other without expansion of contraction. ...
The General equilibrium theory tries to show how and why all free markets tend toward equilibrium in the long run. However, what is meant by equilibrium in this paper is more from a thermodynamical point of view. In order to understand the actual situation, it is necessary to study open systems which are complex. In physics, such a behavior in a complex system can be explain by using Non Equilibrium Thermodynamics. A system is able to self-organize and sustain itself away from equilibrium. Economic systems may fluctuate around a particular point. To sustain it far from the equilibrium state, it needs to degrade more energy and materials. In this study, the energy consumption patterns of Sri Lanka and USA are discussed. The pattern concerning Sri Lanka is close to the model proposed here, whereas the energy consumption pattern of USA is more complicated due to external factors.
... Although French economist François Quesnay can be regarded as the father of economics for being the first person to develop a mathematical model of the economy, most people take Scottish economist Adam Smith to be the father of the discipline. Quesnay saw individual behavior as determined primarily by one's class, and he saw individuals within each class acting in similar ways (Pressman 1994;Vardi 2012). This was due to both social and habitual factors. ...
... Although French economist François Quesnay can be regarded as the father of economics for being the first person to develop a mathematical model of the economy, most people take Scottish economist Adam Smith to be the father of the discipline. Quesnay saw individual behavior as determined primarily by one's class, and he saw individuals within each class acting in similar ways (Pressman 1994;Vardi 2012). This was due to both social and habitual factors. ...
... The Tableau "can be seen as a transposition of the principles of Cartesian physics in the field of economic analysis" (Diemer and Guillemin 2013, p. 36). 21 On the evolution of the Physiocratic movement, see: Higgs (1897); Schelle (1907); Weulersse (1910); Fox-Genovese (1976); Vaggi (1987); and Vardi (2012). 22 Some recent literature has greatly reduced, if not entirely eliminated, the rationalist Cartesian legacy on Quesnay's School, emphasizing other intellectual influences. ...
The evolution of Ferdinando Galiani’s thought toward social mathematic has been neglected by scholars, and his attempt to establish political arguments on the analytical basis remains unexplored. The non-systematic nature of Galiani’s intuitions, due to his laziness, largely justifies this underestimation of his scientific program. This paper intends to show that the mature abbé Galiani follows an intellectual itinerary autonomous and parallel to that followed by Marquis de Condorcet in the same years. The anti-Physiocratique querelle represents Galiani’s methodological maturation. In contrast with Physiocratic economic doctrine, based on the primacy of deductive methodology, Galiani claims for economic science the realism of circumstance against aprioristic axiomatic hypotheses and rationalist generalizations. Galiani’s project, substantially similar to Marquis de Condorcet’s approach to social science, can be defined as Newtonian social mathematics opposed to Physiocratic Cartesian social mathematics.
... 23 Dakle, i kod Restija nalazimo odjeke fiziokratizma i drugih reformističkih pokreta starog režima u poljoprivredi, koji su se u zapadnoj Europi, posebno u Engleskoj, suprotstavljali merkantilizmu. 24 Te su ideje bile osobito dobro primljene među aristokracijom koja se već nekoliko stoljeća odvajala od trgovine i priklanjala zemljoposjedu. Pokret protiv merkantilizma pridonosio je vlasteoskom stilu života -povlačenju na ladanje i život od prihoda s imanja i rente. ...
The macro-financial stability of the state is a priority for the country under any conditions. It is important to constantly monitor the balance of the state's external and internal obligations with a vector for independent accumulation of financial resources. The dynamics of revenue and expenditure indicators of the state and local budgets of Ukraine were analyzed. The analysis of the budget deficit indicator as one of the key indicators of the macro-financial stability of the state, which is marked by a negative trend, was carried out. The need to attract one's own financial resources to cover existing budget deficits was noted. Ukraine's sovereignty in the conditions of globalization and constant instability of socio-economic processes also requires forming a fiscal policy focused on its financial resources. Under such conditions, creating partnership relations between the state and business entities within the sustainable development goal "Partnership for sustainable development" becomes effective. Within this goal, the author examines the possibility of balancing the state's interests to ensure the state's macro-financial stability and implement the new tax regime of Diia City. The critical aspects of this regime are reducing the tax burden on business entities and creating investment attractiveness for potential investors. The identified advantages and disadvantages of the specified tax regime prove the necessity of partnership for sustainable development. The author describes the characteristics of the change in the tax rate on the income of individuals compared to residents of Diia City and taxpayers who are on the general taxation system. It has been confirmed that the personal income tax has the heaviest share among direct taxes. The structure of this tax is analyzed in terms of taxation objects, and the delayed effect of implementing the Diia City tax regime is noted. The further need for constant monitoring of the impact of the new tax regime on economic entities and its fiscal and investment feasibility in ensuring the macro-financial stability of the state was determined.
Modern çağda insan, diğer üretim ögeleri gibi atomize edilerek makineleştirilmek istenmekte ve bu sayede nitel varlığı niceliksel olarak beşere indirgenmeye çalışılmaktadır. Dolayısıyla kültürel olarak kökü kendine ait olmayan yeni devşirme kavramlar insanı öz değerlerine yabancılaştırmakta ve kişilerde anlam karmaşasına neden olmaktadır. Bu husus sosyal bir disiplin olan yönetim bilimine de sirayet ederek kavramsal bir sorun haline gelmektedir. Belli bir amacı gerçekleştirebilmek için insanların sistemli bir şekilde sevk ve idare edilebilmesi olarak tanımlanan yönetim kavramı, farklı tarihsel dönemlerde çeşitli düşünce ekolleri tarafından irdelenmiştir. Bu kavramın tarihsel izi sürüldüğünde geçmişinin insanlık tarihi kadar eski olduğu bilinmesine rağmen bilimsel bir disiplin olarak kabul edilmesi 20. yüzyılın başlarına denk gelmektedir. Yönetim, Frederick Winslow Taylor’un çabalarıyla sübjektif bir kavram olmaktan sıyrılarak gözlemlenebilen, ölçülebilen, eleştirilebilen sistemli bir yapıya kavuşmuş ve bilimsel bir disiplin olarak kabul edilmiştir. Yönetim disiplininin nirengi noktası olarak kabul edilen bu gelişmeyle birlikte nitelikli iş gücünün farkına varılmış ve dolayısıyla insan, kıymetli bir sermaye unsuru olarak tanımlanmıştır. Nitel araştırma yöntemlerinden literatür tarama ve doküman analizi metoduna göre tasarlanan bu çalışmanın amacı, insan sermayesi kavramının spor kurumları için önemini teorik bir bütünlük içinde ele alarak bu minvaldeki çalışmalar için kapı aralamaktır. Bu amaç doğrultusunda insan sermayesi kavramı etimolojik ve ontolojik olarak detaylı bir şekilde ele alınmış, kavramın tarihsel izi sürülerek dünyada ve Türkiye’deki gelişim süreci ayrıntılı olarak incelenmiştir. Ayrıca insan sermayesinin günümüzde Türk spor kurumları için öneminden bahsedilerek bu kavramın Türk kültür ve medeniyeti ekseninde nasıl aktifleştirilebileceği hususu çalışmanın ilgili kısımlarında izah edilmiştir.
"This study examines the “life” of an eighteenth-century private library that migrated from Spain to New Spain in 1765 and returned, greatly reduced, back to Europe in 1772. The collection’s owner was José de Gálvez (1720–1787), a reformist Spanish statesman and recently appointed royal inspector of the Mexican viceroyalty. Standing at the crossroads of book history, the history of reading, and political history, this piece examines the library and its books from both a material and intellectual perspective. It relies on “Thing Theory,” a methodological approach that opens avenues for further research on human-object relations in the Atlantic world. Examining the interplay between the owner, his ideas, his biography, and his book collection, this study expands book history’s geographies and proposes a new narrative about the global dimensions of the Enlightenment."
Most histories of early-modern rights focus on particular concepts of rights: for instance, notions of subjective vs. objective right, or on the presence/absence of particular rights (e.g., self-preservation). But focusing on specific rights has led scholars to pay less attention to what happens to rights as a whole when individuals enter into a political state, and also to miss the fact that historical actors tended to think about rights within broader conceptual regimes. In this paper, I identify three major early-modern rights regimes: the abridgment regime, which emphasizes the abandonment or alienation of rights (e.g., Hobbes); the transfer regime, in which natural rights are transferred to the state, and can only be retrieved under specific conditions (e.g., Spinoza and Locke); and the preservation regime, which insists that we should be able to enjoy the individual exercise of our natural rights even under government (e.g., Jefferson). After laying out the historical origins and conceptual bases of these regimes, I sketch a brief history of their respective trajectories between the early sixteenth and the late eighteenth centuries, focusing in particular on the rather curious and contingent reasons why the preservation regime shot to success after the 1760s.
In this original intellectual history, Anna di Robilant traces the history of one of the most influential legal, political, and intellectual projects of modernity: the appropriation of Roman property law by liberal nineteenth-century jurists to fit the purposes of modern Europe. Drawing from a wealth of primary sources, many of which have never been translated into English, di Robilant outlines how a broad network of European jurists reinvented the classical Roman concept of property to support the process of modernisation. By placing this intellectual project within its historical context, she shows how changing class relations, economic policies and developing ideologies converged to produce the basis of modern property law. Bringing these developments to the twentieth century, this book demonstrates how this largely fabricated version of Roman property law shaped and continues to shape debates concerning economic growth, sustainability, and democratic participation.
A pesar de su limitado alcance espacio-temporal (Francia 1756-1777), la escuela fisiocrática ha dejado una huella decisiva en la historia del pensamiento económico. Al investigar la causa y la naturaleza de la riqueza nacional y los métodos para incrementarla, François Quesnay y los demás miembros de la fisiocracia identificaron el sector agrícola como la única fuente de produit net. Entre las reformas propuestas por los fisiócratas para reformar la estructura productiva de una sociedad atrasada, la más radical es probablemente la del impôt unique. Este artículo se propone explicar por qué, a pesar de su innegable fascinación, tal propuesta estaba destinada al fracaso, tanto en Francia como en el extranjero, con especial referencia al caso de España.
The term "science sociale" was first employed by Mirabeau père in 1767, not Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès in 1789, as historians until now believed. Taking this discovery as its starting point, this article examines the ways in which the idea of a science of society was successively conceptualized in the late eighteenth century by Mirabeau, Sieyès, and Nicolas de Condorcet. Situating their ideas in the context of evolving discussions over the reform of the French state, it argues that they developed three different versions of social science, and that these reflected different attempts to answer the question of how to achieve collective prosperity, justice, and happiness under modern conditions. This article further highlights the changing modes of historical temporality that informed those approaches, which shifted from a focus on the social forms of a mythical past, to a concern with the prevailing norms of the present, to an emphasis, finally, on the likely developments of an ever-perfecting future. In doing so, it shows that the history of early French social science is best understood not as a process of gradual advancement, but rather as one of serial reinvention.
This article presents a detailed chronology of the creation of L'Ami des hommes and the very special role played by Richard Cantillon's Essai sur la nature du commerce en général in this process. It shows that Mirabeau obtained the manuscript of the French translation of the Essai made by Cantillon himself through a marquis de Saint-George. We provide a biography of this obscure character and discuss his relationship with both Cantillon and the Marquis de Mirabeau. Then, we study how Mirabeau used Cantillon's text as a source of inspiration for four projects developed in different contexts. We show that, from 1740 to 1757, his relationship to Cantillon's text changed. His first two tries merely abstracted and rewrote the original text of the Essai to adapt it to a general readership. In the early 1750s, motivated by his discussions with his younger brother, the Chevalier de Mirabeau, on political economy, the marquis developed a more ambitious plan. He decided to provide an annotated edition of Cantillon's Essai. By 1756, Mirabeau realized that his ideas and interests had become so much different from those of Cantillon that it was best to reconceive his project as a stand-alone and completely original text, the one he finally published as L'Ami des hommes in 1757.
During the American War of Independence, the success of Benjamin Franklin’s diplomatic mission was not only played out in the private offices of the Château de Versailles. The American, just like the French Secretary of Foreign Affairs, Charles Gravier de Vergennes, knew that it was necessary to convince public opinion of the necessity of an alliance between France and the United States against Great Britain. The resulting massive propaganda campaign created an unprecedented celebrity phenomenon, now called franklin mania. Based on the provincial press and Franklin’s abundant French correspondence, this article aims to provide a better understanding of this phenomenon, its mechanisms and its consequences on public opinion in the French provinces. This study thus analyzes the means of diffusion of international information in the provinces and the several images and representations of Franklin, which resulted from it and which quickly conquered French public space. It also highlights the emergence of the new Republicans of Letters, who saw in the inventor of the lightning rod a master and a model and who spontaneously associated him with the scientific controversies of the moment.
This article uses materials that have been recently discovered as well as completely new documents, in particular a previously missing copy of the first printed edition of the Tableau économique that the authors found in the French National Archives and that they reproduce here in the appendix of the article. The authors combine these new sources of information with a close reading of materials—in particular the two letters sent by Quesnay to Mirabeau when he worked on the first two versions of the Tableau to provide a largely revised chronology of the conception and circulation of the three early versions of the Tableau. One of the points the authors make is that Madame de Pailly, Mirabeau's lover, acted as a go-between for the two men at that time and was instrumental in convincing Quesnay to share the Tableau with the marquis and to publish it in the sequel of the latter's best seller, L'Ami des hommes.
Whose fault are financial crises, and who is responsible for stopping them, or repairing the damage? Impunity and Capitalism develops a new approach to the history of capitalism and inequality by using the concept of impunity to show how financial crises stopped being crimes and became natural disasters. Trevor Jackson examines the legal regulation of capital markets in a period of unprecedented expansion in the complexity of finance ranging from the bankruptcy of Europe's richest man in 1709, to the world's first stock market crash in 1720, to the first Latin American debt crisis in 1825. He shows how, after each crisis, popular anger and improvised policy responses resulted in efforts to create a more just financial capitalism but succeeded only in changing who could act with impunity, and how. Henceforth financial crises came to seem normal and legitimate, caused by impersonal international markets, with the costs borne by domestic populations and nobody in particular at fault.
The early nineteenth century was a defining moment in the emergence of new, future-oriented visions of human progress. This thesis analyses this development of modern thought through a particular case study: the search for a science of society in France in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Through a contextual study of ideas and knowledge production, the chapters examine the successive models of reform and regeneration that defined this search, tracking a shift in the way these models were conceptualised. This shift involved a transition from individual to collective models of improvement, or, more discursively, from perfectibility to progress. This thesis documents this shift by tracing the origins and development of early French social science in the works of Sieyes, Condorcet and the Ideologues, before turning to the reconfiguration of this science effected by Saint-Simon and his followers in the nineteenth century. In doing so, this study provides new insights into the search for a science of society during and after the French Revolution, a revised interpretation of the history of the concept of perfectibility and a fresh perspective on the ongoing contest between science, religion and politics in this period of intense upheaval. It also advances scholarly understanding of the range of moral, philosophical and natural scientific ideas behind early French positivism and socialism. The nineteenth-century fascination, if not obsession, with progress is shown, in this thesis, to have been shaped by the works of theorists with visionary but idiosyncratic imaginations.
In the eighteenth century the burgeoning field of political economy incorporated an array of economic, social, moral, and historical themes. This article argues that the Physiocrats' application of Nicolas Malebranche's work reveals a critical corporeal component of political economy. The Physiocrats and Malebranche both feared the corrosive effects on the human body of unmitigated commerce and overconsumption. François Quesnay and his Physiocratic acolytes reproduced and expanded on Malebranche's argument that the cognitive faculty of the imagination could stymie epistemological processes and thus the ability to perceive what the Physiocrats understood to be the natural foundations of political economy. The expanse of Atlantic trade, the subsequent “consumer revolution,” and the growth of new social practices transformed French life and brought individual bodies into novel forms of contact. In reaction, the Physiocrats and political economists prioritized relationships between physical bodies and consumer goods.
Au XVIIIe siècle, le domaine naissant de l’économie politique a incorporé un éventail de thèmes économiques, sociaux, moraux et historiques. Cet article fera valoir que l'application par les physiocrates de l’œuvre de Nicolas Malebranche révèle une dimension corporelle de l’économie politique qui s'avère essentielle. Les physiocrates et Malebranche craignaient les effets corrosifs sur le corps humain du commerce et de la surconsommation. Quesnay et ses acolytes physiocratiques ont reproduit et élargi l'argument de Malebranche selon lequel la faculté cognitive de l'imagination pouvait entraver les processus épistémologiques et donc la capacité de percevoir ce que les physiocrates considéraient comme les fondements naturels de l’économie politique. L’étendue du commerce atlantique, la « révolution des consommateurs » qui s'en est suivie et la croissance de nouvelles pratiques sociales ont transformé la vie des Français et facilité de nouvelles formes de contact corporel. En réponse, les physiocrates et les économistes politiques ont donné la priorité aux relations entre les corps physiques et les biens de consommation.
The aim of this article is to probe the connections between two key fields of knowledge of the French Enlightenment: political economy and natural history. It does so by analyzing the uses of reproduction, a term that eighteenth-century political economists imported from natural history. While historians of knowledge have demonstrated the crucial role played by political and economic concerns in the practices of naturalists, intent on improving their nation, the significance of natural history for the development of political economy has not been sufficiently analyzed. Studying side-by-side the works of the period’s most famous school of political economy, the physiocrats, and one of its most influential naturalists, the Comte de Buffon, the paper demonstrates that the physiocrats adopted not only the term from natural historians, but also the conceptual baggage that accompanied it. Buffon radically reconceptualized the reproduction of living beings as a process governed by natural laws and not divine intervention. As the paper argues, the physiocrats’ political-economic system was based on precisely such a conception of the natural laws of reproduction, which they extended from the world of the living to the entire economy of the nation.
This article examines the global history of the Age of Revolution through the lens of the Nouvelle Compagnie des Indes (1785–94). Established in the aftermath of the American Revolution, the company was not only a commercial entity but also an integral part of a diplomatic strategy for reestablishing the postwar Franco-British relationship. The geopolitical context of the Indian Ocean world forced French political and commercial actors to imagine forms of imperial and commercial power that frequently placed French interests under British protection, often in ways that provoked significant opposition in the metropole. Amid ideologies of competition, Anglophobia, and militarism, the case of the Nouvelle Compagnie des Indes reveals how both state and private actors struggled to promote wide-ranging commercial collaboration between France and Britain in the 1780s and 1790s in ways that often anticipated later partnerships between the two empires.
Cet article examine l'histoire globale de l’ère de la Révolution française à travers le prisme de la Nouvelle Compagnie des Indes (1785–94). Etablie après la guerre d'indépendance américaine, la compagnie n’était pas seulement une entité commerciale, mais une partie intégrante d'une stratégie diplomatique pour rétablir les relations franco-britanniques. Le contexte géopolitique de l'océan Indien exigeait que les acteurs politiques et commerciaux français imaginent de nouvelles formes de pouvoir impérial et commercial. Celles-ci plaçaient fréquemment les intérêts français sous la protection britannique, souvent d'une manière qui provoquait de fortes résistances dans la métropole. Dans un contexte idéologique de compétition, d'anglophobie et de militarisme, le cas de la Nouvelle Compagnie des Indes révèle que des acteurs aussi bien étatiques que privés essayaient de promouvoir une vaste collaboration commerciale entre la France et la Grande-Bretagne dans les années 1780 et 1790, en anticipant souvent les partenariats ultérieurs entre les deux empires.
In recent years there has been a renewed interest in Cameralism, both as a discourse and as an administrative political economy, in both theory and practice. Attention has been drawn to how Cameralism—defined as thought and practice—should be understood. The aim of this article is to take a step back and focus on the historiography of Cameralism from the nineteenth century onwards. Even though many in recent times have challenged old and seemingly dated conceptualizations and interpretations, they are still very much alive. Most profoundly this has implied that Cameralism most often in the past has been acknowledged as an expression of—German. as it were—exceptionalism to the general history of economic doctrine and thinking.
This article examines attempts to demonstrate the truth of physiocratic principles in eighteenth-century Baden. Emphasizing the importance of the so-called net yield ( produit net ), a surplus product understood to be created primarily in agriculture, the physiocrats advanced a new science of material prosperity and moral welfare. Despite its alleged “self-evidence,” physiocracy invited strong criticism from those who denied the force of its abstractions. Ultimately regarded as ill-fated and unconvincing, these trials were significant for their attempt to offer an experiential demonstration aimed at persuading doubters and silencing critics. The apparent failure notwithstanding, the episode illustrates how the idiom and practice of experiment served as a powerful resource for generating conviction in the eighteenth century, even in matters extending beyond the emerging natural sciences.
The Scottish Enlightenment is considered a crucial turning point in the history of philosophy. However, as a whole, it cannot be understood without an in-depth analysis of its historical process, beyond its geographic and temporal circumstances. The main aim of this brief article is to demonstrate a common thread in the evolution of the ideas that links the period of Late Scholasticism through the Scottish Enlightenment. In a preliminary perspective, some points will be taken into account: 1) the evolution of legal systems shared by Continental Europeans and Scots, 2) the importance of the Franciscan Medieval tradition, and finally 3) the cross-pollination of proto-economic philosophy through educational institutions and teaching between Europe and Scotland.
Georges Frédéric Parrot was one of the developers and spokesmen of the liberal educational concept of the Enlightenment era in the Russian Empire in the first part of the 19th century. He was born in Montbéliard, Duchy of Württemberg. Parrot studied at Hohe Karlsschule in Stuttgart, and spent his tutorial years in Normandy, France. His best friend Georges Cuvier followed the same path. The first part of the article deals with the educational ideas of Physiocrats, especially those of Pierre Samuel Dupont de Nemours, which influenced the state-run education systems in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, in Russia, and also in America. In 1802, Parrot became a personal friend of Emperor Alexander I of Russia. Parrot introduced to the Emperor the concept of university which dealt with serfdom and its relation to the university as well as human culture and social welfare. Parrot was the person to draft the University of Tartu’s foundation document, and he was responsible for making the institution accessible to representatives of all social groups. The university became the enlightened centre of the educational district. Parrot’s main interest was related with the state-run parochial school system. The education paradigm of Physiocrats laid the basis for the new university concept of the Enlightenment era, which consisted in five important points, and it was spread to the both sides of the Atlantic. © 2018 Estonian Association for the History and Philosophy of Science. All Rights Reserved.
No longer do resource economists merely regard nature as a collection of inert materials to be improved by human labor and manufactured capital; rather, nature is, to an increasing extent, taken to be a mindless producer of economically valuable ecosystem goods and services. Instances of natural capital are frequently said to produce such goods and services in a manner that is relatively detached from human agency. This article argues that, historically, the idea of nature as a systematic original producer capable of self-generation is hardly novel. The eighteenth-century roots of this idea can be found in the writings of Carl Linnaeus who depicted the whole Earth and all of its productions as the “oeconomy of nature.”
Before the French Revolution began in 1789, André-Ernest-Modeste Grétry composed opéra comique that achieved great success both in Paris and abroad. As the revolutionary tides swept toward republican musical aesthetics, the illustrious Grétry receded from the public eye and briefly struggled to remain afloat. A newly discovered letter that he wrote during this period to the famed Abbé Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyes offers a window into the effects that revolutionary legislation had on musicians. Sieyes, author of the seminal revolutionary text “What is the Third Estate?”, pioneered liberty of the press and authors’ rights legislation as a member of the French National Assembly and National Convention. His efforts were realized when the first intellectual property laws relating to music became codified in 1791 and 1793. In the 1790 letter, although Grétry praises Sieyes’ policy proposals, he also raises personal and professional injustices surrounding intellectual property rights to music. Grétry’s letter addresses his concerns about the translations of stage works from French to Italian, the unsanctioned performances of opéras and opéras comiques, and the general welfare of French musicians. While in his nineteenth-century memoirs Grétry recasts himself as a republican, this letter from early in the Revolution focuses on musicians’ more tangible concern to, in his own words, “place bread on the table.” The letter invites an interrogation of how musicians approached the new patronage structure in revolutionary France, which abruptly transferred from the court and church to the nation as a result of political upheaval. A valuable addition to scholarly understanding of Grétry’s participation in the Revolution, the letter simultaneously begs a rethinking of his contribution to revolutionary causes and a reevaluation of musicians’ professional activities during the French Revolution.
Jonas Ross Kjærgård. Adjunkt i Litteraturhistorie, Aarhus Universitet. Han har skrevet en litteraturhistorisk ph.d.-afhandling om sammenhængen mellem lykke og menneskerettigheder i årene op til og under Den Franske Revolution og arbejder pt. på et projekt om den haitianske revolutions litteraturhistorie i Frankrig, Tyskland, USA og Haiti i årene 1791-1859.
This article investigates the scientific practices—and their transformations across time—of the physiocrats in relation to their social background. Our contention is that, in this regard, the physiocratic movement can be broken down in two successive creative communities: The writing workshop of Quesnay (ca.1756–ca.1764) and the physiocratic school (ca.1764–ca.1777). This transformation is related to the specific places and cultural spaces in which the two communities evolved; that is, respectively, Versailles and the court, and Paris in the heyday of the Enlightenment. We want to show that the geographical and social context in which the scientific activities of the physiocrats took place structured the relationships inside each of the two communities and influenced their mode of production and dissemination of economic thought.
Illustration emerges from complex and diverse motives. The portrayal of an objective reality may seem to lie at its heart, but there are other subtle factors at work. Preconception guides many an illustrator's hand. A wish to project known realities onto nascent concepts distorts reality in its own ways, and the process of transmuting the subtle realism of nature into an engraver's line imposes constraints and conventions of its own. There is a general principle in artwork, often unrecognised: the culture of each era dictates its own arbitrary realities. Our experience of this is largely intuitive, but it explains why a specific image (a saint from a thirteenth-century psalter, or the countenance of the Statue of Liberty) is easier to relate to the time it was produced, than to the identity of the artist or the name of the subject. In just this way, a scientific illustration is a mirror of contemporaneous preoccupations, and a clue to current prejudice. It is more than a didactic symbol. Some illustrations create, and then perpetuate, icons which transcend reality and provide a synthesized convention which passes from one generation of books to the next. These icons are created for textbooks, and they populate their pages as decorative features which do little to reveal reality. FOONOTE Discussions on the relationship between reality and interpretation are found in: Ford, Brian J., Images of Science, a History of Scientific Illustration, London: British Library; New York: Oxford University Press (1992); also in the author's Images Imperfect, the Legacy of Scientific Illustration, Yearbook of Science and the Future: 134-157, Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica (1996). Early in the century, François Legaut's Voyages et Aventures (1708) featured a rhinoceros with a second horn projecting forward from its brow. This structure is never found in life. Why should it feature in an eighteenth-century illustrated textbook? The first published study of a rhinoceros (made by Albrecht Dürer in 1515), though powerful and realistic, boasts a small secondary horn on the shoulders, which projects forward. The image was repeatedly plagiarised and -with each generation of copying -this imaginary forward-projecting second horn increased in size. By the time it was included in Legaut's book the imaginary horn was equal in size to the real one.
Using archival materials, we investigate the scientific practices of François Quesnay and the individuals who worked with him in relation to their social background. Our contention is that, before 1764, the group of authors who shared Quesnay's commitment to an agrarian economic theory are best described as the “writing workshop” of François Quesnay rather than as the “physiocratic” school. Quesnay organized and supervised the work of these individuals, who assisted him in a manner clearly reminiscent of that of workshops of artists from late medieval and early modern Europe. On the one hand, Quesnay tightly controlled the work of those (the Marquis de Mirabeau, Pattullo, Du Pont de Nemours) who published economic writings, correcting and even rewriting whole parts of their texts. On the other hand, he commanded other writers/individuals to collect data and execute and verify calculations, most notably for his tableaux économiques . In other words, the production of political and economic writings was structured by a detailed division of labor organized by Quesnay, who acted as the master of a writing workshop. After the death of Madame de Pompadour, Quesnay's prominent patroness, in 1764, the situation changed. Quesnay's aura of power at court disappeared and with it, his writing workshop. The center of gravity of physiocracy moved from Versailles to Paris, and the workshop was gradually replaced by the physiocratic school.
History of Political Economy 36.3 (2004) 445-474
In an obscure article, Hans Rieter (1990) has noted the striking resemblance between Quesnay's tableau économique and some unusual clocks that belonged to Gaspard Grollier de Servière, the owner of a cabinet of curiosities (see figs. 1 and 2). Like the other artifacts of Grollier's cabinet, these clocks were meant to be rational recreations: that is, artifacts designed to produce wondrous visual and, more generally, sensory effects. In the eighteenth century, rational recreations served as artistic creations, magical artifacts, engineering machines, pedagogical devices, and tools for scientific experiments. At the time, it was widely believed in France that only that part of science that could be put to the test through sensory experiments (most commonly visual experiments) was "useful science," the rest being metaphysics—"empty science," according to d'Alembert (1756) in the Encyclopédie. Quesnay's tableau économique was part of the tradition of rational recreation.
During the nineteenth century and the first part of the twentieth century, however, the tableau économique—which, as is well known, was a visual representation of the flow of wealth through the economy—was neglected: words were used to describe or interpret physiocratic thinking, even to depict the tableau itself. No tableau is to be found in the classic two-volume history of physiocracy by George Weulersse (1910), nor in Henry Higgs's study of the physiocrats. In the editions of Quesnay's collected writings published in 1846 and 1888, only the less visually complex "arithmetical formula" was reproduced (Daire 1846; Oncken 1888). Similarly, there was no tableau in either form in Schelle's biography of Quesnay or, most unexpectedly, in his 1905 article on the tableau économique (Schelle 1905, 1907). These works were simply unresponsive to the visual representation of economic thinking.
It was not until the 1930s, when visual aids first flourished in economics textbooks and articles, that the tableau économique was rediscovered and began to be the subject of a rapidly growing literature. The tableau was interpreted as a forerunner of modern economic models,
such as general equilibrium, input-output tables (Phillips 1955), reproduction models à la Sraffa (Cartelier 1998), and the Harrod-Domar growth model (Eltis 1998), or more generally, as a forerunner of modern growth theory (Meek 1962, 292–96; Pressman 1994). Yet, commentators have continued to consider that figure and words were acting on the same level of understanding. By "tableau économique" they have meant not only the figure but also Quesnay's explanation of the figure, without differentiating them clearly. (Conversely, in this article, by "tableau économique" I mean only the figure.) Consequently, in their interpretations and mathematical reconstructions of the tableau, historians of economics have given no special attention to its visual dimension, and the visual changes Quesnay made in the tableau have been interpreted as illustrating theoretical changes made by Quesnay in his economic model (Meek 1962, 277–83; Eltis 1975, 183–94; Herlitz 1996).
In this article, I intend to break with this type of interpretation. My thesis is that Quesnay's tableau économique, like rational recreations, embodies two dimensions. It is both a scientific device and a visual artifact. These two dimensions reinforce each other: the tableau was a visual machine to aid the calculation of the creation and distribution of wealth in the nation, and it was used to teach physiocratic science, just as rational recreations were considered engines for scientific discovery and were widely used to teach natural sciences in public lectures. Moreover, in Quesnay's theory of scientific practice...
This article looks at the history of the Tableau Economique from a visual point of view. It shows that Quesnay invented the Tableau to formalize visually his economic theory, and that he used different versions of the Tableau ('Zigzag', 'Precis' and 'Formule') for reasons of visual rhetorics. Accordingly, the visual history of the Tableau clarifies several problems identified by previous 'ecommentors'. The paper concludes that the history of the Tableau as an image cannot be equated with that of Quesnay's abstract economic model without missing the Tableau Economique's raison d'etre.
The Essay Concerning Human Understanding, though dated 1690, was published in late 1689, when its author was fifty-seven. It had been completed in Holland, where Locke had fled in 1683. It had a much longer gestation than this suggests, however. When it was published it was the product of a mature philosophical mind that had been reflecting on the issues that it considers for nearly twenty years. Locke tells us in the “Epistle to the Reader” something of its origin and history. He writes that five or six friends: Meeting at my chamber, and discoursing on a subject very remote from this [i.e., human understanding], found themselves quickly at a stand, by the Difficulties that rose on every side. After we had a while puzzled our selves, without coming any nearer a Resolution of those Doubts which perplexed us, it came in to my Thoughts, that we took a wrong course; and that, before we set our selves upon Enquiries of that Nature, it was necessary to examine our own Abilities, and see, what Objects our Understandings were, or were not fitted to deal with. This I proposed to the Company, who all readily assented; and thereupon it was agreed, that this should be our first Enquiry. Some hasty and undigested Thoughts, on a Subject I had never before considered, which I set down against our next Meeting, gave the first entrance into this Discourse, which having been thus by Chance, was continued by Intreaty; written by incoherent parcels, and after long intervals of neglect, resum’d again, as my Humour or Occasions permitted; and at last, in a retirement, where an Attendance on my Health gave me leisure, it was brought into that order, thou now seest it.
The primary aim of this essay is to explain the central elements of Locke’s theory of knowledge. A secondary aim arises from the official definition of knowledge introduced in the opening lines of Book IV. Though Locke’s repeated statements of the definition are consistent with the initial formulation, the consensus view among commentators is that the official definition is in tension with other Book IV doctrines. My broader interpretation involves an effort to render the various doctrines consistent with the official definition. The order of discussion: section 1 explicates the definition of knowledge. Section 2 explains two main divisions of knowledge-namely, its three degrees, and the four sorts of knowable truths. In section 3, I consider whether Locke understands knowable truths on a model of analyticity. Section 4 addresses potential problems about the objectivity of knowledge, given Locke’s account. Section 5 focuses on knowledge of the external world-Locke calls this “sensitive knowledge,” and it poses special difficulties for the official definition of knowledge.
Locke’s Essay is part of the so-called epistemological turn given philosophy by Descartes that assigned fundamental importance to the theory of knowledge. So much is clear from the introduction to Book I: “my Purpose [is] to enquire into the Original, Certainty, and Extent of humane Knowledge; together, with the Grounds and Degrees of Belief, Opinion, and Assent” (E I.i.2: 43). The general aim in the period was to reconcile the startling discrepancy, in all its ramifications, between the so-called manifest image, as it has come to be called, which views the world in the commonsense terms of colors, odors, and tastes, and the emerging scientific image, which sees it in the atomistic (or “corpuscularian”) terms of sizes, shapes, and motion. Locke’s version of the epistemological turn took what his ecclesiastical critic Stillingfleet called the new way of ideas: we perceive things not as they are in themselves, but in terms of our ideas of them. By an idea Locke means the mind’s immediate object whenever it thinks, which for him is something in the mind (E I.i.8; II.viii.8). The mind knows the mediate object outside the mind insofar as the idea represents it. The distinction between an idea and its object is Locke’s way of dealing with the discrepancy between the manifest and scientific images. So far, all interpretations of Locke are in basic agreement.
Locke’s Essay concerning Human Understanding is a philosophical landmark devoted to understanding the nature and limits of human knowledge in terms of the concept of an idea. The term ‘idea’ plays such an important role in the Essay that contemporary critics derided it for following a “new way of ideas” that would “promote scepticism and infidelity” (W IV: 129-30). Locke himself was apologetic for his frequent use of the term ‘idea’, but he believed that he “could not avoid frequently using it” (E I.i.8: 47). Locke writes, “[m]y new way by ideas … may … comprehend my whole Essay,” but he adds that this “new way of ideas, and the old way of speaking intelligibly, was always, and ever will be the same” (W IV: 134, 430). Locke uses the concept of an idea to develop accounts of sensation, reflection, perception, memory, and knowledge, which became the central themes that exercised his successors and critics such as Berkeley, Hume, and Reid. But there is another distinctive feature of Locke’s Essay. It also includes a turn to language that has a significant place in the history of philosophy. Locke not only relies on the concept of an idea to explain perception and knowledge, but also uses it to develop a theory of language. After a critique of the doctrine of innate ideas in Book I and an extensive discussion of the origins and the classification of ideas in Book II, Locke turns to language in Book III, which begins with a chapter “Of Words or Language in General.”
According to Locke’s theory, ideas are the building materials of human understanding. They compose and combine in several ways. There are two main types of ideas, simple and complex, and there are several types of complex ideas differentiated by modes of construction. Moreover, although ideas direct the mind to objects of thought, ideas do not attain truth or falsity. Propositions, not ideas, are strictly true or false, according to the Essay; but propositions are composed of ideas and connective mental acts. The Essay is ultimately concerned with propositions, because they are what we know, believe, or judge to be true. The treatise aims to explicate the “Original, Certainty, and Extent of humane Knowledge; together with the Grounds and Degrees of Belief, Opinion, and Assent” (E I.i.2: 43). These topics are reached in Book IV after a thorough inquiry into the origin of the various types of ideas in Book II and an examination of names in Book III. The antecedent material on ideas is theoretical ground for the subsequent linguistic and epistemic theories. Names are typed and characterized in accord with the sorts of ideas that determine their signification. Propositions, too, are divided into types that have distinctive epistemic properties in virtue of the sorts of ideas that enter into their composition. The main purpose of this essay is to bring out the systematic theoretical uses to which Locke puts the taxonomic scheme, as well as to trace some strains they put on the classification.
Based on books dealing with political festivities in France since 1789, this article discusses the integrative function which is frequently assigned to festive events by scholars. That function can be summed up in the following proposition: experiencing similar emotions into collective gatherings is supposed to provide or promote socialization. The paper rejects the idea that popular fervor could be an efficient tool to measure civic engagement. It raises the following question: how can we qualify politically enthusiasm, for example by calling it 'civic' or 'imperial', 'patriotic' or 'republican'? The given answer is the following one: public enthusiasm is not civic because an inquiry may find 'patriotism' into participants' minds, but simply because the civic character of the context (and the festive behavior - made of applauses, cheers and joy - which is therefore expected) is recognized by the public and assigned by organizers and/or commentators.
The Assembly of Notables which met between 22 February and 25 May 1787 was a major turning point in French, even world history: it was the first link in an unbroken chain which led to the French Revolution which itself formed the template for the modern world. The reform programme which finance minister Calonne, with the full backing of Louis XVI, presented to a hand picked Assembly of Notables, had it been accepted, would have transformed France but not in an obvious way. For embedded in the origins of the French Revolution is this double paradox, that a process which ultimately delivered equality began with the defence of inequality by the Notables, who nevertheless by resisting the king's attempt to increase his power by introducing that same uniform equality started a process which culminated, for a short time at least, in greater liberty. The Notables were able to defeat Calonne because in 1787 (unlike 1789) liberty was prized higher than equality. Also they were united and disciplined whereas the government was divided. Moreover, Calonne's enemies in the ministry formed links with the Notables: Miromesnil, keeper of the seals, with the parlementaire Notables, Castries, the naval minister, with Necker's powerful faction. And the differences in the ministry were not simply factional (as is often assumed) but ideological and it was this which undermined the royal government as it entered its last crisis. For few ministers still believed in absolute monarchy: Castries, for example, advocated an aristocratic constitutionalism like England's, which was also the view of many Notables. In the light of modern scholarship and the latest archival information, the various facets of this seminal event which are often considered in isolation (the king, the royal council, the Notables, Necker and the public) are integrated into an analytical narrative interspersed with the Notables' critique of Calonne's measures as they were successively presented to them.
Mention the term “medical science” to someone, and it is likely to evoke an image of white-coated scientists working at a laboratory bench. In the mind of a more historically informed listener, the term might produce a more specific image - of Louis Pasteur gazing at a test tube, of Xavier Bichat bending over one of his corpses in the Hotel-Dieu, or even of William Harvey ligating a vein - but the general meaning would remain largely the same, because for us the association between “medical science” and “experiment” is a powerful one. Yet for all its pervasiveness, this association is misleading when we consider the medical sciences in the eighteenth century. An image far more appropriate than the laboratory would be the simple podium or lectern, for the medical sciences were understood by eighteenth-century physicians primarily as a body of theoretical doctrines that formed one part of the university medical curriculum. The medical sciences, especially the subjects of physiology and pathology, furnished the bridge between medical knowledge proper and the domain of natural philosophy. And natural philosophy attempted in turn to provide a comprehensive theoretical knowledge of the elemental makeup of the world and the motions of matter. Therefore, insofar as physiology and pathology explained the composition and actions of the living body in its healthy and diseased states and rendered those explanations in terms consistent with natural philosophy, they legitimated medicine’s claim to the status of scientific knowledge.
Hutcheson And Moral Sense: Francis Hutcheson, David Hume and Adam Smith were the main Scottish participants in the British debate on the foundations of morals. Here their moral theories will be outlined as three rival systems, and then Thomas Reid's critical attitude towards their theories will be discussed. Francis Hutcheson (1694 1746) was the first Scottish philosopher to approach the problem of the foundations of morals in an original way. His strategy was to construct a unitary doctrine drawing both on Lord Shaftesbury's teachings on the relation between natural affection and morality, and on Locke's new empirical epistemology. In response to Hobbes's theory that human nature is fundamentally selfish and anti-social, Shaftesbury had argued that God provided human nature with a number of generous forms of affection, from family affection to a love for mankind, that naturally predispose men to live together. Human beings are also provided with a natural capacity to feel attraction to these affections and a dislike for the contrary ones. In Shaftesbury's works it is not clear whether moral distinctions derive from reason or sentiment, an omission that Hutcheson was to remedy. From Locke, Hutcheson took the doctrine that men lack innate ideas, and that they derive their complex ideas of things and actions from experience, compounding, enlarging and abstracting from simple original ideas.
Historians have long seen the search for a viable “science of man [sic]” as a central feature of eighteenth-century intellectual life. David Hume’s (1711-1776) desire to be “the Newton of the moral Sciences” and his insistence in 1740 that “’tis at least worthwhile to try if the Sciences of man will not admit of the same accuracy which several parts of natural philosophy are found susceptible of” have been taken to represent the views of a huge number of intellectuals throughout the century and across all nations of Europe and North America. Moreover, the centrality of the human sciences to the Enlightenment project is acknowledged not only by those sympathetic to the goals of that project and fundamentally optimistic about its liberating consequences but also by those who have found the goals misdirected and the consequences fundamentally destructive. The issue of how to portray the relationships between such twentieth-century professional disciplines as anthropology, economics, geography, history, linguistics, psychology, or sociology and various eighteenth-century attempts to establish human sciences is both extremely complex and a matter of intense debate. Eighteenth-century authors and readers often thought in terms of categories that differ from those in use today. Thus, for example, the phrases “the natural history of man” and “philosophical history” were frequently used to include many topics now included in anthropology, linguistics, and sociology, along with some that now belong to political science and aesthetics. At the same time, “anthropology” was used in German speaking regions to cover physiology as well as topics from the first three twentieth-century disciplines.
Ever since the French Revolution, Madame de Pompadour's comment, "Aprés moi, le déluge" (after me, the deluge), has looked like a callous if accurate prophecy of the political cataclysms that began in 1789. But decades before the Bastille fell, French writers had used the phrase to describe a different kind of selfish recklessness--not toward the flood of revolution but, rather, toward the flood of public debt. In Before the Deluge, Michael Sonenscher examines these fears and the responses to them, and the result is nothing less than a new way of thinking about the intellectual origins of the French Revolution. In this nightmare vision of the future, many prerevolutionary observers predicted that the pressures generated by modern war finance would set off a chain of debt defaults that would either destroy established political orders or cause a sudden lurch into despotic rule. Nor was it clear that constitutional government could keep this possibility at bay. Constitutional government might make public credit more secure, but public credit might undermine constitutional government itself. Before the Deluge examines how this predicament gave rise to a widespread eighteenth-century interest in figuring out how to establish and maintain representative governments able to realize the promise of public credit while avoiding its peril. By doing so, the book throws new light on a neglected aspect of modern political thought and on the French Revolution.
During the eighteenth century, men and women of letters throughout the Atlantic world repeatedly celebrated the revolution they had witnessed in all the many branches of philosophy. Drawing on the rhetoric and historical vision of those who had championed the achievements of the “new science” of the seventeenth century, apologists for the Enlightenment claimed that humankind had finally been able to progress far beyond the narrow intellectual horizons of antiquity and the “dark ages” thanks to the new methods of inquiry forged by Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626), René Descartes (1596-1650), John Locke (1632-1704), and Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727). In this heroic reading of the genesis of modernity, Bacon was cast as the father of the experimental method, and Descartes played the tragic role of the flawed genius who used reason to liberate humankind from the shackles of scholasticism only to foist yet another false system of philosophy on the learned world. Locke was assigned the part of the humble reformer of metaphysics, who replaced meaningless verbal disputes with the patient empirical investigation of the mechanisms of mind and language and who carefully mapped the limits of human knowledge. But to the siècle des lumières it was Newton - apostrophized in Alexander Pope’s (1688-1744) couplet, “Nature and Nature’s Laws lay hid in Night./GOD said, Let Newton be! and all was Light.” - who towered above the other founders of the Enlightenment. Not only had Newton divined the secrets of Nature by demonstrating that his theory of universal gravitation explained the motions of both celestial and terrestrial bodies, but he had also taught the salutary lesson that philosophers could discover the truth only by eschewing arbitrary hypotheses in order to focus their attention on what could be proved using the combined tools of geometry and experiment.
This 1994 collection of interdisciplinary essays was the first to investigate how images in the history of the natural and physical sciences have been used to shape the history of economic thought. The contributors, historians of science and economics alike, document the extent to which scholars have drawn on physical and natural science to ground economic ideas and evaluate the role and importance of metaphors in the structure and content of economic thought. These range from Aristotle's discussion of the division of labour, to Marshall's evocation of population biology, to Hayek's dependence upon evolutionary concepts, and more recently to neoclassical economists' invocation of chaos theory. Resort to such images, contributors find, was more than mere rhetorical flourish. Rather, appeals to natural and physical metaphors serve to constitute the very subject matter of the discipline and what might be accepted as the 'economic'.
This book studies the je-ne-sais-quoi and its fortunes in early modern Europe. It examines the expression's rise and fall as a keyword and as a topic of debate, its cluster of meanings, and the scattered traces of its pre-history. It focuses on the je-ne-sais-quoi during the key period 1580-1680 but strays on either side of these limits to trace the expression's precursors and its later fortunes. The je-ne-sais-quoi is now assumed to be a quintessentially French phenomenon, but in the early modern period it also marks the cultures of France's neighbours, and this is reflected in the book's inclusion of Italian, Spanish, and English material. It is now assumed, too, that the je-ne-sais-quoi belongs purely to the realm of the literary, but in the early modern period it serves to articulate hitherto unrelated problems in the domains of natural philosophy, the passions, and polite culture, and for that reason it is examined here from an interdisciplinary perspective. Placing major literary and philosophical figures such as Montaigne, Shakespeare, Descartes, Corneille, and Pascal alongside some of their lesser-known contemporaries, this study argues that the je-ne-sais-quoi serves above all to trace a series of first-person encounters with a certain something as difficult to explain as its effects are intense, and which can be expressed only by being expressed differently. The book shows how the je-ne-sais-quoi comes to express that certain something in the early modern period, and suggests that it remains capable of doing so today.
This article explores the intellectual transformations that accompanied the rise of consumption in eighteenth-century France by examining a best-seller, L'Ami des hommes (1756), by the marquis de Mirabeau. The most popular work of political economy of its time, L'Ami des hommes made a particularly important intervention in the luxury debate. Straddling two seemingly contradictory strains of eighteenth-century political and social thought—a classical republicanism that looked backward to ancient civic virtue and an economic liberalism that looked forward to material progress—the book offered readers the best of both worlds: a moral economy of prosperity. This article analyzes Mirabeau's pathology of consumption and places his moral economy of prosperity in the broader context of Enlightenment thought.
Victor Riquetti, marquis de Mirabeau, and Francois Quesnay, Traite de la monarchie, ed. Gino Longhitano (L'Harmattan: Paris, 1999), lxxi + 191pp., 110F, ISBN 2 7384 8449 2.
The aim of this essay is not to propose an alternative to recent explanations of 1789 (the political history of eighteenth-century France is still almost entirely terra incognita and it would be folly not to advance from the few significant bridgeheads that have been established), but simply to place these explanations in a more precisely delineated context. Its argument, quite simply, has been that a public debt places the public in a rather awkward relationship to itself, raising an even more awkward question about the relationship between the entity to which the debt belongs (the state) and the entity responsible for its day-to-day management (the government). Solving that conundrum, in 1789, entailed a great deal of hard thought, and quite a lot more vigorous action, to define and untangle the two entities, the state and the government, responsible for the debt. In the short term, this combination of hard thought and vigorous action was not a formula designed to guarantee civil peace. Some of the ideas were incomprehensible, others unacceptable, and there was a great deal of scope, on either score, for further action.
In this article F-X Emmanuelli examines the experiences of three sets of provincial Estates, those of Provence, Comtat Venaissin and Corsica in face of the pressures from the governments of Louis XV and Louis XVI aimed at undermining the autonomy of the Pays d'Etats and extending the direct authority of the royal government. The article suggests that the royal government did follow a consistent policy of seeking to enlist the support of the social groups in provincial society which it judged most likely to be cooperative and at the same time seeking to reduce the sphere of activity of the Estates to routine administration and the assessment of taxation, for the royal government did not venture to try and suppress their traditional fiscal privileges. After an examination of the different experiences of these three provinces, the article suggests reasons why the Estates enjoyed considerable success in resisting the pressures put upon them and safeguarding their traditional liberties. The level of success, however, is shown to depend on the particular nature of the institutions of the province and the social structure of the Estates themselves.
Philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment did not invent aesthetics, the philosophical study of beauty, the sublime, and related categories, but they did make a highly significant contribution to it. The two most important writers in the field were Francis Hutcheson and David Hume, though others, such as George Turnbull, George Campbell, Alexander Gerard, Allan Ramsay (the painter), Henry Home (Lord Kames), Adam Smith, Thomas Reid, Hugh Blair and Archibald Alison, were significant writers on the subject. Indeed, the sheer number of truly inventive works on aesthetics was a distinctive feature of the Enlightenment in Scotland. In section one I offer some critical reflections on Hutcheson's work, paying particular attention to the role that the doctrine of the association of ideas plays in his thinking. Hume's work on aesthetics owes a great deal to Hutcheson's though he reaches different conclusions. Section two explores Hume's conclusions regarding the existence and identification of the standard of taste. In the writings of the two men moral and aesthetic categories are often combined. A particularly interesting exercise in the combination of these categories is to be found in the writings of George Turnbull, regent at Marischal College, Aberdeen between 1721 and 1727, and section three contains a discussion of his contribution to this field. In the final section I consider the views of George Turnbull and his pupil George Campbell on truth in the arts. Aesthetic theory in the Scottish Enlightenment is a field filled with a rich variety of good things, and in this chapter I shall cover only a small area of this field and shall attend to only a very few of the thinkers who made a significant contribution.
Introduction: Scottish Enlightenment discussions of the human mind and its powers developed from areas of investigation that on the face of it could hardly have been more disparate. Among them were angelology and scientific methodology. I shall comment on perceived relations between these various fields and shall then discuss some of the salient features of the studies on the mind and its powers. I shall pay particular attention to the fact that philosophers writing on the human mind saw themselves as natural scientists in exactly the sense in which physicists, botanists and physiologists were natural scientists. For they were all investigators of the natural world, a world which includes not only bodies, human and otherwise, but also human minds, and they all sought to work within the methodological constraints that characterise good natural science. PNEUMATOLOGY AND NATURAL SCIENCE: Under the heading ‘pneumatology’, theologians had for centuries written on the nature of spirits, divine, angelic and human. It was, however, common for such writings to focus on angels, the good ones and the bad. In the Scottish universities through the seventeenth and into the eighteenth century angels slipped down, and in some cases off, the agenda of pneumatological studies as the focus shifted to humans, and pneumatology was transformed into the systematic study, particularly the philosophical study, of the human mind because that is the kind of mind into which we have the most insight.
History of Political Economy 32.3 (2000) 517-551
If there is one thing that somebody is likely to know about the physiocrats, it is that they held steadfastly to a theory of the exclusive productivity of agriculture. Having special access to the productive power of Nature, agriculture alone can yield the produit net, or the net product, which is a free gift from Nature and the sole source of wealth for the economy. Ronald Meek (1962, 378) has called this the “really essential and distinctive element of the physiocratic model.” But while the most well known, this doctrine is also the most troublesome: it has been explained away, dismissed, and ridiculed; but it has not been well understood. Most, with Adam Smith, are content to label it the “capital error” of the physiocratic system ([1776] 1937, IV.ix.638) and move on.
This article seeks to explore the essence of the net product and Nature’s role in its formation via an unlikely path: the medical writings of François Quesnay (1694–1774). Quesnay’s medical writings, which are from the early part of his career, provide insight into his paradigms and methodology, helping shed light on how he may have thought about the economy.
Section 1 of this article motivates the discussion by arguing that Nature is an inexpungible part of the physiocratic system; ignoring it as some recent scholarship has done is impossible in the face of its textual support and its centrality in physiocratic thought. Nor can the role of Nature be reduced to a simplifying assumption or abstraction that adequately captures eighteenth-century French economy. Thus, a good understanding of physiocracy requires a good understanding of the role of Nature.
Section 2 begins the process of contextualization, arguing from Quesnay’s analysis of natural law that his understanding of social systems such as the economy is modeled on his understanding of physical systems. This connection suggests that his medical writings (the best record of his understanding of physical systems) may provide insights into his economics. Accordingly, section 3 provides background to medical thought in the Enlightenment, while section 4 turns to Quesnay’s medical thought in particular. Section 5 then concludes by returning to Quesnay’s political economy. The section argues that Quesnay’s critical need for a prime mover in the physical order, seen in his medical writings, carries over to the social order as well. This provides an interpretation for the net product and the role played by Nature. Specifically, Nature is the prime mover of the economy, setting it in motion, and the net product is the measure of this motion. Its immediate recipient, agriculture, is therefore uniquely productive, while other sectors only receive their motion from agriculture.
Quesnay, accepting a basic distinction between use value and exchange value, stressed exchange value as the measure of wealth. “As the market value is, so is the revenue.… Abundance plus dearness equals opulence” ([1758] 1962, 84; [1767] 1962, 235). In the traditional interpretation, Quesnay’s analysis of exchange value hinges on the difference between two prices, the market price (prix vénal) and the fundamental price (prix fondamental), where the latter reflects the costs of production, including the maintenance of advances, the feed for livestock, and the subsistence of labor. The difference between these two prices, a measure of surplus, is the net product, the profits for society. Quesnay equates the net product with opulence, for without it the revenue is sufficient only to cover the subsistence of workers, leaving nothing to support the proprietors, the monarch, or the church. To maximize the net product, Quesnay recommends policies that will increase the market price of agricultural commodities to their “proper price” (bon prix), such as lifting prohibitions and duties on agricultural exports.
As illustrated in the tableau économique (Meek 1962; Kuczynski and Meek 1972; Pressman 1994), the net product accrues only to the productive sector, predominantly agriculture, but also fishing and mining. Only there, in the natural order, is the market price above the fundamental price, yielding surplus. But it is distributed to the proprietors, monarch, and church through rents, taxes, and tithes respectively...
Physiocracy in its historical, intellectual, and political setting Physiocracy, or ‘rule of nature’, was a largely, but not exclusively, French movement in political economy that prioritised agricultural productivity over manufacturing as the source of economic growth, and sought to move on from that analysis to provide a fresh model of the fiscal and administrative relationships that should operate between royal governments and the owners of property broadly defined. It exercised intermittent influence on French administrations between the 1760s and 1780s and furthermore attracted vehement supporters and opponents outside France, especially in Italy and Spain, but also as far afield as the United States and Bengal. However, physiocracy has not habitually been associated with innovative political theory, or indeed with any coherent political theory at all. From the days of early commentators such as the Abbé Galiani, Adam Smith, and, later, Jean Baptiste Say, it became conventional to argue that French physiocracy was mistaken in its economics and inept in its politics, partial in its understanding of the mechanisms of wealth creation, and ineffective in making its case before both the tribunal of emerging French public opinion and across the shoals of court politics. The first part of this condemnation, though not perhaps the most important in the eyes of contemporaries, has been conventionally turned into a textbook account, conveniently summarised by Robert Heilbroner in the following terms: The trouble with physiocracy was that it insisted that only the agricultural classes produced true ‘wealth’ and that the manufacturing and commercial classes merely manipulated it in a sterile way. Hence Quesnay's system had but limited usefulness for practical policy. True it advocated a policy of laissez-faire – a radical departure for the times. But in denigrating the industrial side of life it flew against the sense of history, for the whole development of capitalism unmistakably pointed to the emergence of the industrial classes to a position of superiority over the landed classes. (Heilbroner 1961, p42)
Since its publication in 1955, Almarin Phillips' article “The Tableau Économique as a Simple Leontief Model” has inspired an interesting line of interpretation of the arithmetical schemes presented two centuries earlier by François Quesnay. Subsequent attempts to represent the Tableaux économiques in the form of Input-Output transcriptions by Shlomo Maital (1972), Bernhard Korte (1972), Tibor Barna (1975), and Paul Samuelson (1986), among others, have underlined the brilliance of the French doctor's formal conception of the economy as a reproductive system.