Conclusion

French Enlightenment saw an incredible amount of publications in each field of political economy and authors almost always stressed the links with and implications on political and moral philosophy.

They almost all were aware that the age was aiming at deep reforms of structures, behaviours and minds, both in private and social life. This chapter has depicted the main currents of thought that in a sense monopolised attention at the time. These did not, of course, coexist peacefully. Lively polemics took place between them, for example, between Forbonnais and the Physiocrats. One of the most famous was launched by Galiani’s attack, on the part of “commerce politique”, against “philoso- phie economique”, with the publication of his 1770 Dialogues sur le commerce des bles and the reaction of Turgot (Faccarello 1998). However, many attacks on the laissez-faire approach came also from other corners, for example, from Mably or Simon-Nicolas- Henri Linguet (1736-1794) (see, for example, Orain 2015). Individual positions sometimes evolved. Diderot, for example, praised the Physiocrats before supporting Galiani, and Turgot, one of the most important theoretician of laissez-faire, was a former member of the Vincent de Gournay circle - his 1759 “Eulogy of Vincent de Gournay” powerfully contributed to create the erroneous picture of Vincent de Gournay as an adept of laissez- faire. And while “philosophie economique” can be considered as the origin of the subjective theory of value, which developed later in France with Dupuit and Walras, an author such as Graslin (Graslin 1767 [1911], 1768 [2008]) also proposed a Rousseauist approach involving a labour theory of normal prices and distribution and the idea of a gravitation of market prices around natural prices that, a decade before Smith, led the foundations of (British) classical political economy (Faccarello 2009).

The period of the Revolution was also not sterile, especially on the institutional ground. The need for textbooks was felt, in parallel to the reorganisation of the national school system - Say published his Traite d’economie politique in 1803. An attempt to establish political economy as an academic discipline was also made in the ephemeral 1795 Ecole Normale - the mathematician Alexandre Vandermonde (1735-1796) being in charge of the course (Faccarello 1989). Vandermonde’s lectures were rather confused, but he stressed utility and the fact that labour is productive whenever it produces utility, an idea developed a few years later by Say and Antoine-Louis-Claude Destutt de Tracy (1754-1836). Two other mathematicians were of particular interest during the period: Nicolas-Franςois Canard (1750-1833) and Charles Franςois de Bicquilley (1738-1814). In 1799, each of them submitted independently a manuscript to the recently established Institut - Canard to the second section (moral and political sciences) and Bicquilley to the first (mathematics and physics). Both texts were published later, respectively as Principes d’economie politique (Canard 1801) and Theorie elementaire du commerce (Bicquilley 1804), and both are outstanding attempts to formalise economic theory (Crepel 1998), Turgot’s theory of prices in particular.

The French Revolution, however, marked in many fields the end of the period of the Enlightenment in France, with, in particular, Condorcet’s emblematic philosophical testament, Tableau historique des progres de l’esprit humain (Caritat de Condorcet 1794 [2004]). Since then the debates never ceased over the causes of the Revolution and the role that the politico-economic writings of the time played in it (the literature on the subject is abundant: for some recent views, see, for example, Charles and Steiner 2000; Shovlin 2006; or Sonenscher 2007). The two main currents of thought outlined in this entry faded away with the end of the century, even if “philosophie economique” survived for some decades with J.-B. Say (Faccarello and Steiner 2008a, 2008b).

Thierry Demals and Gilbert Faccarello

Conclusion

More on the topic Conclusion: