Conclusions
Turgot, the generalist, as demonstrated by the many intellectual topics he pursued, also upheld the tremendous importance of specialization of professions and the division of labor in many of his economic and administrative writings.
After all, Turgot portrayed specialization and division of labor as indispensable to development and progress, whether historically, economically, or socially contemplated. As shown in the previous sections of this chapter, his economic writings, especially his most important one, the Reflexions sur la Formation et la Distributions des Richesses (1766), portrayed both the social and the manufacturing division of labor, while some of his policy proposals, especially those for reforming the corvee and the milice at both the provincial and the national level, could be described as resting on the productivity consequences from introducing a division of labor (see section 4). On this topic, as in many other parts of economics, he was a true classical economist who, like some of his contemporaries, placed this type of evaluation of labor organization at the forefront of his economic analysis. It is this type of classical economics that also inspired Alessandro Roncaglia to make some of his contributions to economic literature.Notes
1 Available in French at http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k57291/f5.image.
2 Some useful background to these reforms is provided by Dakin (1939, chapter 5) and by Poirier (1999, 91-94 and 283-88).