“Philosophic economique” did not remain unchallenged during the Enlightenment.
Unlike the Gournay circle, which was not a school with a clear political agenda, the physiocratic movement and their allies such as Turgot or Condorcet produced during two decades (1756-76) a body of doctrine and a clear strategy for disseminating their ideas, with an eye to changing the policy of the Kingdom and even the shape of the French monarchy as a whole.
In many ways, political economists succeeded in their enterprise. First, although they already had the ear of a few figures in the higher echelons of government, they put themselves across, through their books and journals, as new actors in the Republic of Letters in the 1760s. Second, they were behind the liberalisation of the grain trade during the same decade or during Turgot’s ministry (1774-76). Third, they had strokes of genius that were handed down to economic posterity, such as the invention of the Tableau economique, the use of figures and calculations in political economy, or a clear explanation of the competitive mechanism. But for their contemporaries, the picture was far more ambiguous.Their communication strategy and the invasion of the philosophical sphere were seen by many as a complete sham: their excesses, their posture of devotion, their despotic views and their monologic message seemed at odds with the spirit of the Enlightenment. As far as the grain trade was concerned, the experiments of the 1760s and 1770s were perceived by many to have been the cause of terrible catastrophes. The Promethean posture of the physiocrats, their confidence in a natural order, and their disregard for time and material contingencies were viewed as crude, culpable negligence, and even a negation of the sensitive body of individuals. Finally, their supposedly incredible discoveries in the new science of political economy were, if not incomprehensible, at least very difficult for the vast majority of their readers to understand.
In this way, to eighteenth-century French society from top to bottom, the physiocratic movement remained sometimes strange and heroic, and sometimes suspicious and frightening avant-garde of writers in a new genre. It is therefore not surprising that a vast and protean antiphysiocratic literature emerged beginning with the 1760s. Against the theoretical aspects of the doctrine, their rhetoric and their devotion up to the critique of their economic policies, the spectrum
DOI: 10.4324/9780429202414-7 of opposition was large (see Orain 2015b; Klotz et al. 2017; Kaplan and Reinert 2019). Even their allies and prominent political economists, primarily Turgot and Condorcet, were clearly opposed to the sectarian spirit of physiocracy (Faccarello 1998; Menudo and Rieucau 2014). In complete agreement with Quesnay and Mirabeau as regards the good effects of competition, self-interest and market forces, they criticised some of the physiocrats’ political concepts, sharing ideas with political critiques of physiocracy. This chapter focuses on three important challengers to the latter: the philosophes Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) and Gabriel Bonnot de Mably (1709-1785), and the lawyer, journalist and maverick Simon-Nicolas-Henri Linguet (1736-1794). These three men shared epistemological principles and have built political systems different and often opposed to that of Quesnay, his disciples and their allies. In the 1760-70 decades, they faced directly political economy doctrines and policies. If they were not opposed - quite the contrary - to societies based on agriculture, they combated grain trade liberalisation and the enrichment of farmers and landowners. This chapter first reveals fundamental divergences between the understandings of human behaviour and the social pact of Rousseau, Mably and Linguet, on the one hand, and of political economists on the other hand. It then turns to the opposing positions of these men concerning the main debate of the 1760s on the grain trade. Lastly, it considers the opposing ideals of a wealthy large-scale agricultural system governed by an absolute monarch, that of the physiocrats, versus the virtuous and democratic societies of their opponents.
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