Quesnay’s “philosophie economique”: sensationism, the legislator and “gouvernement economique”

As with “philosophie economique”, political economy is a discourse involving a general view of man, society and politics, and it is not surprising to find Quesnay making explicit philosophical statements when he began his transition from medi­cine to political economy.

A sensationist theory of knowledge

The first constitutive part of Quesnay’s “philosophie economique” is straightfor­ward, since he was a follower of Etienne Bonnot de Condillac’s sensationist phi­losophy. Clear expressions of this philosophy are the second edition of Quesnay’s final medical text (Essai sur l’economie animale 1747) and the article “Evidence” (1756a), which was the first contribution he wrote for the Encyclopedie edited by Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert.

In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), John Locke opened the way to an empiricist conception of knowledge. An important aim of his book was to criticise the theory of innate ideas: his theory of knowledge altered the focus of enquiry, since the issue was now to understand the actual functioning of the human mind. Quesnay adopted this perspective, also expounded by Condillac in several important books published during the 1740s and 1750s. In 1747, Quesnay made clear that he rejected Nicolas Malebranche’s system (Quesnay 1747, III, 213-18) and endorsed instead the sensationist approach, according to which general ideas resulted from sensations (or perceptions) and attention, the active faculty of the human mind (Quesnay 1747, III, 211, 251). However, Quesnay thought that Locke’s theory of ideas was confusing and imprecise. Thus, while retaining a sensationist point of departure, he retained much of Malebranche’s theory of ideas. Ten years later, he developed his view in the entry “Evidence”:

There is a full correspondence between the body and the sensations coming from it...

(Quesnay 1756a, 69, §24)

However, if sensations provided by the body and the active faculties of the mind are the two basic elements for the understanding of human behaviour, Quesnay considered that the mind makes a significant distinction between humans and animals: between simple freedom or “liberte animale”, and enlightened freedom or “liberte d’intelligence” (Quesnay 1747, III, 278, 350-60; 1756a, 83, §52). Men are not machines, they are not passively driven by sensations (1747, III, 279). Since reason is defined as “the human capacity to reach truth in human judgment and to choose the best, thanks to the intellectual faculties of the mind” (1747, III, 312), and freedom as “the power to examine in order to determine, according to reason, whether to act or not” (1747, III, 350), enlightened freedom, or rational action, is the result of the active faculties of the mind when various

motives are examined in order to determine the best action in a given context. What distinguishes a rational actor is the discovery of a best outcome thanks to his attention, his factual knowledge and his ability to grasp truth or “evidence”. The problem of a merchant who has to choose between two goods is an interest­ing illustration of this point:

at first sight, one commodity appears more profitable; though the fear to be mistaken brings him to examine the price of each commodity, and the extra expenses that they require, the possible loss attached to them, their saleabil­ity, their selling prices; by calculation he evaluates all these items and after a comparison, he chooses the more advantageous commodity; this merchant is thus following his desire to enrich himself; then he deliberates in order to avoid a mistake; finally, he chooses the most profitable commodity and often not the one that initially attracted him.

(1747, III, 350-51)

We can thus find in Quesnay a theory of rational economic behaviour: enlight­ened freedom calculates what is the best outcome from a given resource. However, Quesnay considers that men are often driven by their simple freedom or common sense: they do not always scrutinise their basic sensations, applying attention to determine what the best action would be - in many cases, however, common sense decisions are not only good but provide the same result as enlightened reason (1747, III, 266-7).

Agency through interested behaviour

Quesnay’s sensationist approach to human knowledge thus offers a direct path to interested behaviour. However, this approach must be qualified by his belief in a “natural order”, including a “natural economic order” created by God, that men can understand. This means that, while human behaviour is driven by interest and more particularly by economic interest, people can also be governed through their inter­est. On this basis, Quesnay and the Physiocrats advanced a view of the function­ing and management of the economy in which the legislator’s task is to arrive at knowledge of the natural order through his command of the Tableau Economique, the functioning of the circular flow of wealth and the interested behaviour of the different classes of the kingdom.

This part of Quesnay’s philosophie economique is rather more demanding since he never directly addressed it in a book or an article. Nevertheless, the importance given to interested behaviour is central to Quesnay’s “Maximes generales du gou- vernement economique”, a major text written when he had fully developed his system of “gouvernement economique” (economic government).

dividing societies into various orders of citizens, some of them having a sov­ereign authority upon the others, destroys the general interest of the nation and introduces a conflict of interest between the different classes of citizens: such a division would turn upside down the order of the government of an agricultural kingdom that must unify all the interests towards a primordial object, the prosperity of agriculture, which is the source of all the wealth of the state and of all the citizens.

(Quesnay 1767-1768b, 566)

Against Montesquieu’s views on a constitutional machinery in which distinct powers act as a check on each other, thus acknowledging the existence of differ­ent interest groups within society, Quesnay emphasised the need to base political power on the general interest, which is also the particular interest of (enlightened) citizens.

This line of thought became central for Le Mercier de la Riviere when he empha­sised that there is a common interest between the different parts of a society ruled by laws, in a “natural and essential order” (Le Mercier de la Riviere 1767, 214). Accordingly, he put great emphasis on competition and interested behaviour: he regarded these as the nuts and bolts of economic government which were, referring to Alexander Pope, directly connected to God’s providence, lending an elevated perspective upon interested behaviour and its management:

As Pope said,... greed that separates the seller and the buyer in their expecta­tions is precisely what reconciles and brings them together in practice: it is this greed, this desire for enjoyment, which becomes the soul of competition, and puts it in a position to rule despotically over both the sellers and the buyers.

(Le Mercier de la Riviere 1767, 365)

The legislator and the administration

The third constitutive dimension of Quesnay’s philosophie economique is the the­ory of the legislator, expressed by Quesnay’s major linguistic innovation, “eco­nomic government” - there are about 15 occurrences of this phrase in the entries he wrote for the Encyclopedie. It is first associated with the name of Sully^[72] and the core of physiocratic theory - agriculture:

this great minister had grasped the true principles of economic government of the kingdom, establishing the wealth of the king, the strength of the State, the happiness of the people, on the revenue of the land, that is, on agriculture and on foreign trade in its products.

(Quesnay 1757a, 183)

He then refers to the management of real wealth, the net product generated by agriculture: “economic government must look to the growth and the perpetu­ation of this revenue, all the other advantages that depend upon it will develop and sustain themselves” (Quesnay 1757b, 244; see also 220, 256).

The condition of the population and of the employment of men are thus the principal objects of economic government in any State, because it is from the work and industry of men that the fertility of the land stems, as well as the monetary value of its production, and the good use of monetary wealth. Here are the four sources of abundance; they each concur in their mutual growth, but they cannot do so without the general administration of men, of goods, of productions.

(Quesnay 1757-1758, 259)

The legislator, however, must not be involved with the administration, especially in a highly centralised monarchy (Steiner 2018, 68-74). Administration might seem to be a subordinate part of the machinery of government - when Quesnay wants to give more weight to the subject, it is described as “general” administration (Quesnay 1757-1758, 259) - but it is important in terms of consequences. This is the reason why “the government of the revenues of the nation must not be aban­doned to the discretion or to the authority of a subaltern and particular administra­tion” (Quesnay 1757a, 205). Among the reasons behind this lack of confidence in low-level administration is first of all the fear that bad decisions would result from civil servants and clerks being poorly prepared to resist particular interests (Quesnay 1757-1758, 297, 306), and notably the mercantile interest. There is addi­tionally the substantial cost of administrative mismanagement.

It is not so much the excessive gains of the financiers, but the immense amount of salaries paid to the clerks, the injustices and the hindrance in com­merce, that prevent the beneficial progress that the author imagines......................................................................................................................

multitude of clerks employed in the levying of taxes upon goods is in itself a loss of men to the State: all these men paid by the nation do not produce by their work any wealth... this expenditure and these men are nothing but a sheer loss to the kingdom.

(Quesnay 1757b, 230)

However, Quesnay explains that the kingdom can improve if the administration does its proper job when associated with good or economic government: if “bad administration of the kingdom can excessively diminish the revenues of the King”, good administration “can increase these revenues prodigiously” (Quesnay 1757b, 231). In that case, thanks to its contribution to economic government, the adminis­tration belongs to the “productive class”, as is the case when landowners manage their property well:

Landowners can be considered as men who produce through management and the improvement of their properties; the sovereign himself and his min­isters contribute directly and generally to the growth of wealth, through the economic government of the State. Upon this depends the prosperity of the nation, but it is necessary that the administration does not lose sight of the true source of the revenues of the kingdom.

(Quesnay 1757-1758, 305)

Later on, economic government became a central concept, establishing the con­nection between the economic and political fields. Quesnay made this clear in his “Maximes generales du gouvernement economique d’un royaume agricole”, the last important text that he wrote before turning to his (unsuccessful) essays on mathematics.

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