Turgot’s Reflexions

Turgot’s economic analysis in his Reflexions begins with a reminder that equality in landownership, giving each person a piece of land just sufficient to produce his subsis­tence, is a picture of society that has never existed, and never could exist (1766, 43).

What labourer could attend to all the detail necessary in this operation which continues for several months, sometimes for several years? If he could, would he be able to, for a single hide? What a loss of time, space, materials, which might have served either at the same time or successively to tan a large quantity of hides! And even if he did succeed in tanning a single hide, he needs only one pair of shoes: what will he do with the rest? Shall he kill an ox to make his pair of shoes? Shall he cut down a tree to make a pair of wooden shoes? The same thing may be said concerning all the other wants of man, who, if he were reduced to his own field and his own labour, would waste much time and trouble in order to be very badly equipped in every respect, and would also cultivate his land very badly. (Ibid., 45)

If wants are to be adequately met, the need for exchange brings labor contracts into the picture, enabling labor to be sold for commodities. Once again, the benefits of this are linked to the division of labor.

The class of “cultivators” organizes the farming of the land by providing implements and the necessary working capital. Thirdly, there is a class of laborers who work for their subsistence wage, the outcome of competition in the labor market (ibid., 49). The second and third class are active in the production of wealth; the first class, who as Turgot (ibid., 49-50) explains, have inherited their right to landed property, won in the distant past by their remote ancestors. They use their leisure “for the general needs of the Society, such as wars, and the administration of justice,” either as a form of voluntary personal service or, more likely, for payment from the state (ibid., 49).

Progress transforms this class arrangement of responsibility sharing characteristic of an agricultural society into that of a commercial, capital-using society. This takes place once sufficient capital has accumulated to enable highly productive capitalistic farming methods. Property ownership of the land is here completely divorced from the manage­ment of production on that property Such a situation, or higher stage of development, assumes an already wealthy country where capital-using techniques can be applied to agriculture as well as to every other type of production from the relative abundance of capital this implies (ibid., 55).

The arrival of commercial society, that is, a fully-fledged exchange economy, gives opportunities for an even wider application of the division of labor, combined as it can now be with capital-using productive processes. Such a society, as Turgot (ibid., 64-65) put it, “greatly facilitates the separation of the different labours among the different members of society.” This remark is combined with the view that the growing sur­plus from improved agricultural production facilitates the accumulation of “moveable wealth” or capital, which in turn is described “as an indispensable prerequisite for all lucrative work” (ibid., 64-65).

The last proposition takes Turgot’s argument into discussing the various “employ­ments” of capital.

I have already mentioned the preparation of leather of which shoes are made: whoever has seen the workshop of a tanner, cannot help feeling the absolute impossibility of one, or even several poor persons providing themselves with hides, lime, tan, utensils, etc. and causing the buildings necessary for the Tanner to be erected, and of their living for several months until their leather was sold. In this Craft, and in many others, must not those that work at it have learned the trade before they venture to touch the materials, lest they should spoil them in their first attempts?

Here is another indispensable advance. Who then will collect the material for the work, the ingredients, the tools necessary for the process? Who is to construct canals, markets, and buildings of every kind? Who will enable that great number of workmen to live until their leather is sold, of whom none individually would be able to prepare a single hide, consider­ing moreover the profits of the sale of a single hide could not furnish subsistence for any of them? Who will defray the expenses for the instruction of Pupils and Apprentices? Who will maintain them until they are sufficiently instructed, guiding them gradually from an easy labour proportionate to their age, to works that demand the utmost strength and ability? It will be one of those Owners of capitals, or moveable accumulated values, who will employ them partly in advances for the construction of the establishment and the purchase of materi­als, partly for the daily wages of the Workmen who labour in the preparation of them. It is he who will wait for the sale of the leather to return to him not only all his advances, but also a profit sufficient to compensate for what his money would have been worth to him, had he turned it into the acquisition of an estate, and moreover, the wages due to his labour and care, to his risk and even to his skill; for surely, if the profits were the same, he would have preferred living without any exertion on the revenue of the land which he could have purchased with the same capital.

The more advanced model of the Reflexions neatly interrelates progress, division of labor and accumulation of capital in the transition from agricultural to commercial society. In commercial society, the associated class distinctions create an additional property-owning class—the owner of capital or movable riches who, like the owners of land at both the stages of development, can live off of the revenue from their property (interest and profit) without necessarily having to work. The emphasis in the Reflexions, that “magnificent per­formance” as Joseph Schumpeter (1954, 325) called it, and the praise of which Alfred Marshall had anticipated (Groenewegen, 2003). Inequality remained an important fea­ture of this account, but is no longer the major rationale for this more elaborate account of the division of labor by the “mature” Turgot (cf. Groenewegen, 1987, 902) for a more succinct account in the context of the notion of the division of labor).

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