As Sraffa's library shows,
Francois Quesnay and Adam Smith symbolize the impact of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution on books dealing with the theoretical concepts that were developed.
Thus, besides moral and political (or legal) cosmopolitanism there is also a form of economic cosmopolitanism associated with the work of
Francois Quesnay and Adam Smith who both sought to diminish the role of the politics in the economic realm and to establish conditions for free commerce across international borders.
(1.)
Francois Quesnay, Webster's Dictionary of Quotations (New York: Smithmark Publishers, 1992), 328.
Their leader was
Francois Quesnay, and Adam Smith was very impressed with their theories.
The Economics of
Francois Quesnay, Duke University Press, Durham.
Political economy, whose leading eighteenth-century champions were Richard Cantillon,
Francois Quesnay, and Adam Smith, followed up on Thomas Hobbes and William Petty's supposition that individuals behaved in the economic realm as rational, self-centered decision makers.
Francois Quesnay (1694 - 1774) is considered to be the founder and leader of physiocracy, though many of his ideas are to be found in the writings of earlier French economists, such as Jean Claude Vincent, sieur de Gournay; Sebastien Vauban; and Pierre de Boisguilbert.
'Marx et Quesnay', in
Francois Quesnay et la Physiocratie.
Turgot explained that "every type of labor, in agriculture, in industry or in commerce, requires advances," and that, consequently, "capitals are the indispensable foundation of all lucrative enterprises."(3) With equal brevity,
Francois Quesnay, in his General Maxims, in print perhaps as early as 1758 and thereafter published in numerous, somewhat varied editions, asserted that "it is not so much men as wealth which must be attracted to the countryside." The more wealth is employed in cultivation, the less men are required and the more agriculture prospers and yields revenue.