physiocracy

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physiocracy

a school of thought or set of economic ideas based on the writings of QUESNAY and other 18th-century French economists and philosophers. The physiocrats felt that land was the single source of income and wealth in society capable of producing a ‘net product’. They also believed in the idea of a ‘natural order’ in society, which harmonized the particular interests of individual citizens with the common interests of society. This made them strong proponents of individual liberty and strong opponents of government intervention in society, other than to protect the individual and his property rights. Adam SMITH was strongly influenced by physiocratic ideas, and in his hands the ‘natural order’ was spelled out in the form of the workings of the market mechanism. See also PRIVATE-ENTERPRISE ECONOMY.

Collins Dictionary of Economics, 4th ed. © C. Pass, B. Lowes, L. Davies 2005

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Quesnay, François

References in periodicals archive ?

In fact, two of the commonly held important teachings of the physiocrats known as laissez faire or natural law and their adherence to economic growth through agriculture underlie Adam Smith's book and the economic policies of the Philippines.

Roots of the country's economic problems

The Physiocrats have been credited with affecting a pivotal shift within economic thought that helped craft the conditions for the French bourgeois revolution (Orain 2015: 384).

CLASS ANTAGONISM AND LANDED PROPERTY IN THE FUNCTIONAL DISTRIBUTION OF INCOME IN AUSTRALIA

Quesnay uses the phrase "pauvres paysans, pauvre royaume" (poor peasants, poor kingdom) in a footnote in "Maximes generates du gouvernement economique d'un royaume agricole," in Eugene Daire, ed., Physiocrates, Part 1 (Paris: Guillaumin, 1846), 99n-100n.

"The School of Liberty" (1890)

We saw in our review of economist Michael Hudson's book Killing the Host (reviewed in our Summer 2016 issue) that Hudson traces the idea back to the French Physiocrats. Of "Adam Smith, David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill and their contemporaries," he says that "their major aim was to prevent landlords from 'reaping where they have not sown.'" He quotes a passage from Mill's Principles of Political Economy supporting a "general land-tax" against the part of the land-value that was not due to the "industry exerted by the proprietor." Hudson devotes pages to the late nineteenth century American economist Simon Patten on the same subject.

Two more American authors calling for a 'Basic Income Guarantee'

The French team included "the Encyclopedists and Rousseau, the Physiocrats and Condorcet," as well as Hobbes, Godwin, Priestly, Price, Paine, and Jefferson.

The varieties of Burke in contemporary American conservative thought

In the latter half of eighteenth century, the French Physiocrats presented the first systematic and comprehensive theoretical model of economics, emphasizing the idea that goods and services are produced not for the direct use of their producers but for sale to others.

The Politics of Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers

(268.) Ackerman, supra note 1, at 17-18 (ascribing the origin of the direct/indirect distinction to French physiocrats such as Baron Turgot).

What the Constitution means by "duties, imposts, and excises" - and "taxes" direct or otherwise

The paradigm in which De Tracy and other French liberals operated diverged significantly from the British Classical School, (1) springing from the contributions of French physiocrats and having been "nourished by a long and glorious tradition which reached back through Condillac, Turgot, Quesnay and Cantillon to the Scholastics" (Salerno, 1978, p.

Division of labor and society: the social rationalism of Mises and Destutt de Tracy

The physiocrats thought all value came from nature, which true labour worked up by tending the land.