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.
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).
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.
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.
The French team included "the Encyclopedists and Rousseau, the
Physiocrats and Condorcet," as well as Hobbes, Godwin, Priestly, Price, Paine, and Jefferson.
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.
(268.) Ackerman, supra note 1, at 17-18 (ascribing the origin of the direct/indirect distinction to French
physiocrats such as Baron Turgot).
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.
The
physiocrats thought all value came from nature, which true labour worked up by tending the land.