Quesnay, François

Quesnay, François 1694-1774

BIBLIOGRAPHY

François Quesnay was born in the village of Méré, Île de France, into a family of merchants and small landowners. As a child he received no formal training, but he learned to read and write from a gardener. Largely self-taught, in 1711 he began to study medicine and surgery in Paris. In 1717 he married; he had three children. He first earned a living as a surgeon and contributed several essays to the controversy between surgeons and physicians in France in the 1740s. In 1734 he assumed the position of physician of the Duke of Villeroy and in 1749 of Madame the Pompadour, Louis XV’s favorite, in Versailles. In 1752 he saved the dauphin from smallpox, which won him the king’s favor, a noble title, and a significant amount of money. At the beginning of the 1750s he was elected a member of the Académie des Sciences, Paris, and the Royal Society, London. During this period Quesnay stopped publishing medical works and turned to economics. The years 1756 and 1757 saw the publication of his entries in the Encyclopédie on Fermiers (farmers) and Grains (corn). Three further entries devoted to Hommes (people), Impôts (taxes), and Interét de l’argent (money rate of interest) could not be published in the Encyclopédie after an attempt to assassinate the king, which was grist for the mill of the enemies of the encyclopédistes (d’Alembert, Diderot, and others) and brought the project to a standstill. The first two articles were published only at the beginning of the twentieth century, the third in 1766.

Of particular importance to Quesnay’s works in economics and their impact on the contemporary political debates first in France and then beyond was his encounter with the Marquis de Mirabeau in 1757. Mirabeau became a close follower of Quesnay and untiringly spread the gospel of the new physiocratic school. In 1758 Quesnay composed the first edition of the Tableau économique, which contained the first schematic account of the intertwined processes of production, distribution, and disposition of the riches of an entire nation. Mirabeau compared the importance of the Tableau to that of the discovery of fire and the wheel; Marx called it the “most brilliant idea” of political economy up until then and the physiocrats “the true fathers of modern political economy” (Marx 1963, p. 44). Two further editions of the Tableau followed in 1759. In 1763 Mirabeau published the Philosophie rurale in three volumes, a work that was heavily influenced (and partly even written) by Quesnay. In the same year the physiocrats began to engage in economic policy debates. Their articles appeared first in the Journal de l’agriculture and then in Éphémerides du citoyen, the “sect’s” main outlet. Quesnay contributed several essays on themes such as the natural law doctrine, the so-called sterility of industry, and, in 1766, a simplified version of the Tableau in an article titled “Analyse de la formule arithmétique du Tableau économique.” The school’s influence in France peaked in the late 1760s and then steadily declined. Quesnay died in December 1774 near Versailles.

Quesnay conceived the process of production as a circular flow, with the rent of land being traced back to the existence of surplus product ( produit net ) left over after all means of production have been used up and all means of subsistence in support of the laboring population have been deducted from annual gross outputs. With a social division of labor, the products have to be exchanged for one another in interdependent markets. In order for the process to be able to continue unhampered, prices must cover physical real costs of production, consisting of means of production and subsistence, plus, in agriculture, the rent of land. A major concern of Quesnay was with the system’s potential for growth. This depended on whether the surplus was consumed productively or unproductively and whether new methods of production could be developed and introduced, which by increasing productivity increased the social surplus.

Quesnay’s works had a major influence on the development of central concepts and analytical tools in economics. After him the idea of ubiquitous economic interdependence never left the realm of economics again. Marx’s analysis of simple and extended reproduction in volume 2 of Capital drew on the Tableau (see Marx 1974, and Gehrke and Kurz 1995), as did Wassily Leontief’s (1941) input-output analysis. Piero Sraffa’s (1960) reformulation of the classical approach to the theory of value and distribution was inspired by the physiocrats’ multisector analysis. Also inspiring Sraffa was the physiocrats’ concern with the implications for the theory of value and distribution of the specific conditions of the transformation of matter and energy into new forms of matter and energy in given sociotechnical conditions. Quesnay’s concept of production as a circular flow is in marked contrast with the view entertained by some marginalist economists such as Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk of production as a oneway avenue of finite duration leading from the services of original factors of production to final output. The concept of a closed system, as we encounter it in Quesnay, is employed in fields of economics that take into account the laws of thermodynamics, such as environmental economics.

SEE ALSO Economics; Marx,Karl; Physiocracy; Surplus; Sraffa,Piero

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gehrke, Christian, and Heinz D. Kurz. 1995. Karl Marx on Physiocracy. European Journal of the History of Economic Thought 2 (1): 53–90.

Hecht, Jacqueline. 2005. La vie de François Quesnay. In François Quesnay. Oeuvres économiques complètes et autres textes. 2 vols. Ed. Christine Théré, Loic Charles and Jean-Claude Perrot. Paris: Institut National d’Études Démographiques. Vol. 2, pp. 1331–1420.

Institut National d’Études Démographiques. 2005. François Quesnay. Oeuvres économiques complètes et autres textes. 2 vols. Ed. Christine Théré, Loic Charles and Jean-Claude Perrot. Paris: Author.

Leontief, Wassily. 1941. The Structure of American Economy, 1919–1929: An Empirical Application of Equilibrium Analysis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Marx, Karl. 1963. Theories of Surplus Value. Part 1. Trans. Emile Burns. Moscow: Progress Publishers.

Marx, Karl. 1974. Capital. Vol. 2. London: Lawrence and Wishart.

Quesnay, François. 1972. Tableau économique. 3rd ed. Ed. and trans. Marguerite Kuczynski and Ronald Meek. London: Macmillan.

Sraffa, Piero. 1960. Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities: Prelude to a Critique of Economic Theory. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.

Vaggi, Gianni. 1987. The Economics of François Quesnay. London: Macmillan.

Heinz D. Kurz