In his History of Economic Analysis, Joseph Schumpeter does not hesitate to qualify the critique of Physiocracy deployed in Graslin's Essai analytique sur la richesse et sur l'impôt (1767) as “the best ever proffered.” Yet the author of the work was unknown in the Republic of Letters: not having belonged to the circle of young men of letters gathered around the intendant of commerce Jacques Vincent de Gournay (1712–1759) in the 1750s, lacking avowed relations with other theoreticians of the time, away from the capital for more than 15 years, Jean-Joseph-Louis Graslin (1727–1790) exercised the function of tax collector at the General Farm bureau in Nantes, an Atlantic city then at the height of its prosperity. Yet one would be mistaken to take him for a completely isolated novice. We know in fact that he frequented the same, highly prestigious collège, Dormans-Beauvais, in Paris, as the future famous economist, Gournay circle-fellow and Antiphysiocrat François Véron de Forbonnais (1722–1800), that they had common friends, in particular diplomat Pierre-Michel Hennin (1728–1807), common relatives, and that Forbonnais's father and Graslin were members of the same scholarly society, the Royal Agricultural Society of the Touraine généralité. This last element manifests a taste, if not for political economy, at least for agricultural questions and patriotic academies. Graslin admits, moreover, in the foreword to his work, that “long devoted to studying the elements of economic science, [he] had recognized all the falsity of the principles imagined by the writers who are regarded as the masters of that science.”

Judging that his ideas had sufficiently matured, Graslin was to take advantage of a contest proposed in 1766 by the Royal Agricultural Society of Limoges on indirect taxation both to refute the ideas of François Quesnay (1694–1774) and his disciples and to present his own reflections on the question. Not having won the contest (and for good reason: he inverted the assumptions of the program, which were of clearly Physiocratic inspiration), he nevertheless obtained an honorable mention, and decided to publish his memoir anonymously at the end of 1767 under the title: Essai analytique sur la richesse et sur l'impôt. At the same time he entered another contest, one proposed by the Imperial Society of St. Petersburg, this time on serfdom.