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Quesnay and the Road to Modernity: Technology, Markets, and Polity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 June 2009

Gianni Vaggi
Affiliation:
Department of Political Economy and Quantitative Methods, University of Pavia, Via S. Felice 5, 27100 Pavia, Italy.

Extract

“PAUVRES PAYSANS, PAUVRE ROYAUME” (Quesnay's emphasis), this is the synthesis of the evil and damages of France in Extrait des économies royales de M. De Sully (Kuzcynski and Meek 1972, p. 10). This text is made up of twenty-four short maxims that accompany the third edition of the Tableau économique, in the first months of the 1759; the words quoted refer to a note and to maxim fourteen. A similar text, with the emphasis, is in the Maximes générales du gouvernemente économique d'un royaume agricole published in the 1767 in the Physiocratie by Pierre Samuel Du Pont de Nemours, a disciple of Francois Quesnay (INED 1958, vol. II, p. 973). This is no secondary item in the work of the master of Physiocracy; in this brief sentence and in that emphasis there is the synthesis and analysis of the main problem of France in the eighteenth century.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The History of Economics Society 2002

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References

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