The physiocrats considered that François Quesnay had created a ‘new science’, political economy. They set themselves the task of celebrating this event by writing its history. It is to this end that, in 1768, Pierre Samuel Du Pont wrote De l'origine et des progrès et d'une science nouvelle. In the first pages of his essay, Du Pont attributed the foundation of the science of political economy to ‘three equally worthy friends of the inventor of the Tableau Économique: de Gournay, M. le Marquis de Mirabeau and M. le Mercier de la Riviere’. The latter two, Victor Riqueti de Mirabeau (1715–1789) and Paul-Pierre Lemercier de la Rivière (1719–1801), were the doctor's principal collaborators, but Jacques Vincent de Gournay died early, in June 1759, before physiocracy as a concept had emerged. As intendant of commerce, Gournay (1712–1759) was at the centre of a circle of writers and administrators in France in the 1750s. These men, all closely associated with commerce, were charged with translating and disseminating what they called the ‘science of commerce’. Gournay's circle shared some key elements with the physiocrats. For example, both groups considered competition to be the principal driving force for the creation and circulation of wealth. They were also both very critical of the guilds and favoured freedom in the grain trade. However, either from a theoretical or a political point of view, Gournay's circle was less homogeneous than the physiocratic movement. The science of commerce cannot be summarized as a body of doctrines because it was really the product of group discussions. In addition, most of the authors in Gournay's circle did not see ‘freedom’ and ‘property’ as being governed by the immutable laws of a transcendent ‘natural order’. In contrast to the ahistorical truths of the physiocratic order, which local and regional history and circumstances had to yield to, the science of commerce was characterized by an ongoing focus on realities, contingencies and local practices. This epistemological stance was the source of future debates between the followers of the two. For example, Gournay was aware of the need to reinforce the French monarchy's naval capacity, and he therefore defended the instigation of a Navigation Act and the colonial Exclusif.

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.

Probably frightened by Dupont's fiery exhortations to ‘make war on the lunatics’, that is to say on the enemies of the Physiocrats who ‘make use of their talents to distort the truth’, Simon-Nicolas-Henri Linguet (1736–1794), one of these ‘lunatics’, decided to give the following epigraph to the work he had written against them, his Réponse aux docteurs modernes.

At that time, Forbonnais, Graslin, Béardé de l'Abbaye and Mably had left the literary battlefield, at least for a while. Galiani was in Italy and Necker had not yet launched an attack. Was it really worth it anyway? Since Maynon d'Invault's downfall (at the end of 1769), a movement of ‘de-liberalization’, a ‘restoration policy’ has been at work under the auspices of the new controller-general Terray and Quesnay's school seemed to be in a rather delicate position vis-à-vis the new power, and even so vis-à-vis their new popular notoriety during riots and public disorders. It had been given the freedom to export grain, hence the rise in food costs and the terrible events that ensued. Accused, scoffed at and rebuked, the Économistes defended themselves and even launched a counter-attack against Galiani's Dialogues, which had done them such harm. Blows had been landed, but the Économistes had not fallen yet. At the beginning of the decade, one man in particular wanted to be part of the Antiphysiocratic fight and strike the fatal deathblow. His name was Linguet, who, from that point on, was considered ‘one of their most fearsome’ opponents, the ‘most articulate and aggressive critic’ of Physiocracy and even ‘their most ferocious and relentless scourge’.

As we shall now see, a number of principles expressed in his founding work of 1767 were destined to oppose him to Quesnay and his disciples. However, a distinct transition occurred. During the mid-19 60s, Linguet had been inspired by their ideas but, by 1769, he had begun to have doubts, which led him to express open criticism of them in 1770. This triggered direct confrontation the following year. The liberalization of the grain trade was the main reason for this change, but also his overall lack of knowledge of the Physiocratic principles up to 1771. Indeed, until then, Linguet had gone with the flow, but did not really know what to make of the substance of such policies.

The place assigned to Gabriel Bonnot de Mably (1709–1785) in contemporary historiography is far from trivial when one takes an interest in his critique of Physiocracy. From the mid-nineteenth century to the 1970s, the matter seemed to be settled: like a Meslier, a Morelly or a Dom Deschamps, Mably was an avant-garde thinker of utopian socialism. In reaction to this canonical interpretation, the work of Procacci or Maffey has tried on the contrary to make of him an authentic reactionary. Expelled from the Enlightenment, Mably became a scholastic monarchist, a realist in the service of absolutism, and even, he who did his secondary studies in a college run by the Congregation, a “Jesuit”! This return of the pendulum, which had little repercussion, was useful in the sense that it made it possible to discuss and partially re-examine the utopian character of Mably's thought. But it erred in the other direction by minimizing the critique that the philosophe addressed to private property and especially to inequalities.

At almost the same time, the “revisionism” that followed the work of the Cambridge school and in particular of the famous Machiavellian Moment of J. G. A Pocock succeeded in extricating that thought from its anachronistic interpretations, whether “progressive” or “reactionary.” The idea then was to combat the traditional notion of the emergence, then the triumph, of Lockean liberalism over the course of the eighteenth century by showing that another tradition, that of “civic humanism” or “classical republicanism” was at work at that time. Highly critical of the “consumer revolution,” of free trade and enrichment as an end in itself, this tradition is said to have used a different vocabulary, that of “virtue,” “civic spirit,” the refusal of “luxury,” and praised citizens’ active participation in the exercise of power. Although it had found a place in the Anglo-Saxon world, this interpretative grid was long left aside by French historians of the Enlightenment until the recent work of Wright, Baker, Kwass and Shovlin. The first two looked particularly at Mably, and their work undeniably enabled some progress in our understanding of the philosophe's thought by extricating him from the earlier dead ends.