Quesnay, Turgot, Diderot, and the Transition to Capitalism in Eighteenth-Century France

Historians associate Quesnay, Turgot and the physiocrats with the deregulation of the grain trade and the right to export grain. The physiocrats maintained that this policy would raise prices and create incentives to invest in agriculture. I will argue in this paper, however, that their writings betray misgivings about the wealthy classes’ propensity to spend on luxury consumption despite the allure of profitable investment. Quesnay and his followers therefore called on the monarchy to impose legal despotism to establish the “natural order” and oblige the various classes to pursue private interests, not in support of luxury consumption, but guided by reason to assure a continuous flow of capital into agriculture. This “natural order” resembles what Marx and Weber described as the competitive imperative of capitalism, which puts pressure on businesspeople to reinvest and accumulate capital as the sole means to keep it. The physiocrats promoted their vision of the “natural order,” because, given the agrarian relations of Old Regime France, the capitalist imperative to reinvest profits did not exist. Diderot supported positions on property rights and free trade associated with Physiocracy but criticized this view that wealth had to be forced back into production rather spent on useful or enjoyable items of consumption. Diderot’s criticism, like the reservations of Marx and Weber, underscores a broader critique of capitalism’s focus on profit over human wellbeing.