Condorcet and physiocratic political economy | Tangente

-

François Quesnay's Tableau économique (1758) gave rise to the "sect of the Economists," also known as the Physiocrats because their philosophy rested on agriculture, which they regarded as the sole producer of wealth. The Tableau économique, a schematic representation of the circulation of wealth, was a forerunner of the input-output tables used in modern national accounting. It distinguished three classes: the productive (agricultural) class, the landowning class and the sterile class (everyone else). Other tenets of the doctrine included complete freedom of trade and the principle that only landowners should pay tax, which justified the idea that only they could participate in political life. These ideas influenced the government from 1764 onward and were later taken up by Condorcet.

Condorcet's economic liberalism --------------------------------------