Physiocracy

Phillippe Steiner

Physiocracy is an intellectual movement that arose from the encounter between François Quesnay (1694–1774), physician to King Louis XV, and Victor Riqueti, marquis de Mirabeau (1715–1789), a noble landowner, famous for his book L'ami des hommes (1758). In the 1760s, the movement gained momentum thanks to the emergence of talented men such as Pierre-Samuel Dupont de Nemours (1739–1817); the abbot Nicolas Baudeau (1730–1792), who placed his periodical (Les Ephémérides du citoyen ) at the disposition of the school; and Pierre-Paul Le Mercier de la Rivière (1719–1801), a former administrator in the French West Indies who became the author of a major book, L'ordre naturel et essentiel des sociétés politiques , in which the political views of the school were made available to a wider public. Physiocracy means the power of nature. The term came from the role that Quesnay and his followers gave to nature in the production of (le ...

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