François Quesnay (1694–1774)

French economist; one of the founders of classical political economy; founder of the French Physiocrats.

Quesnay was born on June 4, 1694, in Paris, France, into a landowner’s family. In the 1750s, Quesnay grew interested in economics, especially agriculture, and became acquainted with Diderot, d’Alembert, Helvétius, Condillac among others and began to write for the Encyclopédie.

In 1757, he wrote two economic papers for the Encyclopédie entitled Fermiers (Farmers) and Grains (Grain). In these two articles, Quesnay argued that the main reasons for the deterioration of conditions in the countryside were that the peasants were over-taxed and that the price of grain was too low. In 1757, Quesnay became acquainted with Marquis de Mirabeau, who held that the wealth of a nation was the size of its population. Quesnay, for his part, convinced Mirabeau that agriculture was much more important than population, because agricultural production provided basic necessities for human survival. From then on, Mirabeau became a loyal disseminator of Quesnay’s views. This event marked the beginning of Physiocracy.

In 1758, Quesnay published his most important economic work, Tableau économique (Economic Table), which for the first time tried to account for the process of reproduction and circulation of aggregate social capital, which had an important impact on Marx’s analysis of social reproduction. Marx pointed out that it is one of the great merits of the Physiocrats, that in their Tableau économique they were the first to attempt to depict the annual production in the shape in which it is presented to us after passing through the process of circulation. Of course, Tableau économique is not based on the correct labor theory of value, and were theoretically flawed. Tableau économique treated agriculture as the sole branch of production, but did not consider industry as a branch of production, thus falling into many logical contradictions and errors. At the same time, due to the failure to correctly classify the two major departments of social production—the production of means of production and the production of means of consumption –, coupled with a one-sided understanding of agriculture, it was impossible to arrive at a final and correct solution to the question of the reproduction and circulation of social capital.

In 1766, Quesnay published his famous paper Analyse de la formule arithmétique du tableau économique de la distribution des dépenses annuelles d’une Nation agricole in the Journal de L’Agriculture, and put forth a brief form of his economic table. From 1764 to 1767, Quesnay became the real theoretical mentor of the Physiocrats, and his thoughts were also applied in the economic policies of France. By 1768, the ideological and political influence of the Physiocrats began to decline, and Quesnay’s theory was severely criticized. Quesnay died in Versailles in December 1774.