Louis-Sébastien Mercier, lecteur et propagateur de l'économie politique

Abstract

Marcel Dorigny : L.-S. Mercier, reader and populariser of economics. Although Mercier was not a major economist of the late 18th Century, economics is always present in his writings, especially before the Revolution. He helped to popularise the issues that were at the heart of vital controversies, such as free trade in corn, luxury and social inequality, credit and currency, or property rights. He was a reader and propagator of other people's writings, but he was not a neutral observer. His radical, almost obsessive, hostility towards Quesnay's school did not make him an anti-liberal doubting the legitimacy of property rights or defending social egalitarianism. On the contrary, Mercier was a virulent defender of individualism and inequality as factors of unlimited economic progress. He belongs to one of the founding currents of French liberalism, distinct from the Physiocrats but which did not adopt all of the theories of the British school.