The Political Failure of an Economic Theory

Abstract

One overwhelming fact was obvious to all contemporary observers at the end of the Ancien regime: in this large and fundamentally rural kingdom of France, the economic weight of agriculture could not be ignored. “All the authors of the period, Utopists, exiled Huguenots, Economists (…) valued the cultivation of land” and, for Vauban and Boisguibert especially, “agricultural activity has a primacy that is both historical (in the development of humanity) and logical (in the causal explanation of the productive process)”, notes Perrot. 1 A third reason can be added: land’s symbolic value, since the acquisition of land was the key to gaining titles of nobility for the bourgeoisie of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is therefore appropriate to relate ideas on population to the thinking about agriculture and physiocracy – the “rule of nature” – presents a twofold originality in relation to the other intellectual currents of the period.