The Physiocrats Argue Land Is the Only Source of Wealth
Quesnay's Tableau economique tries to map how wealth actually flows through a nation
Quick facts
- Founder
- Francois Quesnay
- Work
- Tableau economique
- Published
- 1758
- Key idea
- Land as the source of wealth; laissez-faire
What happened
Francois Quesnay, court physician to Louis XV at Versailles, published his Tableau economique in 1758, a diagrammatic model tracing how income flows between landowners, farmers, and merchants through a national economy. Quesnay and the school of thinkers who gathered around him, known as the physiocrats, argued that agriculture was the only truly productive source of new wealth and that governments should stop interfering with markets through tariffs and controls, a policy stance summarized in the phrase laissez-faire, laissez-passer. Quesnay's follower Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours promoted physiocracy in a 1768 treatise as a new science standing alongside the natural sciences, and the physiocrat sympathizer Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot briefly served as Louis XVI's controller general in the 1770s before opposition to his reforms drove him from office.
Why it matters
The physiocrats were the first group to try modeling a national economy as an interconnected system rather than a collection of separate transactions, and their argument against government interference in markets became one of the direct influences Adam Smith engaged with, and partly rejected, when he wrote The Wealth of Nations.
How we know
Quesnay's Tableau economique and the physiocrats' writings survive in their original editions; the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's entry on economics in early modern philosophy traces the Tableau's 1758 publication and the school's later history from these texts.
Sources
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Economics in Early Modern Philosophy · Reputable sourceplato.stanford.edu · The domain "plato.stanford.edu" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
- Library of Economics and Liberty (Econlib). Francois Quesnay · General sourceeconlib.org · Cited as a "reference" source (no stronger domain match).
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