by Will Durant
Despite this setback, physiocratic notions made their way, at home and abroad. An edict of 1758 had established free trade in wool and woolen products. Adam Smith visited Quesnay in 1765, was attracted by his “modesty and simplicity,” and was confirmed in his own predilection for economic liberty. He judged “the capital error of this system … to lie in its representing the class of artificers, manufacturers, and merchants as altogether barren and unproductive,” but he concluded that “this system, with all its imperfections, is perhaps the nearest approximation to the truth that has yet been published on the subject of political economy.”45 The ideas of the physiocrats accorded well with the desire of England—already the greatest exporter among the nations—to reduce export and import dues. The doctrine that wealth would grow faster under freedom from governmental restrictions on production and distribution found sympathetic hearing in Sweden under Gustavus III, in Tuscany under Grand Duke Leopold, in Spain under Charles III. Jefferson’s affection for a government that governed least was in part an echo of physiocratic principles. Henry George acknowledged the influence of the physiocrats on his advocacy of a single tax falling upon realty.46 The philosophy of free enterprise and trade charmed the American business class, and gave an added stimulus to the rapid development of industry and wealth in the United States. In France the physiocrats provided a theoretical basis for freeing the middle classes from feudal and legal impediments to domestic trade and political advancement. Before Quesnay died (December 16, 1774) he had the comfort of seeing one of his friends made controller general of finance; and had he lived fifteen years more he would have seen the triumph of many physiocratic ideas in the Revolution.
IV. THE RISE OF TURGOT: 1727-74
Was Turgot a physiocrat? His rich and diverse background repels every label. He came of an old family—“une bonne race” Louis XV called it—which had through generations filled with distinction important posts. His father was a councilor of state and prévôt des marchands— the highest administrative office in Paris. His older brother was maître des requêtes (secretary for petitions and claims), and a leading member, of the Parlement of Paris. As a younger son, Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot was intended for the priesthood. In the Collège Louis-le-Grand, in the Seminary of St.-Sulpice, and in the Sorbonne he passed all tests with credit, and at the age of nineteen he became Abbé de Brucourt. He learned to read Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Spanish, Italian, German, and English, and to speak the last three of these languages fluently. In 1749 he was elected a prior of the Sorbonne, and in that capacity he delivered lectures two of which made a stir beyond the ramparts of theology.
In July, 1750, he addressed the Sorbonne in Latin on “The Advantages that the Establishment of Christianity Has Conferred upon the Human Race”: it had rescued antiquity from superstition, had preserved many arts and sciences, and had presented to mankind the liberating conception of a law of justice transcending all human prejudices and interests. “Could one hope for this from any other principle than religion? … The Christian religion alone has … brought to light the rights of humanity.”47 There is an echo of philosophy in this piety; apparently the young prior had read Montesquieu and Voltaire, with some effect upon his theology.
In December, 1750, he addressed the Sorbonne with a Tableau philosophique des progrès successifs de l’esprit humain. This historic enunciation of the new religion of progress was a remarkable performance for a youth of twenty-three. Anticipating Comte—perhaps following Vico—he divided the history of the human mind into three stages: theological, metaphysical, and scientific:
Before man understood the causal connection of physical phenomena, nothing was so natural as to suppose they were produced by intelligent beings, invisible, and resembling themselves. … When philosophers recognized the absurdity of these fables about the gods, but had not yet gained an insight into natural history, they thought to explain the causes of phenomena by abstract expressions such as essences and faculties.... It was only at a later period that, by observing the reciprocal mechanical action of bodies, hypotheses were formed which could be developed by mathematics and verified by experience.48
Animals, said this brilliant youth, know no progress; they remain the same from generation to generation; but man, by having learned to accumulate and transmit knowledge, is able to improve the tools by which he deals with his environment and enriches his life. As long as this accumulation and transmission of knowledge and technology continues, progress is inevitable, though it may be interrupted by natural calamities and the vicissitudes of states. Progress is not uniform, nor is it universal; some nations advance while others retreat; art may stand still while science moves on; but the sum of the movement is forward. For good measure Turgot predicted the American Revolution: “Colonies are like fruit, which clings to the tree only until it is ripe. By becoming self-sufficient, they do what Carthage did, what America will sometime do.”49
Inspired by the idea of progress, Turgot, while still in the Sorbonne, planned to write a history of civilization. Only his notes for some sections of the project survive; from these it appears that he had intended to include the history of language, religion, science, economics, sociology, and psychology as well as the rise and fall of states.50 His father’s death having left him an adequate income, he determined, late in 1750, to leave the ecclesiastical career. A fellow abbé protested, and promised him rapid advancement, but Turgot replied, according to Du Pont de Nemours, “I cannot condemn myself to wear a mask throughout my life.”51
He had taken only minor orders, and was free to enter a political career. In January, 1752, he became substitute attorney general, and in December counselor in the Parlement; in 1753 he bought the office of maître des requêtes, in which he won a reputation for industry and justice. In 1755-56 he accompanied Gournay on tours of inspection in the provinces; now he learned economics by direct contact with farmers, merchants, and manufacturers. Through Gournay he met Quesnay, and through him Mirabeau père, Du Pont de Nemours, and Adam Smith. He never listed himself as of the physiocratic school, but his money and his pen were main supports of Du Pont’s magazine, Éphémérides.
Meanwhile (1751) his mind and manners won him welcome in the salons of Mme. Geoffrin, Mme. de Graffigny, Mme. du Deffand, and Mlle. de Lespinasse. There he met d’Alembert, Diderot, Helvétius, d’Holbach, and Grimm. One early result of these contacts was his publication (1753) of two Lettres sur la tolérance. To Diderot’s Encyclopédie he contributed articles on existence, etymology, fairs, and markets, but when the enterprise was condemned by the government he withdrew as a contributor. Traveling in Switzerland and France, he visited Voltaire (1760), beginning a friendship that lasted till Voltaire’s death. The sage of Ferney wrote to d’Alembert: “I have scarcely ever seen a man more lovable or better informed.”52 The philosophes claimed him as their own, and hoped through him to influence the King.
In 1766 he wrote, for two Chinese students who were about to return to China, a hundred-page outline of economics—Réflexions sur la formation et la distribution des richesses. Published in the Éphémérides (1769-70), it was acclaimed as one of the most concise and forceful expositions of physiocratic theory. Land, said Turgot, is the only source of wealth; all classes but cultivators of the soil live on the surplus that these produce beyond their own need; this surplus constitutes a “wages fund” from which the artisan class can be paid. Here follows an early formulation of what came to be known as “the iron law of wages”:
The wages of the worker are limited to his subsistence by competition among the workmen. … The mere worker, who has only his arms and his industry, has nothing except in so far as he succeeds in selling his toil to others. … The employer pays him as little as he can; and as he has a choice among a great number of workers, he prefers the one who works for the least wage. The workers are therefore obliged to lower their price in competition with one another. In every kind of work it cannot fail to happen, and actually it does happen, that the wages of the worker
are limited to what is necessary for his subsistence.53
Turgot went on to stress the importance of capital. Someone through his savings must supply the tools and materials of production before the worker can be employed, and he must keep the workers alive until the sale of the product replenishes his capital. As an enterprise is never sure of success, profits must be allowed to balance the risk of losing the capital. “It is this continual advance and return of capital which constitutes … the circulation of money, that useful and fruitful circulation which gives life to all the labors of the society, … and is with great reason compared to the circulation of the blood in the animal body.”54 This circulation must not be interfered with; profits and interest, like wages, must be allowed to reach their natural level according to supply and demand. Capitalists, manufacturers, merchants, and workingmen should be free from taxation; this should fall only upon landowners, who will reimburse themselves by charging more for their products. No duty should be charged on the transport or sale of any article of consumption.
In these Réflexions Turgot laid down the theoretical basis of nineteenthcentury capitalism—before the effective organization of labor. One of the kindest and most honest men of his time could see for the workers no better future than a subsistence wage. Yet this same man became a devoted public servant. In August, 1761, he was appointed intendant—the king’s supervisor—of the généralité of Limoges, one of the poorest regions of France. He estimated that forty-eight to fifty per cent of the income of the land went in taxes to the state and tithes to the Church. The local peasants were sullen, the nobles uncouth. “I have the misfortune,” he wrote to Voltaire, “of being an intendant. I say the misfortune, for in this age of quarrels and remonstrances there is happiness only in living the philosophic life among one’s books and friends.” Voltaire answered: “You will win the hearts and the purses of Limousins … I believe that an intendant is the only person who can be useful. Can he not have the highways repaired, the fields cultivated, the marshes drained, and can he not encourage manufactures?”
Turgot did all that. He labored zealously in Limoges for thirteen years, winning affection from the people and dislike from the nobility. He repeatedly—vainly—petitioned the Council of State to reduce the tax rate. He improved the allotment of taxes, remedied injustices, organized a civil service, freed the trade in grain, and built 450 miles of roads; they were part of that nationwide road-building program (begun by the French government in 1732) to which we owe the lovely tree-shaded highways of France today. Before Turgot the roads had been built by corvée— the forced and unpaid labor of the peasantry; he abolished corvée in Limoges, and paid for the labor by a general tax on all the laity. He persuaded the inhabitants to grow potatoes as human food, instead of only for animals. His vigorous measures of relief in the famine periods of 1768-72 won universal admiration.
On July 20, 1774, a new King invited him to join the central government. All France rejoiced, and looked to him as the man who would save the crumbling state.
V. THE COMMUNISTS
While the physiocrats were laying the theoretical basis of capitalism, Morelly, Mably, and Linguet were expounding socialism and communism. As the educated classes surrendered their hopes of heaven they consoled themselves with earthly substitutes: the well-to-do, ignoring religious prohibitions, indulged themselves with wealth and power, women and wine and art; the commoners found solace in visions of a utopia in which the goods of the earth would be equally shared between simple and clever, weak and strong.
There was no socialist movement in the eighteenth century, no such definite group as the Levellers in Cromwell’s England, or the communistic Jesuits of Paraguay; there were only individuals here and there adding their voices to a mounting cry that would become, in “Gracchus” Babeuf, a factor in the French Revolution. We recall that the priestly skeptic Jean Meslier, in his Testament of 1733, pleaded for a communistic society in which the national product would be equally shared, and men and women would mate and part as they pleased; meanwhile, he suggested, it would help if a few kings should be killed.55 Seven years before this proclamation came to print, Rousseau, in his second Discourse (1755), denounced private property as the source of all the evils of civilization; but even in that outburst he disclaimed any socialistic program, and by 1762 the heroes of his books were well equipped with property.
In the same year with Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin of Inequality appeared the Code de la nature of an obscure radical of whom, aside from his books, we know hardly anything but his last name, Morelly. We must not confuse him with André Morellet, whom we have seen as a contributor to the Encyclopédie. Morelly first roused the wits with a Traitédes qualités d’un grand roi (1751), which pictured a communistic king. In 1753 he gave his dream poetic form as Naufrage des îles flottantes, ou La Basiliade; here the good king, perhaps after reading Rousseau’s first Discourse, leads his people back to a simple and natural life. The best and fullest exposition of the communistic ideal was Morelly’s Code de la nature (1755-60). Many ascribed it to Diderot, and the Marquis d’Argenson pronounced it superior to Montesquieu’s L’Esprit des lois (1748). Morelly thought, like Rousseau, that man is by nature good, that his social instincts incline him to good behavior, and that the laws corrupted him by establishing and protecting private property. He praised Christianity for inclining to communism, and mourned that the Church had sanctioned property. The institution of private property had generated “vanity, fatuity, pride, ambition, villainy, hypocrisy, viciousness … ; everything evil resolves itself into this subtle and pernicious element, the desire to possess.”56 Then sophists conclude that the nature of man makes communism impossible, whereas in real sequence it was the violation of communism that perverted the natural virtues of man. If it were not for the greed, egoism, rivalries, and hatreds engendered by private property, men would live together in peaceful and co-operative brotherhood.
The road to reconstruction must begin by clearing all obstacles to the free discussion of morals and politics, “allowing full liberty to wise men to attack the errors and prejudices that maintain the spirit of property.” Children should be taken from their parents at six years of age and brought up communally by the state until they are sixteen years old, when they should be returned to their parents; meanwhile the schools will have trained them to think in terms of the common good rather than personal acquisition. Private property should be permitted only in articles pertaining to the individual’s intimate needs. “All products will be collected in public storehouses to be distributed to all citizens for the needs of life.”57 Every able-bodied individual must work; from twenty-one to twenty-five he must help on the farms. There is to be no leisure class, but everyone will be free to retire at forty, and the state will see that he is well cared for in old age. The nation will be divided into garden cities with a shopping center and a public square. Each community is to be governed by a council of fathers over fifty years old; and these councils will elect a supreme senate to rule and co-ordinate all.
Perhaps Morelly underestimated the natural individualism of men, the strength of the acquisitive instinct, and the opposition that the hunger for freedom would offer to the tyranny required for the maintenance of an unnatural equality. Nevertheless his influence was considerable. Babeuf declared that he had imbibed his communism from Morelly’s Code de la nature, and Charles Fourier probably took from the same source his plan (1808) for co-operative “phalansteries,” which in turn led to such communist experiments as Brook Farm (1841). In Morelly’s Code occurs the famous principle that came down to inspire and plague the Russian Revolution: “chacun selon ses facultés, á chacun selon ses besoins”— from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.58
The philosophes generally rejected Morelly’s system as impracticable, and accepted private property as an unavoidable consequence of human nature. But in 1763 Morelly found a vigorous ally in Simon-Henri Linguet, a lawyer who attacked both law and propert
y. Disbarred from practice, Linguet published (1777-92) Annales politiques, a journal in which he delivered a running fire upon social abuses. Law, he thought, had become an instrument for legalizing and maintaining possessions originally won by force or fraud.
Laws are destined above all to safeguard property. Now, as one can take away much more from the man who has than from him who has not, they are obviously a guarantee accorded to the rich against the poor. It is difficult to believe, and yet it is clearly demonstrable, that the laws are in some respects a conspiracy against the majority of the human race.59
Consequently there is an inevitable class war between the owners of property or capital and the workers who, in competition with one another, must sell their labor to propertied employers. Linguet scorned the claims of the physiocrats that the liberation of the economy from state controls would automatically bring prosperity; on the contrary, it would accelerate the concentration of wealth; prices would rise, and wages would lag behind. The control of prices by the rich perpetuates the slavery of the wage earner even after slavery has been “abolished” by law; “all that they [the former slaves] have gained is to be constantly tormented by the fear of starvation, a misfortune from which their predecessors in this lowest rank of humanity were at least exempt”;60 slaves were lodged and fed all the year round; but in an uncontrolled economy the employer is free to throw his employees into beggary whenever he can make no profit from them; then he makes begging a crime. There is no remedy against all this, Linguet thought, but a communist revolution. He did not recommend it for his time, since it would lead more likely to anarchy than to justice, but he felt that the conditions for such a revolt were rapidly taking form.
