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on the definition he gives of it at the beginning of his book:
By “economy of nature” we mean the wise disposition [ dispositio] of natural
beings, established by the sovereign Creator, according to which they tend to
common ends and execute reciprocal actions. Everything contained within the
limits of this universe loudly celebrates the wisdom of the Creator. Everything
that falls within our senses, everything that is presented to our mind and deserves
observation combines, through its disposition, to manifest the glory of God; that
is, to produce ends that God wanted as the purpose of all his works.
However surprising this conception may appear in an author we are accustomed
to think of as the founder of modern scientific taxonomy, the derivation of the
syntagma from the economic-providential tradition is here obvious and beyond
doubt. Oeconomia naturae simply means—in perfect accordance with the theo-
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logical paradigm that is familiar to us— the wise and providential dispositio that the creator has impressed upon his creation and through which he governs it
and leads it to its ends, in such a way that an apparent evil in reality agrees with
the general good. Moreover, from the start of the 1740s, Linneaus writes a series
of short works that have this idea at their heart. In Curiositas naturalis (1748), an inhabitant of the moon falls unexpectedly to earth and observes in astonishment the terrible and disordered struggle of all against all that appears to reign
on this planet. But as he observes events in an increasingly careful manner, the
citizen of the moon begins to decipher—beneath the apparently cruel chaos—
the immutable order of general laws in which he recognizes the intention and
hand of a divine creator. The experiment is taken up again in 1760 in the more
substantial and pondered Dissertatio academica de politia naturae. The “econ-
omy of nature” cedes its place to a politia naturae, but this, according to the
terminology of Policeywissenschaft that has by this time become consolidated,
means simply knowledge and government of the order and internal constitution
of human society. In this book a moon-dweller is also thrown to earth naked
as Adam in the middle of wars and horrifying slaughter. Once again, however,
he gradually achieves an understanding of the hidden order that governs the
reciprocal relations between creatures and moves them according to a perfectly
circular motion.
One can rationally conclude that there is a necessary politia in the natural realm.
A realm without government, without order, and without control would gradu-
ally fall into ruin. In a state, we call politia the direction and just administration of the whole; and this conception cannot but be confirmed if one follows as far
as possible the chain of nature.
It is in the knowledge of this “natural police” that man’s true vocation consists:
Man who is himself the eye and mind of the earth, always taking care to observe
with astonishment the economy of the creator, discovers that he is the only being
that must venerate God by observing the perfection of his work.
2.3. The concept of an “economy of nature,” in what contemporaries called
la secte économiste—that is, the Physiocrats—is entirely in agreement with these
premises. The influence of Malebranche upon Quesnay is well documented (see
Kubova in Quesnay, vol. 1, pp. 169–196), and, more generally, the influence of
the model of the providential order on Physiocratic thought does not require
proof. And yet, there has not been sufficient reflection on the curious circum-
stance that the modern science of economics and government has been consti-
tuted on the basis of a paradigm that had been developed within the horizon
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of the theological oikonomia and whose concepts and signatures [ segnature] it is possible to precisely document.
The concept of “order,” which we have seen to play an essential role in the
constitution of the divine government of the world, has a particular relevance in
this regard. It is at the center of Quesnay’s thinking even before the 1750s, when he
composes the celebrated Tableau économique (1758) and the articles “Fermiers” and
“Grains” of the Encyclopaedia (1756). Well before taking on the form with which
we are familiar, the term “economy” had established itself already in the first half of
the eighteenth century in the syntagma “animal economy.” However, animal econ-
omy is not a social science but a branch of medicine, which broadly corresponds to
physiology. In 1736, Quesnay, who remained a medical doctor until the end of his
life, composes the Essay physique sur l’économie animale, where the latter is defined in terms of an immanent order that forcefully calls to mind a paradigm of government. The animal economy, he writes, does not designate the animal as such, but
[ . . . ] the order, the mechanism, the set of functions and movements that support
animal life, the perfect and universal exercise of which, if executed faithfully, with
alacrity and ease, constitutes the most flourishing state of health, in which the
smallest disturbance is itself an illness.
It is sufficient to transfer this order of the “state of health” to the political state,
from nature to society, in order that it be immediately converted into a para-
digm of government. The gouvernement économique d’un royaume is nothing
but the ordre naturel plus avantageux, and this results from the immutable laws
that the Supreme Being has established for the formation and conservation of
his work. Economy for Quesnay means order, and order founds government.
For this reason the 1762 edition of the Dictionnaire de l’Académie can record as
the meaning of the term économie “the order through which a political body
principally subsists” (the 1798–1799 edition adds, “in this case it is called polit-
ical economy”). Also here, as in Thomas Aquinas, order operates as a signature
[ segnatura] that serves to relate the theological order of the universe to the im-
manent order of human society; the general laws of providence and nature with
the set of particular phenomena. Quesnay writes:
Men cannot penetrate the designs for the construction of the universe of the
Supreme Being; they cannot raise themselves to the destined ends of the im-
mutable rules that he has established for the formation and conservation of his
work. Nevertheless, if these rules are examined with care, one will realize that
the physical causes of physical harm are the same as the causes of physical good;
that rain, which irritates the traveler, fertilizes the earth. (Quesnay, vol. 2, p. 73)
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(The example of the rain that is at once benign and destructive is, not coinciden-
tally, what Malebranche uses to define the mechanism of providence.)
This substantially theological idea of a natural order impressed upon things
is so clearly present in the thought of the économistes that the science that we
call “political economy” could have been called the “science of order.” This is the
name that Le Trosne persistently gives it in his treatise De l’ordre social (1777), whose biblical ep
igraph taken from the book of Psalms leaves no doubt as to
the origin of the concept. Despite the fact that Le Trosne is the first of the économistes to develop a theory of value that overcomes the limits of Physiocracy, his system rests upon unequivocally theological foundations. Indeed, through
the concept (or rather, the signature [ segnatura]) of “order” and the “economic
truths” that it implies, he attempts to make it possible to comprehend and gov-
ern the politics that had “seemed to try to appear impenetrable up to that point”
(Le Trosne, p. VIII).
The science of administration presented nothing but facticious, arbitrary, and
variable rules; and, since it could not achieve trust, to achieve respect it adopted
the mysterious obscurity of the oracles. (Ibid., p. IX)
But as soon as men glimpse the “science of order,” the mysteries dissipate and are
replaced by the knowledge of the economy through which human societies have
been established according to the same laws that support the physical world:
There exists a natural, immutable, and essential order instituted by God in order to govern civil societies in the way most advantageous to sovereigns and subjects;
men have by necessity partly conformed to it; otherwise any association between
them would become impossible. And if societies are not as happy as they should
be and as they should desire to be, that is because the disorders and evils that they
undergo stem from the fact that, of that order, they merely know some general
principles without understanding it as a whole, without drawing from it the
practical consequences that follow from it, and moving away from it on some
essential points. This order, which is so important to discover and understand,
has a physical basis and is derived, through a chain of necessary relations, from the laws of physical order; these are the only means of growth for sustenance,
riches, and populations and, consequently, for the prosperity of empires and for
the measure of happiness that the social state entails. (Ibid., pp. 302–303)
The “economic science” of the Physiocrats is nothing but the “application” and
transposition of the natural order into the “government of societies” (ibid.,
p. 318); but the physis in question is that which results from the paradigm of the divine government of the world, that is, from the ensemble of relations that exists
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between general laws and particular cases, between first causes and secondary
causes, between ends and means, the calculation of which is the object of that
“invention that is so important and ingenious” (ibid., p. 320) that is the tableau économique. The use of the syntagma gouvernement de l’ordre, to which the eighth discourse ( De l’évidence et la possibilité du gouvernement de l’ordre) of Le Trosne’s treatise is dedicated, is decisive. Here the genitive is, at once, subjective
and objective; in the same way as in Thomas Aquinas, order is not an externally
imposed schema, it is the being of God himself, which founds the government of
the world and, at the same time, the dense network of immanent relations that,
by linking the creatures together, renders them governable.
Political economy is constituted, in other words, as a social rationalization
of providential oikonomia. It is not by chance, therefore, that the epigraph on
the frontispiece of Le Mercier de la Rivière’s treatise on the Ordre naturel et
essential des sociétés politiques (1767) situates the new science with the words of Malebranche: “Order is the inviolable law of the Spirits and nothing is regulated
if it does not conform to it.”
2.4. Christian Marouby has demonstrated the importance of the concept of
“economy of nature” in Adam Smith (Marouby, pp. 232–234). When it appears
for the first time in the Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), its links with the providential paradigm are entirely explicit. Not only does Smith avail himself of it
to express the link that the “Author of nature” has established between the final
causes and secondary causes, ends and means (Smith 2002, Part 1, §II, Chapter
5, note), but, more generally, he underlines on more than one occasion the af-
finity between his conception and the providential paradigm. Smith calls upon
the “ancient Stoics”: “The ancient Stoics were of the opinion that, as the world
was governed by the all-ruling providence of a wise, powerful, and good God,
every single event ought to be regarded as making a necessary part of the plan
of the universe, and as tending to promote the general order and happiness of
the whole: that the vices and follies of mankind, therefore, made as necessary a
part of this plan as their wisdom or their virtue; and by that eternal art which
educes good from ill, were made to tend equally to the prosperity and perfection
of the great system of nature” (ibid., Part 1, §II, Chapter 3, p. 44). But Perrot
has demonstrated the influence that French authors such as Mandeville, Male-
branche, Pierre Nicole, and Pascal exercised over his thinking (Perrot, p. 348).
Perrot believes that the celebrated passage according to which “it is not from the
benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner,
but from their regard to their own interest,” derives from Nicole and Pascal; and
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it is from this perspective that one should investigate the celebrated image of the
invisible hand.
It appears, as is well known, twice in Smith’s work: the first time in the Theory
of Moral Sentiments and, the second, in Chapter 2 of the fourth book of the
Wealth of Nations:
As every individual [ . . . ] directing that industry in such a manner as its produce
may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as
in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no
part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part
of it. (Smith 1976, p. 477)
That the metaphor has a biblical origin is not in doubt. Even if the immediate
derivation is to be sought in all probability in the authors chronologically closer
to Smith, our investigation into the genealogy of the providential economic
paradigm has led us by chance to this image on more than one occasion. Ac-
cording to Augustine, God governs and administers the world, from the great to
the small things, with an occult hand sign (“omnia, maxima et minima, occulto
nutu administranti”: Augustine, The Literal Meaning of Genesis, 3, 17, 26); in
Salvian’s treatise on the government of the world, empires and provinces, but
also the smallest details of private homes are led by “quasi quadam manu et
gubernaculo” (Salvian, On the Government of God ); Thomas Aquinas ( Summa
Theologiae, q. 103, a. 1, ad 2, p. 5) speaks in the same way of a manus gubernatoris that governs the created without being seen; in Luther ( De servo arbitrio), the
creature is itself a hand ( Hand ) of the hidden God; finally, in Bossuet, “Dieu
tient du plus haut des cieux les rênes de tous les royaumes; il a tous les coeurs en
sa main” (Bossuet 1936, Part III, Chapter 7, pp. 1024–1025).
But the analogy is even stronger and deeper than the image of the “invisi-
ble hand” allows us to infer. Didier De
leule has magisterially analyzed the link
between Hume and Smith’s thought and the birth of economic liberalism. He
opposes the “naturalism” of Hume and Smith to the “providentialism” of the
Physiocrats who are direct tributaries, as we have seen, of a theological paradigm.
To the idea of an original divine design, comparable to a project developed in
the brain, Hume opposes, as we have seen, that of an absolutely immanent prin-
ciple of order, which functions instead as a “stomach,” rather than as a brain.
“Why,” he makes Philo ask, “can an ordered system not be woven out of a stom-
ach rather than a brain”? (Deleule, pp. 259 and 305, note 30). If it is probable that
the Smithian image of the invisible hand is to be understood, in this sense, as
the action of an immanent principle, our reconstruction of the bipolar machine
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of the theological oikonomia has shown that there is no conflict between “provi-
dentialism” and “naturalism” within it, because the machine functions precisely
by correlating a transcendent principle with an immanent order. Just as with the
Kingdom and the Government, the intradivine trinity and the economic trinity,
so the “brain” and the “stomach” are nothing but two sides of the same appara-
tus, of the same oikonomia, within which one of the two poles can, at each turn,
dominate the other.
Liberalism represents a tendency that pushes to an extreme the supremacy of
the pole of the “immanent order-government-stomach” to the point that it al-
most eliminates the pole “transcendent God-kingdom-brain.” But by doing so it
merely plays off one side of the theological machine against the other. And when
modernity abolishes the divine pole, the economy that is derived from it will not
thereby have emancipated itself from its providential paradigm. In the same way,
in modern Christian theology, there are forces that cast Christology into a near
a-theological drift; but in this case as well, the theological model is not overcome.
2.5. In the Theodicy, Leibniz relates the opinion of certain cabalists according
to which Adam’s sin consisted in his separating the divine Kingdom from its