Tableau économique
The founding text of Physiocracy and the first attempt to model a whole economy as a circular flow. Quesnay divides the nation into a productive class of farmers, a class of landowners, and a “sterile” class of artisans and merchants, and traces how one year’s harvest, through the payment of rent and the purchases of each class from the others, reproduces itself exactly. Only agriculture yields a net product; hence a single tax on land rent, free trade in grain, and secure capital for farmers. Marx called the Tableau the most brilliant idea of which political economy had yet been guilty.
- Edition
- Translated for the Compendium from the French. Contents: the Analysis of the Arithmetical Formula of the Tableau Économique with its seven Important Observations (Journal de l’agriculture, June 1766; revised and enlarged in Dupont de Nemours’s Physiocratie, 1767), with the formula of the Tableau given as a table; and the General Maxims of the Economic Government of an Agricultural Kingdom with Quesnay’s notes on them (Physiocratie, 1767). The Physiocratie texts follow the reprints in Daire’s Physiocrates (1846) and Oncken’s Œuvres économiques et philosophiques de F. Quesnay (1888), voted word by word from four OCRs, with figures checked on the page images; editorial matter by Dupont, Daire and Oncken is omitted. The first, “zigzag” Tableau of 1758–59 and its Explication are not included: the only reproduction, the 1894 facsimile, has manuscript corrections written over its figures.
- Source
- Daire, Physiocrates (1846) and Oncken, Œuvres de Quesnay (1888), archive.org
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Contents
- Analysis of the Arithmetical Formula of the Tableau Économique 17 min 33
Quesnay explains the arithmetic of his economic table. The nation is divided into a productive class of farmers, a class of proprietors (landowners, sovereign and tithe-owners) and a sterile class of artisans and merchants. In a prosperous kingdom, 2 milliards of annual advances yield a harvest of 5. The proprietors spend their 2 milliards of rent, the classes buy from one another, and the whole product is sold and consumed so that next year can begin again. Agriculture alone yields a net product, which should bear the whole tax. The farmers’ capital, and the interest that maintains it, must never be touched.
- Important Observations 22 min 17
Seven observations follow from the table. Proprietors should spend on farm produce rather than on luxury goods, and should spend on improving their land. Landed property and farm capital must be secure. The table also yields estimates of population by class. Free foreign trade only exchanges equal values, so wealth must come from production at home. Merchants form a cosmopolitan body whose gains are a cost to the nation. Money is not the true wealth of a nation: a rich agricultural country needs only a money stock about equal to its rent, and credit can supply the rest.
- General Maxims of the Economic Government of an Agricultural Kingdom 15 min 13
Thirty general maxims for governing an agricultural kingdom. These include a single sovereign authority without counterweights and instruction of the nation in the natural order. They hold that land is the only source of wealth and that property must be secure. Tax should fall on the net product alone, never on the farmers’ capital, wages or goods. Revenues must circulate rather than form idle money fortunes. Grain should be farmed by rich farmers on large holdings, grain prices kept good, and trade, above all in grain, left entirely free. Revenue matters more than population, and borrowing by the state should be avoided.
- Notes on the Maxims 1 h 8 min 35
Quesnay’s notes develop the maxims with examples from France, which he leaves unnamed. He argues that the tax is the sovereign’s share of the land and that taxes on labour and goods multiply their own cost. He describes how arbitrary taxation, the ban on grain export and Colbert’s favour to manufactures ruined French agriculture. He praises rich farmers and large-scale cultivation, defends high and steady grain prices as good for wage-earners, and distinguishes use-value from market value. The notes close by arguing that wealth, not population, sustains states and armies: “Poor peasants, poor kingdom.”