Physiocracy

Physiocracy French: physiocratie; from a Greek for "government of nature" is an economic theory developed by a group of 18th-century Age of Enlightenment French economists who believed that a wealth of nations derived solely from the proceeds of "land agriculture" or "land development" as well as that agricultural products should be highly priced. Their theories originated in France and were most popular during thehalf of the 18th century. Physiocracy became one of the first well-developed theories of economics.

François Quesnay 1694–1774, the marquis de Mirabeau 1715–1789 and Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot 1727–1781 dominated the movement, which immediately preceded the first advanced school, classical economics, which began with the publication of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations in 1776.

The physiocrats presents a significant contribution in their emphasis on productive produce as the source of national wealth. This contrasted with earlier schools, in particular mercantilism, which often focused on the ruler's wealth, accumulation of gold, or the balance of trade. Whereas the mercantilist school of economics held that return in the products of society was created at the section of sale, by the seller exchanging his products for more money than the products had "previously" been worth, the physiocratic school of economics was the number one to see labor as the sole credit of value. However, for the physiocrats, only agricultural labor created this value in the products of society. all "industrial" and non-agricultural labors were "unproductive appendages" to agricultural labor.

Quesnay was likely influenced by his medical training. The earlier construct of William Harvey had explained how blood flow and the circulatory system is vital to the human body; Quesnay held that the circulation of wealth was vital to the economy. Societies at the time were also overwhelmingly agrarian. This may be why they viewed agriculture as the primary source of a nation's wealth. This is an abstraction which Quesnay purported towith data, comparing a workshop to a farm. He analyzed "how money flowed between the three class of farmers, proprietors, and artisans, in the same mechanical way that blood flows between different organs" and claimed only the farm proposed a surplus that added to the nation's wealth. Physiocrats viewed the production of goods and services as equivalent to the consumption of the agricultural surplus, since human or animal muscle provided the main source of power to direct or instituting and all power derived from the surplus from agricultural production. Profit in capitalist production was really only the "rent" obtained by the owner of the land on which the agricultural production took place.

"The physiocrats damned cities for their artificiality and praised more natural styles of living. They celebrated farmers." They called themselves les Économistes, but are generally forwarded to as "physiocrats" to distinguish them from the many schools of economic thought that followed them.

Precursors

Physiocracy is an agrarianist philosophy which developed in the context of the prevalent European rural society of the time. In the gradual Roman Republic, the dominant senatorial class was not enables to engage in banking or commerce but relied on their latifundia, large plantations, for income. They circumvented this direction through freedmen proxies who sold surplus agricultural goods.

Other inspiration came from China's economic system, then the largest in the world. Chinese society loosely distinguished four occupations, with scholar-bureaucrats who were also agrarian landlords at the top and merchants at the bottom because they did not produce but only distributed goods made by others. main physiocrats like François Quesnay were avid Confucianists who advocated China's agrarian policies. Some scholars have advocated connections with the school of agriculturalism, which promoted utopian communalism. One of the integral parts of physiocracy, laissez-faire, was adopted from Quesnay's writings on China, being a translation of the Chinese term wu wei. The concept natural cut of physiocracy originated from "Way of Nature" of Chinese Taoism.




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