ABSTRACT
Francois Quesnay, founder of the Physiocratic school known to France and to Adam Smith as "The Oeconomists," was—even more than John Locke—an originator of physical analogies guided by reason. Quesnay justified the cultivators and sterile classes by "the natural order" and the "natural right." The cultivators and the sterile classes got the subsistence necessary for their existence from the landlords and monarch. They got the equivalent of what they put in—that was as natural as any law of physics. But there was another branch of the natural order, the "moral order," which was just as binding on mankind by nature as the physical order. It was this that justified the landlords and monarch in taking the net product of rents, interest, and taxes. The definitions of the Natural Order, including the Moral Order, enabled Quesnay to reconcile all the contradictory notions of philosophers regarding natural law, natural rights, and natural justice.
