ABSTRACT
The examination of Physiocracy in Chapter 5 was chiefly aimed at delineating the economic model that was embodied in Quesnay’s famous ‘Tableau Economique’. It is not a comprehensive study of the Physiocratic school, and it serves even less as an indicator of social thought in France during the latter part of the eighteenth century prior to the Revolution. Physiocracy itself had only a brief popularity in intellectual circles, but there were numerous other important French social thinkers of the period, including Montesquieu, whose influential analysis of the English constitution we examined in Chapter 4. France before the Revolution was, indeed, a place of exceptional intellectual vigour: Rousseau, Voltaire, Laplace, Lavoisier, Turgot, Condillac, Condorcet, Diderot, and d’Alembert being some of the other names still remembered today. In mathematics, natural science, and the social sciences, France gave every indication during the later eighteenth century of becoming the intellectual leader of the Western world. There was only one serious competitor for France’s supremacy-Scotland.
