ABSTRACT
Quesnay was a French ‘philosophe’, a physician to Louis XV. When the king said to him ‘What would you do if you were king ?’, he replied, ‘Nothing’. ‘Then who would rule?’ ‘The Laws’. This was a classic statement of the basic premiss of laissez-faire – that human affairs were governed by ‘natural laws’. The task of government was to discover those laws and to allow them free play. Newton in the seventeenth century had uncovered the laws behind the behaviour of matter. The task of succeeding generations should be to uncover the laws which underlay the behaviour of man.
