ABSTRACT
How long is it since economy discarded the Physiocratic illusion, that rents grow out of the soil and not out of society?
(Karl Marx, Capital I: 86)
François Quesnay was born in 1694. Two centuries later, in 1894, Friedrich Engels edited the third volume of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital. This chapter commemorates the two events in terms of an investigation of Marx’s reading of the physiocrats, in particular Quesnay, and the way he absorbed physiocratic concepts in his own analysis. The chapter is on Marx on physiocracy rather than on Marx and physiocracy. That is, our concern is first and foremost with what Marx thought the physiocrats had done or had aimed at doing and to what extent he benefited from what he saw in their works. With such a perspective it is of secondary importance whether his views on the physiocrats are faithful to their writings. (We shall, however, take the opportunity to comment on some problems of Marx’s interpretation of the physiocrats). What matters is the productive use Marx made of the physiocratic doctrines as he understood them. It should be kept in mind that Marx, a foremost historian of economic thought, was not so much interested in the history of economic thought for its own sake. He rather conceived of a careful and critical study of earlier political economists as an indispensable task in the development of a coherent analysis of modern society. He entertained the view that he or she who wanted to promote economic analysis had to study the history of the subject as well as the history of the subject matter, that is, economic and social history.
