ABSTRACT
This century has not been kind to mainstream economics. It has failed to notice the planet is afire. Anti-ecological, it ignores natural limits. Its ‘peak prometheanism’ arrived in the 1980s, but how far back does the rot go? Some ecological economists locate the wrong turn in the nineteenth century. Before that was physiocracy (meaning ‘rule of nature’). The physiocrats were the first to call themselves ‘economists,’ and to formalise political economy as an objective science tasked to anatomise general economic laws. Were they the pioneers of a genuinely ‘ecological’ tradition of economics? In this essay I subject physiocracy to critical analysis, focussing on agrarian capitalism and laissez-faire economics, as well as class, colonialism, environmentalism and the growth paradigm. I ask whether physiocracy was science masquerading as mysticism or the reverse. Finally, I reflect on the ideology of economics and the limits of ‘image-focused’ alternatives such as Kate Raworth’s ‘doughnut economics.’
