ABSTRACT
An abundance of materials had been stored up by the middle of the eighteenth century out of which a new discipline, to be known as economics, would soon emerge. Greek philosophy was its ultimate source, but its beginnings are more precisely to be found in the emergence of modern science during the late Renaissance. The investigations and researches that culminated in the Newtonian system indirectly stimulated the rise of social science. The recognition that physical events obey certain laws made it reasonable to inquire whether there also are laws governing human events, and whether ways of improving the social environment might be prescribed on the basis of these principles. The Physiocrats scrutinized social processes with a view to discovering causation and a principle of regularity, just as Sir Isaac Newton (1632-1727) and other physical scientists had done before them with respect to natural phenomena. Their system of thought sought after the laws that govern the distribution of wealth, and France is quite appropriately regarded as the locale of the first school of theoretical economics and the beginning of a tradition of thought that has come to be called classical.
