Free Market by Jacob Soll;

Author:Jacob Soll; [SOLL, JACOB]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780465049707
Publisher: Hachette
Published: 2022-09-06T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 11

THE FRENCH CULT OF NATURE AND THE INVENTION OF ENLIGHTENMENT ECONOMICS

The Land is the Source or Matter from which all Wealth is Produced.

—RICHARD CANTILLON, ESSAY ON THE NATURE OF TRADE IN GENERAL, CIRCA 1730

BY THE MID-EIGHTEENTH century, the two great economic powers of the world, France and Britain, had both experienced stock crashes and were still embroiled in a series of costly and destructive wars. Both felt they had lost ground to the other in what David Hume, the Scottish philosopher and mentor to Adam Smith, famously called “a jealous fear” over commerce. Remarkably, although France was the bigger loser financially and diplomatically, it continued to dominate the wool trade. Thanks to Colbert’s industrial policy and the manufacturing successes of Rouen and Lyon, France was now out-exporting Britain. Even more surprising, given France’s financial and diplomatic problems, not to mention its lack of a national bank, Louis XV managed to borrow at the same rate as the English government.1

Still, the economic outlook was not cheerful. France had lost its paper currency and its Royal Bank in the melee of Law’s project. The effort to create market institutions and trust had collapsed, leaving France without the tools to build effective capital and stock markets to repay its nearly untenable debt. The rising commercial class suffered a setback as philosophers and nobles who supported the agrarian dominance of society looked to prioritize agriculture over industry. Harking back to Cicero’s ancient belief that social hierarchy and the economy were simply reflections of a clockwork “causal” mechanics of nature, there emerged a group of French economists known as the physiocrats (from the Greek word phusis, meaning “nature”), who fervently believed that free agriculture would produce wealth only if the government taxed industry and let farmers operate with no duties or regulations.2

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.