The Physiocrats
20 Jun, 2013
330 Economics
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the Physiocrats, an important group of economic thinkers in eighteenth-century France. The Physiocrats believed that the land was the ultimate source of all wealth, and crucially that markets should not be constrained by governments. Their ideas were important not just to economists but to the course of politics in France. Later they influenced the work of Adam Smith, who called Physiocracy “perhaps the nearest approximation to the truth that has yet been published upon the subject of political economy.”
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Guests
- Richard Whatmore
6 episodes
Professor of Intellectual History & the History of Political Thought at the University of Sussex -
Joel Felix No other episodes
Professor of History at the University of Reading - Helen Paul
8 episodes
Lecturer in Economics and Economic History at the University of Southampton
Reading list
-
National Identity and the Agrarian Republic: The Transatlantic Commerce of Ideas Between America and France (1750-1830)
Manuela Albertone (Ashgate, forthcoming, January 2014) Google Books → -
Turgot and the Ancien Regime in France
Douglas Dakin (Octagon Books, 1972) Google Books → -
Origins of Physiocracy
Elizabeth Fox-Genovese (Cornell University Press, 1976) Google Books → -
A History of Economic Doctrines: From the Time of the Physiocrats to the Present Day
Charles Gide, Charles Rist (Heath, 1952) Google Books → -
The Physiocrats: Six Lectures on the French Economistes of the 18th Century
Henry Higgs (Batoche Books, 2001) Google Books → -
The Oeconomical Table, An Attempt Towards Ascertaining And Exhibiting The Source, Progress, And Employment Of Riches, With Explanations, By The Friend Of Mankind, The Celebrated Marquis de Mirabeau
Victor De Riquetti (W. Owen, 1766) Google Books → -
A History of Economic Thought
Eric Roll (Faber and Faber, 1992) Google Books → -
The Financial Decline of a Great Power: War, Influence and Money in Louis XIV's France
Guy Rowlands (Oxford University Press, 2012) Google Books → -
History of Economic Analysis
Joseph Schumpeter (Oxford University Press, 1996) Google Books → -
The Political Economy of Virtue: Luxury, Patriotism, and the Origins of the French Revolution
John Shovlin (Cornell University Press, 2006) Google Books → -
Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution
Michael Sonenscher (Princeton University Press, 2007) Google Books → -
The Physiocrats and the World of the Enlightenment
Liana Vardi (Cambridge University Press, 2012) Google Books →
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Programme ID: b02x97k6
Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/b02x97k6
Auto-category: 330.1 (Economics and politics)
Hello (First sentence from this episode)
Hello. An eminent French economist of the 18th century, the Marquis de Mirabeau, believed that three inventions had enabled the emergence of stable political societies.