Anne Robert Jacques Turgot
French statesman and physiocrat-aligned economist (1727–1781) whose Reflections on the Formation and Distribution of Wealth (1770) developed Quesnay's theory that land is the sole source of net product, a decade before Adam Smith.
Overview
Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, Baron de l'Aulne (10 May 1727 – 18 March 1781), was a French statesman and economist who served as Intendant of Limoges (1761–1774) and then as Controller-General of Finances under Louis XVI (1774–1776). Sometimes classed as a physiocrat and closely associated with François Quesnay's circle, Turgot is best remembered today as an early advocate of economic liberalism and as the likely first economist to state something resembling the law of diminishing marginal returns in agriculture.[1] His major theoretical work, Réflexions sur la formation et la distribution des richesses ("Reflections on the Formation and Distribution of Wealth"), was written in 1766 and published in installments in 1769–1770 — roughly a decade before Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations.[1]
Physiocratic Land Theory and Reforms
In the Reflections, Turgot developed Quesnay's core physiocratic claim that agriculture, and therefore land, is the sole source of a true net product (produit net) — that manufacturing and commerce merely rearrange value that ultimately originates in the soil — and divided society into a productive (agricultural) class, a salaried/artisan class, and a class living off land's disposable surplus.[1] As Controller-General, he tried to put physiocratic and free-trade principles into practice: the Six Edicts of 1776 abolished the corvée (forced peasant labor on roads, replaced by a tax on all landowners) and dissolved the guild system's monopolies on trades, alongside earlier moves toward free internal trade in grain. The reforms provoked fierce opposition from the privileged classes and the court, and Turgot was dismissed on 12 May 1776, ending his brief tenure as France's chief financial minister.[1]
Significance for Georgism
Turgot's insistence that land's net product is a category apart from ordinary production places him, alongside Quesnay, in the physiocratic lineage that Henry George and later Georgists trace as intellectual ancestors of taxing land rent rather than labor or capital. Mark Blaug's standard history of economic thought discusses Turgot's Reflections in its opening chapter on Pre-Adamite (pre-Smithian) economics as a systematic statement of this land-surplus doctrine.[2]
See Also
- Henry George — later drew on the physiocratic land-surplus tradition Turgot helped systematize
- Adam Smith — Turgot's Reflections predates Smith's Wealth of Nations by about a decade
- David Ricardo — developed classical rent theory that built on and revised physiocratic land ideas
- Economic Theory in Retrospect (book) — Blaug's standard history covering Turgot's Reflections
- Gaffney, Two Centuries of Economic Thought on Taxation of Land Rents — names Turgot the Physiocrats' "political spokesman" in its survey of land-taxation advocates
Sources
- "Anne Robert Jacques Turgot," Wikipedia — used for biographical dates, the Intendant of Limoges and Controller-General roles, the Reflections' composition/publication dates, the physiocratic net-product theory, the Six Edicts of 1776, and the 1776 dismissal (verified via search of the live article). en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Robert_Jacques_Turgot
- Mark Blaug, Economic Theory in Retrospect (5th ed., Cambridge University Press, 1997), Ch. 1 — discovery source; used for classifying Turgot's Reflections among the "Pre-Adamite" systematic statements of the land-surplus doctrine. Book page