[2] François Quesnay (1694–1774), the marquis de Mirabeau (1715–1789) and Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot (1727–1781) dominated the movement,[3] which immediately preceded the first modern school, classical economics, which began with the publication of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations in 1776.
This contrasted with earlier schools, in particular mercantilism, which often focused on the ruler's wealth, accumulation of gold, or the balance of trade.
"[5] They called themselves les Économistes, but are generally referred to as "physiocrats" to distinguish their beliefs from the many schools of economic thought that followed.
[6] Physiocracy is an agrarianist philosophy which developed in the context of the predominantly rural, pre-industrial European society of the time.
In the late Roman Republic, the dominant senatorial class was not allowed to engage in banking or commerce[7] but relied on their latifundia, large plantations, for income.
Chinese society broadly distinguished four occupations, with scholar-bureaucrats (who were also agrarian landlords) at the top and merchants at the bottom (because they did not produce but only distributed goods made by others).
[9] One of the integral parts of physiocracy, laissez-faire, was adopted from Quesnay's writings on China,[10] being a translation of the Chinese Taoism term wu wei.
Starting in the 1760s, officials in France and Germany began increasingly to rely on quantitative data for systematic planning, especially regarding long-term economic growth.
[12] Pierre Le Pesant, sieur de Boisguilbert served as a member of Louis XIV's local administration of Paris, and wrote pamphlets and booklets on subjects related to his work: taxation, grain trade, and money.
Le Pesant asserted that wealth came from self-interest and markets were connected by money flows (i.e. an expense for the buyer is revenue for the producer).
[3] The event that led Mirabeau to devote himself to political economy was undoubtedly his work on a manuscript of Richard Cantillon's Essai sur la nature du commerce en général, which he had in his possession as early as 1740.
Rather, they had to discover the laws of the natural order that would allow individuals to live in society without losing significant freedoms.
Laissez-faire was popularized by physiocrat Vincent de Gournay who is said to have adopted the term from François Quesnay's writings on China.
Turgot recognizes that there is opportunity cost and risk involved in using capital for something other than land ownership, and he promotes interest as serving a "strategic function in the economy.
"[16] The ideas of the Physiocrats had an influence on Adam Smith, David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill, and above all Henry George, who appears at first to have come to similar beliefs independently.