Chapter 6: The Dawn of Political Economy [A] real state and a real government only arise when class distinctions are already present, when wealth and poverty are far advanced, and when a situation has arisen in which a large number of people can no longer satisfy their needs in the way in which they have been accustomed.
— G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History
A Great Beginning As I have already mentioned, classical political economy was never willing to rely completely on the market to organize production. It called for measures to force those who engaged in self-provisioning to integrate themselves into the cash nexus. This chapter will demonstrate that this assertion holds true for William Petty Richard Cantillon, the Physiocrats, and other early classical political economists.
For much of classical political economy, self-provisioning was nothing more than a residue of a savage past. True, the classical political economists did not treat self-provisioning as a theoretical category. Instead, they camouflaged their hostility to it under a theoretical apparatus that denied legitimacy to all activity that did not conform to the norm of production by wage labor.
The sociological backdrop to early classical political economy also contained implicit judgments about nonmarket activities. For example, the famous Four Stages theory of Smith and Anne Robert Jacques Turgot proposed that the essence of social development was an inevitable passage from hunting and gathering to animal husbandry, then agriculture, and finally commercial society (see Meek 1977b). This classical anticipation of Marx's base and superstructure theory represented an undeniable advance in the understanding of the past, but it also served an ideological purpose.
Classical political economy often identified the working classes with savages (see Berg 1980a, 136-44). For example, John Rae (1834, chaps. 7, 9) faulted both savages and the working class for an inadequate effective desire for accumulation. Two years later, Nassau Senior (1836, 69) made exactly the same point in terms of his category of abstinence.
In addition, a discipline that associated hunting for one's food with savage life could hardly be expected to display a great deal of sensitivity to the restrictions on hunting that society enforced at the time. After all, JeanBaptiste Say (see 1821, 165; Platteau 1978, 1:157-70) condemned primitive people as anarchists. On reviewing the major figures in the pantheon of political economy, an unremitting hostility toward self -provisioning of all kinds emerges— at least insofar as it interferes with the recruitment of wage labor.
Sir William Petty: An Introduction Classical political economy began with a period of adolescent brilliance. Perhaps none of its practitioners was so brilliant or so adolescent as the irrepressible William Petty, whom Marx (1970, 52n ; 1977, 384) generously credited with being "the father of English political economy."
Petty was a polymath. Before winning his spurs as a political economist, he had achieved both fame and notoriety as a doctor. He had also served as a professor of music and dabbled in the design of ships.
Petty's scientific activities led him to extreme technological optimism. In his enthusiasm, he predicted that the day would come "when even hogs and more indocile beasts shall be taught to labour; when all vile materials shall be turned to noble use" (cited in Strauss 1954, 137). In general, Petty kept his vivid imagination in check. Instead, his keen powers of perception, together with a vision of a market society, inspired his views. Like others of his day, he caught a glimpse of the power of capital accumulation in the rapid reconstruction of the wealth of London following the Great Fire of 1666 (Petty 1690, 243; see also Appleby 1976, 502).
Petty also recognized that the prospects for the future could be advanced through changes in the system of social organization. Not only did he perceive that a more rational organization of society could increase the quantity of labor, but he also seems to have been the first writer to describe how the division of labor within the workshop results in improved efficiency (Petty 1690, 260; 1683, 473; see also George 1964, 173-75). His example of the manufacture of watches was one of the few areas in which England was a technical innovator rather than a mere imitator (George 1953). Petty's naval experience may have helped him to see the strategic importance of this new method of organizing production. When he traveled to Holland, Petty witnessed firsthand the remarkably refined division of labor in Dutch shipbuilding (Kindleberger 1976). The combination of Petty's parallel interests in the architecture of ships and the social division of labor lends some support as well to Engels's speculation that the division of labor originates in the military (see Marx and Engels 1975, 90-91).
Unlike the other practitioners of classical political economy, for whom the division of labor was primarily a matter of theory, Petty profited from it handsomely in his capacity as the organizer of the great survey of Ireland. After initially winning an appointment as the chief medical officer to Oliver Cromwell's forces in Ireland, he subsequently acquired the contract to survey the newly defeated land.
Private individuals financed a significant part of Cromwell's army, based on the assurance of shares in the 2.5 million acres of Irish land, which the English intended to confiscate. Speed was of the utmost necessity, since Cromwell had to complete the survey before the impatient conquerors could divide the spoils among themselves.
Petty employed a thousand workers who were untrained as surveyors, in this task, first teaching them the rudiments of the separate parts of the profession of surveying (Strauss 1954; Aspromourgos 1988). His work was quick enough, but in the process, Petty picked up 13,000 pounds sterling and 18,000 acres of land for himself in direct violation of the terms of his initial agreement (McNally 1988, 44-45).
Petty's Vision Petty's analysis is particularly valuable. His broad experiences put him in touch with some of the most dynamic forces of his era. In addition, his survey of Ireland gave him the opportunity to examine the social and economic conditions of an entire people.
Petty's early life as a cabin boy, as well as his military duties in Ireland, suggested England's future as a sea power. This perspective provided him with a different context for analyzing primitive accumulation. Whereas most observers were reluctant to move against the peasant society too quickly because of its ability to produce inexpensive foot soldiers (see Marx 1977, 880-81n; Smith 1976, V.I. a. 6, 692-93; Weulersse 1910, 1:246), Petty insisted that England's military future lay with a strong navy rather than an infantry. Certainly, England's geographic position gave naval power considerably more importance than was the case in other nations. England could thus afford to sacrifice some of her peasantry in the course of forming a new society in which defense would rest primarily on a navy (see B. Moore 1966, 30).
Sailors, for Petty (1690, 259), were simultaneously soldiers, artisans, and merchants. He used the following calculation to demonstrate the advantage of his implicitly proposed social division of labor: "The Husbandman of England earns but about 4s. per Week, but the Seamen have as good as 12s. in Wages, Victuals (and as it were housing) with other accommodations, so as a Seaman is in effect three Husbandmen" (ibid.). Indeed, the navy became the eventual foundation for the British imperial system (Frank 1978).
Creating a new social division of labor in England was so integral to Petty's mission that he even attempted to design ships that would best support it (see Strauss 1954). Although his naval designs were not successful, his social program was. The navy that Petty envisioned only made economic sense if the people could be led to produce sufficient commodities for export. Given the diminished need for infantry troops and the importance of increased exports, Petty called for an intensification of primitive accumulation.
Petty found confirmation of his vision of a new social division of labor in the experience of Holland. Indeed, Tony Aspromourgos (1986, 40; see also Petty 1690, 255) believes that a central feature of Petty's work was an attempt to explain the material basis for the contrast between Irish poverty and Dutch success based on his experience living in those two countries. Petty (1690, 266; see also Appleby 1976, chap. 4) claimed that Holland relied on the international economy for much of its food and exported goods, although in reality Holland mostly exported services rather than material products.
Petty's overt concern with revolutionizing the structure of the British economy led him to take notice of the changing social division of labor. He observed: "The Trade of food was branched into Tillage of Corn and grazing of Cattle, that of clothes into Weaver, Tinker, and Taylor, Shewmaker and Tanner and that of Housing in Smith, Mason and Carpenter" (Petty 1927, 1:212). The peasantry, which did not accept wage labor as a matter of course, was unlikely to embrace Petty's vision of a new social division of labor that eliminated the source of their livelihood.
Perhaps because the household economy was so solidly entrenched, Petty did not raise the question of the sort of incentives that might make people forego producing for their own needs in order that they would specialize in narrow occupations. For Petty, however, individual choice was not an issue. Rather, he assigned the government the responsibility for the creation of a new social division of labor.
Petty appropriated the language of bullionism to lend theoretical support to his notion of a new social division of labor. He calculated: "The Wealth of every Nation, consisting chiefly, in the share which they have in the Foreign Trade with the whole Commercial World, rather than in the Domestick Trade, of ordinary Meat, Drink, and Cloaths, &c. which bring in little Gold, Silver, Jewels, and other Universal Wealth" (Petty 1690, 1:295). Petty's universal wealth was merely a sign of power, derived from the development of the economic forces of the nation. Thus he estimated that England was substantially more powerful than her great rival, France (ibid.).
Petty closely associated universal wealth with the rise of a new social division of labor. He expressed this connection even more clearly in a similar passage, which directly follows his estimates about the superior productivity of seamen (259-60)
Petty and the Social Division of Labor Petty demonstrated a lifelong interest in prodding the government to take actions that would reduce the vitality of household production. Specifically, he recognized the strategic importance of transferring workers out of agriculture (Petty 1690, 256, 267). In his chapter of Veibum Sapienti titled "How to Employ the People, and the End Thereof," he explained that an efficiently run society must set people "upon producing Food and Necessaries for the whole People of the Land, by few hands" (Petty 1691, 118-20).
Petty, as was common in his age, wanted to set everybody to work: "Thieves, robbers, beggars, fustian and unworthy Preachers in Divinity in the country schools, . . . Pettifoggers in the Law, . . . Quacksalvers in Physick, and . . . Grammaticasters in the country schools" (cited in Strauss 1954, 137). Petty recommended that the law "should allow the Labourer but just wherewithal to live; for if you allow double, then he works but half so much as he could have done, and otherwise would" (Petty 1662, 87). Toward this end, he insisted that food be kept sufficiently scarce; surplus grain was to be put into granaries rather than allowing it to be "abused by the vile and brutish part of mankind to the prejudice of the commonwealth" (Petty 1690, 275).
Many other writers at the time advocated the value of high food prices (see Furniss 1965; Wermel 1939, 1-14, 17, 24), although not always in language as vigorous as Petty's. With characteristic audacity, Petty (1690, 287) rhapsodized that "that vast Mountainous Island [of Ireland would sink] under Water," thus expropriating its inhabitants from their land and livelihood, and forcing them to migrate to England, where they could be exploited efficiently, "a pleasant and profitable Dream indeed." More practically, Petty (1687, 560; see also 1927, 58-61) called on the government to hasten the development of a proletariat by removing a million Irish to England, leaving the remaining population to manage Ireland as a cattle ranch or in his words as a "Kind of Factory."
Perhaps the only adequate commentary on Petty's social vision came from the acid pen of Jonathan Swift (1729), whose "Modest Proposal" essay suggested consuming the flesh of children. Georgy Wittkowsky (1943) finds numerous stylistic parallels to support his contention that Swift's satire had been chiefly modeled after Petty's work. Gulliver's description of an "odd kind of arithmetick ... in reckoning the numbers of our people by a computation drawn from the several sects among us in religion and politicks" also seems to be an allusion to Petty (Swift 172,6, 131). In addition, Swift (1731, 175) parodied Petty's proposal for the Irish cattle factory, as well as Petty's list of professions that could be put to the productive labor that was cited above.
Given the haphazard data available at the time, Petty's method sometimes invited satire. For example, Guy Routh (1977, 45) provides the flavor of Petty's method:
In comparing wealth of Holland and Zealand to that of France, he takes guesses by two other people, does not like the results and ends up with a guess of his own. He estimates the population of France from a book that says that it has 27,000 parishes and another book that says that it would be extraordinary if a parish had 600 people. So he supposes the average to be 500 and arrives at a population of 13V2 million. And so it goes.
Despite his fanciful predictions and wild guesses, Sir William Petty still managed to set political economy on the course it was to follow for the next three centuries, even though legal intrigues arising from his Irish land grab sapped most of his intellectual energy.
Richard Cantillon Richard Cantillon, the second major figure of classical political economy, was a shadowy presence. In terms of economic sophistication, Cantillon represented a significant advance over Petty (Brewer 1992). Indeed, Cantillon (1755, 43, 83) was openly contemptuous of Petty's work, which he twice dismissed: once as "fanciful and remote from natural laws"; and once as "purely imaginary and drawn up at hazard."
Unlike most of the writers encountered in the study of primitive accumulation, Cantillon went beyond calling for an intensification of the process. True, he joined in the complaints about the excessive number of holidays enjoyed by people in the countryside (ibid., 95 ), but so did almost every other political economist at the time. Cantillon (ibid., 43) also wrote, "Individuals are supported not only by the produce of the Land which is cultivated for the benefit of the Owners but also at the Expense of these Same Owners from whose property they derive all that they have."
Much of what we know of Cantillon's life comes from court records. Where Petty was frequently hauled into court for his land speculation, Cantillon was deeply involved in litigations concerning his dealings in credit. Specifically, Cantillon lent people money to buy shares in John Law's scheme. As security, he required that the shares be left in his custody. Anticipating a fall in their value, he sold them. Those to whom he lent the money charged that Cantillon had betrayed their trust. They took the position that merely standing ready to buy new shares was not equivalent to holding the original shares as collateral (see Fage 1952; Hyse 1971).
Indeed, if the price of the shares had risen, Cantillon might have gone bankrupt, leaving him unable to repurchase the stock. His borrowers would have lost any of their own money that they might have invested in those stocks. If the shares fell, Cantillon was guaranteed a double profit, consisting of interest paid on the loan as well as the profit earned from repurchasing the stock at the diminished price. Cantillon's angry clients sued him, setting off a wild sequence of events.
Antoin Murphy (1986) has reconstructed Cantillon's strange story, including the bitter litigation, his scandalous family life, the probable faking of his own death, and his likely ultimate demise incognito in the jungles of South America. Gripping though his personal experiences may be, Cantillon's importance here lies in the realm of theory.
Cantillon, in fact, made several key contributions to economic theory in his famous Essay, even though he probably intended it as a contribution to his lawyer's brief (see ibid., 246). To begin with, he clearly pointed out that land generates a surplus, over and above the sustenance of the people who work it. For Cantillon, this surplus represented the material from which all other classes lived. This insight prepared the way for the French Physiocratic school, which we will discuss at length later (see Walsh and Gram 1980, 19).
Even more fundamentally, Cantillon went far beyond Petty's practical call for a reorganization of the economy. Cantillon built this analysis into the structure of his Essay, which he divided into three books. The first seems to be about the feudal Irish world in which he was born, and the next two about the monetary world to which he emigrated (Murphy 1986, 17). According to Cantillon (1755, 63 ff .; Walsh and Gram 1980, 298), the system of prices in the economy that he described in the final sections of the Essay could give the same result as a system of direct command over labor typical of a feudal economy. In effect, Cantillon recognized for the first time that market relations could be an effective means of control. His contribution to the political economy of primitive accumulation is thus incalculable.
The French Economy Almost all observers concurred that the French economy was dysfunctional at the time when classical political economy came to France. Marx (1977, 239) spoke of "the unspeakable misery of the French agricultural population." Alex de Tocqueville (1858, 120) claimed that the peasants on the eve of the French Revolution were worse off than their thirteenthcentury forbearers. One mid-eighteenth-century visitor to southern France claimed that he saw no birds because the peasants had consumed them all (Kiernan 1991, 78). The despondent Francois Fenelon warned that "France was being turned into a desolate and starving poor house" (cited in Salvemini 1954, 53).
As French society veered toward revolution, the educated public began to take a keen interest in economic matters, especially insofar as they pertained to agriculture. Dupont de Nemours noted: "We . . . place at that epoch [1750] the origin of discussions about political economy" (ibid.). In this spirit, Voltaire wrote: "Around 1750, the nation, satiated with verses, tragedies, comedies, operas, novels, romanesque stories, with moral reflections still more romanesque, and with theological disputes over grace and convulsions, set itself to reason about grains" (cited in Weulersse 1910, 1:25). Comte de Mirabeau went so far as to proclaim that "all politics emanates from a grain of wheat" (ibid., 2:2; the source cited by Weulersse appears to be incorrect). We might roughly translate Mirabeau's image to mean that the locus of "principal contradiction" (see Mao 1937, sec. 4) of French society was the agricultural crisis.
Most middle-class observers agreed on the causes of France's plight: An oppressive tax system, which largely exempted both the aristocracy and nobility; a peasantry that was too poor to afford the necessary investment; and a church that contributed to the peasant's laziness by supporting an excessive number of holidays. We have already mentioned Voltaire's proposal for shifting holidays. The cantankerous English novelist, Tobias Smollett (1766, 59, 38) apparently agreed, complaining:
The great number of their holidays not only encourages this lazy behavior, but actually robs them of what their labour would otherwise produce. . . . Very nearly half of their time, which might be profitably employed in the exercise of industry, is lost to themselves and the community, in attendance upon the different exhibitions of religious mummery.
Not everybody conceded that the French economy was as disastrous as these commentators made it out to be, although Say was the only classical political economist who seemed skeptical of the great superiority of the British economy (see above). More recently, some historians and economists have begun to judge the French economy more favorably. Robert Aldrich (1987, 99; see also Kindleberger 1984) sums up this research: "It is possible to consider the long-term development of France as a more humane transition and perhaps a not less effective one in the transition to industrial society."
In other words, France's development may have differed from Britain's, but it was not altogether inferior. Although peasants may have been impoverished, their lot may not have been worse than what the unskilled, urban worker encountered in England. We might even arrive at the conclusion that France's transition to modern capitalism might have been more humane than England's. Unfortunately, a humane transition had less attraction for the primitive accumulationists than the great profits to be had from coercing labor into submission.
The Economic Interests of the Physiocrats In France, a group of economists, collectively known as the Physiocrats, more or less sought to emulate the British system. As might be expected, they counted themselves among those who would profit from the changes they proposed. In Norman Ware's (1932, 608) words, "The Physiocrats were not professional economists but officials of various sorts emerging from the French bureaucracy and climbing into the land-owning and even the noble classes."
These officials could not easily cease to be bourgeois. They were too poor to ape the aristocracy and treat their estates as playthings. They had to earn revenue. Not surprisingly, their theories justified a new system of production and reform of the archaic financial system that burdened them.
Francois Quesnay, for example, the leader of the Physiocrats, published his first economic essay in 1 7 5 6, the year after he bought a large estate and became a nobleman (ibid., 614). According to his economic table, which was a schematic analysis of the new social division of labor, the expected rate of return on agricultural investment was between 2,50 and 300 percent (Weulersse 1910, 1:354). No wonder that Gabriel Bonnot de Mably was moved to write, "Here then is M. Quesnay entirely occupied with this new object. His first discovery was, that if the price of land increase, the revenue of his new domain would increase equally and he would have made himself an excellent purchase" (cited in Ware 193 1, 614).
The Physiocrats built on Cantillon's analytical foundations, centering on rent. The Marquis de Mirabeau, Frangois Quesnay's loyal disciple, claimed to have been in possession of Cantillon's work for sixteen years, planning to publish it as his own. Eventually, he heard that somebody else had a copy and was about to issue the book with the proper attribution. As a result, Mirabeau finally published the book in 1755 as the work of Cantillon (Higgs 1931).
The Physiocratic identification of surplus and rent reflected the prevailing opinion within the French middle classes, as well as Cantillon's theory. At the time, the French bourgeoisie was incapable of imagining any other source of wealth and power than landed property (Nallet and Servolin 1978). For instance, their legal framework gave no indication of an awareness of the potential expansion of capital (ibid.).
Despite their fanatical support for large-scale farming, the Physiocrats understood that small-scale, labor-intensive agriculture could produce substantially higher yields (Weulersse 191 o, 2:317). Recall the success of Ponce and the Parisian market gardeners discussed in chapter 5 (see also Kropotkin 1898, 62ff. ; 1906, 20; Ponce 1870, 32-49).
True, these market gardeners devoted a prodigious amount of labor to their work. Mirabeau even claimed that the majority of Parisian gardeners slept with a pail of water near their bed to quench the thirst of their plants when they gave off sounds that indicated the need for moisture during the night (Weulersse 191 o, 2:317); however, even if their working day had been halved, their output would still have remained substantial.
Attitudes toward Labor The Physiocrats saw England as the most successful example of what they considered to be a well-functioning society. Still, they distanced themselves from the basic English model of the social division of labor in one respect: they called for the initial concentration of wage labor in agricultural pursuits rather than industry. They looked with suspicion on textile production, the mainstay of the Industrial Revolution in England, since textiles might prove to be an unwelcome competitor for agricultural labor (Weulersse 1959, 28n). In contrast, the British were more troubled by the thought that agricultural activities might compete with industry.
The Physiocratic movement differed from British political economy in one other crucial respect. Although almost everybody in polite society agreed that the French peasants were lazy (Weulersse 1910, 1:321), the Physiocrats did not adopt an ostensibly hostile attitude toward them. Unlike the British, whose typical tone was contentious at best when discussing the common people, the French often expressed concern about the well-being of country folk.
Where the British violently opposed hunting by the lower classes, the French worried that people had to content themselves with coarse food such as chestnuts (ibid., 1:488), now an expensive gourmet item. The Parliament of Toulouse lamented the fate of women who spun at night after spading or even plowing during the day (ibid., 2:687). With a more free form of commerce, such women were promised lighter workloads. Enclosures were even recommended as a method for expanding the demand for labor (Weulersse 1959, 149).
Ultimately, such differences came down to matters of style, since the Physiocrats could be as brutal as anyone in their attitude toward the working classes. Mirabeau (1763, 8) identified the agricultural laborers along with working cattle as tools of cultivation. Certainly Quesnay (1757, 86) did not express much sympathy toward the workers when he wrote:
It is very harmful to allow people to get used to buying corn at too low a price. As a result they become less hard-working; they spend little on the bread they eat and become lazy and presumptuous; farmers have difficulty in finding workers and servants and are very badly served by them in years of plenty. It is important that the common people should earn more, and they should be spurred on by the need to earn. In the last century, when bread was much dearer, the people were used to it and they earned in proportion, and as a result were more hard working and better off.
Net and Gross Product What, then, was the advantage of the new technology of large-scale farming? The answer from England, where the French first learned about the new husbandry, seemed clear. One article, published more than a half century after the age of the Physiocrats, reveals the British perspective:
The proprietor of the land, cultivating his farm under the old system, was obliged, we will suppose, to keep ten horses, ten labourers to plough, sow and reap, ten women to card and spin. Under the present system of providing a series of different crops in succession, we may assume that five horses and five labourers are sufficient to carry on the work of the same farm, and that the use of machinery in carding, spinning, and weaving, may enable two women the same quantity of wrought goods, which formerly required the labour of ten. (Edwards 1827, 417)
Boyd Hilton (1977, 121) attributes this citation to Edward Edwards, the same writer whom Joseph Dorfman (1966b) credits with being the author of two books written under the pen name Piercy Ravenstone, generally considered to be two of the most noteworthy works of "Ricardian Socialism." Ravenstone, however, opposed profits, although the author of the above passage does not argue so much against profit as in favor of rent. This divergence lends support to Piero Sraffa's (1951, 11:64) contention that the author of the Ravenstone works was Richard Puller.
Regardless of the authorship, this quote throws light on one important aspect of the new agricultural technologies: although these techniques seemed to save labor, on closer examination, these savings become more ambiguous. To begin with, much of the improved economy of labor was not at all due to the production of more output with a lesser quantity of labor. Instead, it was nothing more than the result of an intensification of labor.
The new system not only speeded up labor (see A. Smith 1976, V.I.a.15, 697); it also redirected it to meet the needs of capital. Under the old system, the demand for agricultural labor was irregular. Specific tasks, such as planting and harvesting, required considerable labor. During other, less demanding periods, agricultural workers had more time available to produce for their own needs. The author of the above cited article considered this activity to be a loss for capital. He recommended that "the occupier of any tenant must have maintained in his own house, or at least within the limits of his own farm, a number of hands, sufficient, not only to perform the work of tillage, but to manufacture all the articles of clothery required by himself, his family, and his working people" (Edwards 1827, 416).
Thus, although in the long run, a far-reaching expansion of the productive powers of labor accompanied the new agricultural technology, the major attraction at the time appeared to be the reduction in the expense of maintaining labor over the extensive periods that rural workers had previously devoted to household production. Workers, who had formerly divided their hours between the production of grain and the production of their other domestic needs, were now required to more or less specialize in grain. As a result, the net product would increase, since fewer workers would be required on the farm to perform those tasks specifically directed to the production of grains (Weulersse 1910, 2:314-15).
Thus, Mirabeau, the self-proclaimed "Friend of the People," justified capitalist farming by virtue of its ability to force people to cease living at the expense of the proprietor (ibid., 2:350; see also Cantillon 1775, 47). Under the Physiocratic program, as L. P. Abeille (1768, 95; cited in Weulersse 1910, 2:686) recommended in his Principles sur le liberte du commerce des grains, the worker was to be considered a commodity like all other commodities. To give this program theoretical support, the Physiocrats excluded grain consumed by cultivators (and presumably also all other goods they produced for their own needs) from the national wealth (see Maitland 1804, 125-27).
The Physiocratic contention that the success of agriculture should be judged by the net product did not go uncontested. Others, such as Frangois Forbonnais, countered that the support of people was an end in itself (Weulersse 19 10, 2:314-15). In effect, the Physiocrats wanted to convert traditional agricultural production into a commodity-producing enterprise directed toward the creation of surplus value; their critics analyzed agriculture from the point of view of the production of use values. In short, the much vaunted success of the capitalist agriculture recommended by the Physiocrats was not merely a matter of technical improvements.
The Reception of the Physiocrats The Physiocrats evoked widespread antipathy. For example, David Hume (1769, 216) wrote to a French friend, "I hope that you will thunder them, and crush them, and pound them, and reduce them to dust and ashes. They are, indeed, the set of men the most chimerical and most arrogant that now exist." Baron Grimm, one of their severest critics, ridiculed their pretensions:
They begin with a good dinner, then they labor; they chop and dig and drain; they do not leave an inch of ground in France. And when they have either labored all day in a charming saloon, cool in summer, and well warmed in winter, they part in the evening well contented, with the happy thought that they have made the Kingdom more flourishing, (cited in Hale and Hale 1887-1888, 1:8)
In a 6 August 1770 letter, Jean-Baptiste-Antoin Suard wrote to Abbe Galliani: "I have been so disgusted by the jargon and the tiresome repetitions of the economistes, the exportists, the libertyites, etc! But having barely finished the first four pages [of the Dialogues] I was swept up till the very end without being able to do anything else" (cited in Kaplan 1976, 593).
What explains this hostility? In part, the Physiocrats appalled conservatives by challenging existing institutions. For example, Tocqueville (1858, 159, 162) bristled:
Our Economists had a vast contempt for the past. . . . Starting out from this premise, they set to work, and there was no French institution, however venerable and well founded, for whose immediate suppression they did not clamor if it hampered them even to the slightest extent or did not fit in with their neatly ordered scheme of government. . . .
According to the Economists the function of the state was not merely one of ruling the nation, but also that of recasting it in a given mold, of shaping the mentality of the population as a whole in accordance with a predetermined model and instilling the ideas and sentiments they thought desirable into the minds of all.
Finally, Tocqueville charged that the Physiocrats called for economic but not political liberty (ibid., 159). Of course, the other classical political economists also feared universal suffrage. More damaging to the Physiocrats, Tocqueville interpreted their reliance on the state as a form of socialism (ibid., 164), yet we will see throughout this book that classical political economists generally called for state action to sweep away traditional barriers to capitalism, although they generally did so more discreetly.
More recently, both Terrence Hutchison (1988) and Friedrich von Hayek (1948, 1959, 189) have renewed the charge that the Physiocrats were the spiritual forbearers of modern communism, although the former grudgingly grants that they were "perhaps rather less dictatorially directed than the Marxians" (Hutchison 1988, 285). Hutchison's position is especially curious, since he also condemned what he termed "Colbertist-Stalinist" tendencies, even though the Physiocrats strenuously opposed Colbert's system (ibid., 295).
Nonetheless, Adam Smith, the patron saint of laissez-faire, adopted a great deal of the Physiocratic analysis, except for its specifically French emphasis on the exclusive productivity of agriculture. He also made his own version less abstract than the Physiocrats, in the process obscuring the importance of primitive accumulation. Indeed, Smith's transformation of Physiocratic doctrine led Dugald Stewart, whom we have already met in the context of his clearheaded sorting out of the various theories of domestic industry, to conclude that Physiocrats were more scientific than Smith. However, Stewart (1855, 1:306) judged that the doctrines of Smith were "with very few exceptions, of greater practical utility" to statesmen and businessmen.
Certainly, with respect to primitive accumulation, Stewart's verdict is correct. The Physiocrats put the subject on a much more theoretical basis than any of the classical political economists, but their analytical clarity was unwelcome. In contrast, the English political economists preferred to write as if all hardship were due to the silent compulsion of the market, rather than the intended result of extraeconomic actions.
In conclusion, with the Physiocrats, as with Sir William Petty, we get some idea of the connection between the creation of a new social division of labor and the rise of capitalism— a connection that is generally expressed in terms of hostility toward the self-sufficient household.